Monitor engineer Eddie Mulrainey recently took Yamaha’s M7CL out on tour with The Beautiful South to promote the band’s new album, ‘Superbi’ (www.beautifulsouth.co.uk). It’s his first time on the road with a digital console - what made him ditch analogue?
"I've mixed many bands on all sorts of desks, and it seemed to me that the M7CL was the most practical desk for anyone going digital. It's got 48 motorized faders - so no flipping between 1–8 and 9-16 or 1–24 and 25–48 or whatever. I've got everything in front of me, and with the touchscreen, it's so immediate.
"The desk was recommended to me by Wigwam (www.wigwam.co.uk). They're brilliant, and the technical support from Alex [Hadjigeorgiou] is second to none. That, coupled with Yamaha's international backup, provides a tremendous feeling of security.
"Alex explained that I could have four stereo 31-band graphics or eight of the new Flex15 graphics and still use four of the internal effects. The Flex15s are still 31-band but you can only use fifteen bands at any one time. For me, this was perfect as, with the wedges I use, I only expected to be using around six to eight, anyway.
Eddie also runs an events production company in Dubai (www.3db-dxb.com) and it was here that his introduction to the M7CL began - but in a rather roundabout way…
"I was sitting in the office and I loaded the M7CL Editor software into Yamaha's Studio Manager on the computer. I labelled all my channels, did all my high pass filters, set all my compressors - all the time thinking this is never going to work. But when I came to the UK and went to Wigwam for a spot of familiarization on the desk, I just plugged in my USB key and boom; there it all was! I'd set it up 3000 miles away, flown in and bang, it's happening. Brilliant!"
When the tour got underway, Eddie went on to fully exploit the comprehensive storage and recall capabilities of the console.
"We did the first show and thought, yeah that was great, so I saved everything, got to the next show, thought this is a bit different, changed a load of things and saved that as a new scene. I found that halfway through the tour I was thinking, hang on a minute, what did I do in Glasgow? On an analogue desk, once you changed something you could never remember what you’d done - even when you charted it, it was never the same - but with the M7CL I just recall it and copy and paste it for that night's show.
"I’ve got a full library of every gig that we've done so now, when one of the band says, 'can you put it back to the way it was?', I can say, 'Where? Bristol? Plymouth?' Someone said, 'oh well, we don’t have to do a soundcheck on the next tour, then'. Well, that's pushing it a bit but, in theory…"
"There are some things that I can do on the M7CL that can't be done on certain other - much more expensive - digital desks, like copying a graphic, for instance. I’ve got twenty-four wedges that are all the same, so I dial in a curve to use as a starting point and just copy that to all my outputs."
Clearly, the usability of Yamaha's software appealed to Eddie, but he was also impressed by the M7CL's practicality and heritage...
"Previously I’d have had a 48-channel desk and three racks - sixteen channels of graphics and loads of effects. Now I have all the graphics I need onboard and I can use those same Yamaha effects because they're in there, too! The new REV-X Plate is spot on; really, really nice. And there's a gate and compressor on every channel. Fantastic value for money!
"Yamaha have a lot more experience with digital desks than other manufacturers because they’ve had the 02R, the DM2000, the PM1D and 5D - they’ve covered the whole range. Whereas most big board manufacturers are now looking to make smaller boards, Yamaha have already got that nailed. They just seem to have got it right, to be honest - to the point where I'm thinking of buying one. A lot of the stuff that we do in Dubai is small conference work, so I’m going to get a couple of 01V96-V2s. I had a look at them and thought wow!…"
Eddie explained that his approach to work has been permanently changed following his experience with the M7CL on the Beautiful South tour…
"I found I got more headroom out of the wedges, everything sounded a lot cleaner than analogue - much better intelligibility at the high end; clearer and crisper. And there was another fantastic feature on the M7CL that I’d tried before with analogue and never really achieved. I used the output delays to time-align the centre wedges with the side fill, and I found that, at most venues that cleared a lot of low-mid build-up; it just brought everything together in one space.
"Another amazing aspect of it was that we were using it as two desks. Before, I would never allow the support band to use my desk - I’d have a separate desk for them. But with the M7CL I just recall their settings and it doesn’t affect me at all!"
So, we can count Eddie as the latest in a long line of digital converts. It seems as if all that’s required to open up a whole new world of possibilities for such forward-looking sound engineers is a couple of hours (or less!) in the presence of Yamaha’s amazing M7CL.
The Beautiful South tour continues in August with gigs including Castle Howard in Yorkshire and the V Festival.
