dgapps.ie 09:40  
In mid December of 2020 Gorillaz performed and broadcast three fully live ‘Song Machine Live From Kong’ shows from the basement of Kong Studios, West London. The photo above shows the monitor desk with the iPad on the left running Router with three connected iPads running Faders, and the iPad on the right running Changes. SetList was also in use on monitors for these gigs.
Previously Gorilaz had been using the hardware Aviom D-16c A-Net Card in one of the DiGiCo SD Racks. This card provided 16 outputs (8 stereo) to a Aviom A16D Pro rack unit which fed three Aviom A-16II Personal Mixers on stage. There were a number of issues with this system:
  • The outputs were common to all of the personal mixes.
  • The monitor engineer couldn't actually listen to the final mix for each of the musicians.
  • The mixers were a bit, er, clunky. Select a channel, then use the one volume knob.
  • The mixers had various modes, in one mode the select buttons were mutes. Previously one of the drummers had somehow got into mute mode mid gig, and selected his click channel to turn it up a bit, except it wasn't select, it was mute. Whoops!
  • The system only worked at 48 kHz and 96 KHz was now required, mainly to reduce the latency of the keyboard systems, and the perceived audio distances from wedges and IEM.
    Enter Faders and Router! This was the first major outing for Router and Faders working together. Advantages of the Router and Faders way of doing things included:
    • No sub mixing required, each musician controlled only their own channels.
    • The monitor engineer could actually listen to the final mix for each of the musicians!
    • Each channel could have it's own fader, and/or be part of a multi fader.
    • Faders only gives the musician control of specific desk nodes and desk faders via app faders, there's no mute mode that might cause an channel to be inadvertently muted mid gig!
    • As Faders talk OSC to Router which talks OSC to the desk, the system will work at whatever frequency the desk is working at. 96 kHz audio is no problem.
      DiGiCo had a news article about the gig:
      digico.biz