Mid July saw 150,000 music fans descend on Scotland’s Glasgow Green for TRNSMT. Named best new festival at the UK Festival Awards in 2017 and with headlining sets from Stormzy, Catfish and the Bottlemen and George Ezra this year, TRNSMT’s continuing appeal is obvious. Adlib was there to provide full technical production – sound, lighting, screens – for the main stage and, with newly purchased DiGiCo SD12s gracing the front of house and monitor positions, audio delight was guaranteed.
Adlib has a long history with the TRNSMT’s organiser, DF Concerts, not least through T in the Park, Glasgow’s predecessor to TRNSMT, with which the company had been involved since 2006. It has been working with them on TRNSMT from the festival’s out set in 2017.
Adlib is a long-time DiGiCo user and has seen the benefits of having SD12s in its inventory since its first purchased one in 2017 for Placebo’s tour.
“Then, for that summer, we decided on the SD12 as the festival monitor board of choice going forward,” says Adlib director Dave Jones. “We got a lot of our engineers and directors involved in that decision-making process. There were a few options on the table, but we thought that the SD12 offered us the most rentable solution year-round and would alsoput us in a good stead forthe future. This has proved to be a successful decision.”
Adlib subsequently purchased five more of the consoles, taking its SD12 inventory up to 12, siting a general shift towards DiGiCo as the choice for festival house consoles as the reason behind this substantial investment, as well as a need to cover the numerous control packages that Adlib now tours over the same festival period.
With two SD12s at FOH and two at monitors for TRNSMT, plus a support/spare SD12 and a number of requested consoles for incoming acts, including an SD12 for Stormzy’s monitors for his headline set on the Friday night and an SD10 for FOH for Years and Years, the decision has proved a wise one.
“The house consoles at TRNSMT were very well received and extensively used across the festival’s three days,” concludes Jones. “Some of the major acts such as the Kooks tour with SD12s, but they left them in the truck and used the house consoles instead, which made their lives much easier, and that’s what it’s all about.”
TRNSMT Festival heads back to Glasgow Green in July 2020, whilst Adlibs SD12s will be constantly busy on the remainder of the 2019 festival season.