Switching between desks at a concert

[tolley1466]

I believe this should go in The Next Gen, mods please move it if not :(

 

Sorry if this is hard to follow.

 

I'm wondering, how do they arrange the patching of multiple desks at concerts/festivals so that they are patched in for the act they are required to be used on?

 

For example a support band may use their own desk and the headlining band will use a different desk and once the support band have finished the other desk will need to be patched in. What do they do exactly?

 

Is it as simple as having multiple multi tails (using a multipin obviously) and unplugging and plugging into the required desk or is it more than meets the eye?

 

Sorry if I haven't made this very clear!

[Rob_Beech]

Generally they'll either plug and unplug multipins or use active splits and just run them all in parallel all day, I've used both methods. One would usually expect a master desk of some form which playback and compere mic etc may run through to enable swapping of desks without interruption.

[Wilflet]

big festivals your quite likley to have two full systems (foh desk, mons desk, multi, stage box) so the stage box can be patched and things like comps patched groups/vca assigned while the previous band is still on.

 

On academy sized tours you often get a headline desk and a support desk (support may be house desk sometimes) the headline desk often involves fibre, cat5, madi etc. support seem to get m7cl's alot generally with an analogue multi. in this case you run two and support goes into a stereo channel on the headline.

 

But as Rob points out, if the multi's are the same a spliter rack or swapping the fan out are both options that are used.

[tolley1466]

Excellent, never thought about using a master desk. Would explain a few things :(

 

Thanks

[mackerr]

I think the most common method is using some sort of input on the headliner's desk for the support console(s). There ore other options though, using an external matrix like the Midas XL88 is also pretty common, although it is quite expensive, and I have always been confused by the layout being much more familiar with the Yamaha matrix layout. Recently there have been products introduced specifically for this purpose. The APB Dynasonics MixSwitch can switch up to 4 mix buses to the PA while having a separate mic input for announcements and a stereo input for music playback during changeover. There is an expansion box which adds 4 more switches without the extra inputs so you can expand the system as much as you want.

 

On the input side it is generally separate multies.

 

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