Facilitator, sound designer and engineer Rory Madden specified the personal mixing and monitoring solutions from Roland for his latest sound design project having used them for the UK and European tour of We Will Rock You and for The Commitments in London's West End. The M-48's were supplied by Madden's own rental and production company, Sonalyst.
As one of the first engineers to use the M-48's in quantity for live musical production, Madden chose the M-48's initially for We Will Rock You after comparing the Roland products to other similar offerings in the market. "The M-48's were a lot better in terms of sound quality than the competition. They had lots to play with and loads of cool features," commented Madden. "They proved to be robust and problem free both with 'We Will Rock You' and 'The Commitments' and above all the musicians liked using them. I had no hesitations in using the M-48's in the design for the Monty Python shows."
With the performers on stage using conventional monitors, the Roland M-48 Personal Mixers were used by the nine piece band for personal monitoring and mixing, enabling each musician to control exactly what they wanted to listen to during their performances. Using the M-48's, each monitor mix can be adjusted by the musician to their exact preferences with volume, pan, 3-band EQ and built-in reverb per group all instantly adjustable by convenient encoder knobs.
Both the monitor engineer and the monitor tech had their own M-48's so that they could listen in and make adjustments remotely if necessary and check regularly on the musicians' monitor mixes without disturbing the musicians during the show.
With a DiGiCo SD7 digital console at FOH, the M-48's enabled control of up to 40 audio channels via 16 stereo groups allowing each musician to choose what he or she wants to listen to without having to share the same sources and in the same order as everyone else. The M-48's, in this particular setup were connected to the SD7 via a Roland S-1608 Digital Snake 16 x 8 Stage Unit which feeds into a Roland S-4000D Splitter and Power Distributor.
(Jim Evans)
