Promoting Foot Of The Mountain A-Ha have spent the autumn touring Europe and Japan with a DiGiCo SD7 at FOH and an SD8 on monitors.

Manning the SD7 was vastly experienced FOH engineer Sherif El Barbari, reacquainting himself with the console he first used 18 months ago when manning the faders for South African singer Howard Carpendale. “For me, using either a DiGiCo D5 or SD7 feels like meeting up with an old friend,” says Sherif. “Given the flexibility and the sonic quality of both consoles, it is a ‘comfort factor’ that definitely makes life much easier. I specified the SD7 for this tour because of that and for the complete confidence it instils that I can deliver a great show time after time.”

As well as the three members of the band itself, A-Ha was touring with three extra musicians, so Sherif had the SD7 set up with 84 mix channels, 12 stereo groups, 12 mono groups, 12 stereo aux sends, 12 mono aux sends, 16 matrix inputs, 12 matrix outputs and 24 control groups. “It wasn’t strictly necessary to use all of that, but with the SD7 you can really go large without having to worry about compromising on the DSP,” he says. “Having it set up like that meant that I was prepared to do all sorts of things which might occur as the tour progressed.”

He continues, ”I was using the dynamic EQ on backing vocals to deal with proximity effect, which allowed me to have a good response when they were not ‘swallowing’ the mic. But when really close up to the capsule, the dynamic EQ really cleaned up the massive boost in low and low-mids. I was also using multiband compression on the synth bass to keep the rumble in problematic rooms under control.”

Sherif El Barbari

Sherif was taking advantage of the SD7’s virtual soundcheck capability, recording via an RME Madiface on to Steinberg Nuendo, using a Macbook Pro and an external Avastor Firewire hard drive. “Basically this is my setup for virtual soundcheck but, a little way into the tour, the band asked me to record every show for a video shoot in Oslo and they thought it would be handy if they have some tracks spare,” he says.

Sadly for fans, the Foot Of The Mountain tour marked A-Ha’s penultimate series of live shows. A 2010 farewell tour is planned - climaxing in their home city of Oslo in a year’s time - before the band calls time on its 25-year career. And for any fans unable to get to that final tour, use of the SD7 on this year’s tour ensured that the sun will always shine on their memories of A-Ha on stage.

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