One of the gigs just before Christmas gave me the excuse to talk about a bit of kit I’ve used quite a bit over the last year or so. I already said that I took a PA rig over to Lowestoft and didn’t have to use it, as they had one in the venue. Who’d be a soundman?
I did end up using our own monitor system though, as well as our own desk (one we hire from MSL – the company who do all Jools Holland’s shows). The desk is a Yamaha M7CL. I gave a stereo feed to the in-house PA, so I was slightly at the mercy of the mid scoop-happy venue engineer. I had already weighed up my options, and still decided this the best plan overall in that particular venue
My favourite feature on Yamaha’s M7 is its EQ. It’s a good sounding console, especially for the price, and the EQ has very few flaws; I think the all round EQ response is great. In this particular situation, I’d put my trust in using plenty of mid boost on the built in graphic system to put back as much as possible, and the console didn’t let me down. Obviously better results would have been gleaned from striking at the source (the in-house graphics) but from experience in this particlar ‘chain’ of venues, it was better left alone, as it would have only been messed with post soundcheck anyway!
From my already stored scene, there was a bit of work to do on most of the individual channels, as I was using an entirely different rig to the Renkus-Heinz or the Turbosound (and obviously – scoop happy). Yamaha’s M7 is easy to program, though, and access to any outboard effects is at a simple touch or two of the screen.
Compressors, gates and limiters are great, ok, and pretty good, respectively. The De-Esser is a welcome bonus for me, which tonight, I use on the lead vocal in conjunction with a medium ratio, smooth but quite drastic compressor. The results mean a trained ear can hear the compressors pumping, but sorts out the wireless mic transmission problems and some excessive mic technique 
I’m not a fan of the reverbs on the M7 – they sound too digital and you have to spend a while messing around with the parameters to get anything that amounts to warmth. To my ear, the shift from ‘not enough’ to ‘way overboard’ comes with not enough middle ground. Having said that, I am one of those ‘lively’ engineers, and I tend to do things as manually as possible. Some intense programming of the board would almost certainly iron this out.
Mixing monitors from front of house couldn’t be easier, with a well-placed ‘Sends on Faders’ button clearly on the screen. From there, it displays the list of your mixes , and touching each one shifts the faders into their current position for that mix. Simple, but brilliant.
I would prefer to use a 6 way monitor mix, as opposed to the four I’ve set up on the desk, but setting up the monitor graphics then reduces the space available for effects.
If you don’t use many effects at a time, the way around this is just to save your settings to several different user-presets, and just change your effects accordingly on each one. Again, for the price, the M7 is an absolutely untouchable console, and for either front of house, or monitors, it stands up to any other digital board with at least its pride still intact.
Last I heard, it retails at around £15K. For a board this good, versatile, easy to use, AND compact – Yamaha – I praise you.
