I had to guest engineer at a festival Saturday afternoon (the engineer who had been running it had to leave for family reasons). It was an X32 with a DL32 stage box. First band was fairly straight-forward. 4 people – drums, bass, guitar and 3 vocals. 2nd band was 5 people – drums, bass, guitar, acoustic guitar, (2) congas and 4 vocals. Not as straight-forward, but added congas in vacant channels on the DL32. Unfortunately, they were nowhere near the other drums on the console, but not a big issue.
The 3rd band was 10 people – 2 keys plus a B3 with Leslie, guitar, bass, drums, (3) congas, 6 vocals, sax. There was no simple way to re-layout the inputs for the board to make sense, so we added inputs where we could with only 45 minutes to change over. So I had 3 layers of inputs with nothing where it should have been.
On the GLD, I could have put them on any input and dragged them EXACTLY where I wanted them on the console.
And I wouldn’t have had to listen to what I consider a very harsh sounding compressor on the X32.
All during that set I kept wishing I’d had the GLD rather than the X32.
