Jaco Beukes puts S21 through its paces at Aardklop Festival
Published: MEA
SOUTH AFRICA: A DiGiCo S21 based inside the Sanlam Auditorium for the recent Aardklop National Arts Festival in Potchefestroom offered freelancer Jaco Beukes the perfect chance to try out some of the desk’s features. Mr Beukes, from SJ Audio, was the main sound engineer for the venue and helped guest engineers for artists such as Karen Zoid and Elvis Blue. Kyle Robson from DWR, the DiGiCo distributor in South Africa along with Ian Staddon from DiGiCo, visited Aardklop for support.
‘This was my first gig on the S21 but I’m a big DiGiCo fan so it was awesome,’ said Mr Beukes. ‘Other than the label, it’s great that the console fires up in 96kHz by default, but for my show I kept it in 48kHz. I really enjoyed the audio enhancer effects and for Charl du Plessis’ Boogie Woogie Big Band used them on kick drum, bass and toms as well. The graphic EQs are awesome and easy to use – I inserted them on input channels and output channels which was useful. I had them on vocals and on the piano which gave me a lot more power and flexibility.’
The ease of setup was also one of the desk’s attributes that Mr Beukes admired. ‘The great thing is that you can customise the layout of the console for each band, where at a normal festival setup, you would normally setup the console that everyone would have to work on,’ he explained. ‘The sound was awesome and I had great feedback from guest engineers.’
‘To see that everything went well makes my life so much easier,’ added Mr Robson. ‘The S21 is a great console and I knew that everyone would enjoy its sound and features.’