Atlanta Sound & Lighting uses Midas PRO6 to “Rock FORE Dough” at the Masters golf tournament
The sixth annual Rock FORE Dough concert was held April 9 through April 12 in Augusta, Ga. during the Master’s golf tournament. Featuring performances by Hootie and the Blowfish, Zac Brown Band, Shawn Mullins, and 48 Volt, with sound and light by Atlanta Sound & Lighting (ASL), the event raised money to benefit the First Tee of Augusta, which promotes character development and life-enhancing values through the game of golf.
ASL has raised the bar annually at Rock FORE Dough over the last six years, and this year was no different: ASL debuted their Electro-Voice XLC line array system with DVX woofer upgrades as the main PA and deployed their new Midas PRO6 for the Front-of-House mix. A second PRO6—currently on tour with Darius Rucker from Hootie and the Blowfish, completed the console spec at FOH.
The main EV rig featured 20 XLC DVX boxes hung 10 per side along with six flown XLC118 subs per side. In addition, ASL used eight EV MTL-2 boxes as side fills on the deck and six ZX1 front fills, each driven from the PRO6’s auxiliary sends. EV Xw12 served as stage wedges.
Thomas Smith, Sound Department Manager for ASL, comments: “We just upgraded our DVX woofers about two weeks ago, and the vocals hit you square in the face through those boxes – they’re not only warm and intelligible; there’s a lot more power behind them. The horns are very smooth. I was happy to debut the DVX woofers at an event as renowned as the Master’s. They sound fantastic.”
In addition to the main XLC rig, ASL’s EV spec also included IRIS-Net control and supervision software (interfaced on the PRO6), NetMax N8000 digital control/matrix, Dx38 speaker processors, and CP4000S and CP3000S amplifiers.
The Midas PRO6 consoles at FOH completed the picture with suitably superb sonic performance: “This year, using the new PRO6s, I was able to use IRIS-Net on the same work surface. We began using IRIS-Net roughly a year and a half ago and love it. Using the KVM switch on the PRO6, I’m able to control the PA, IRIS-Net, and all our Dx38s from a screen on the console. It’s awesome, I never have to go back to another computer or laptop – I can do everything from our PRO6 now; I never have to leave that screen. It’s great!”
Perhaps what impressed Smith and his team the most was the PRO6’s uncanny sonic resemblance to its analog forebears, including the renowned Midas XL4.
“The EQ sounds like an XL4 and the layout is extremely close to the Heritage,” says Smith. “We’ve been waiting for something like the PRO6 for a long time. All the other digital desks out there are so harsh and bright, but the PRO6 sounds absolutely amazing – especially in the low end. We’ve never heard anything like it. It’s got Midas sound quality with digital flexibility in a package that’s extremely accessible.
“The population groups on the PRO6 are a great feature,” adds Smith, “because while the bands do line checks, I can bring up population groups, mix on area B – I can bring anything out of the pop group and it will never affect what the other engineer is doing. And having the two mix busses or the two solo busses is the other great thing about this desk, because two people can use it at the same time. It was really a seamless production with the two PRO6s at FOH.”
But the biggest treat for Smith and ASL comes when he introduces the new PRO6 to first-time users. FOH engineers never forget using a Midas mixing console.
“We recently ran a two-day Christian rock festival,” says Smith. “So many guest engineers fell head over heels for the PRO6. They’d never seen anything like it. In fact, one engineer who had just tried our PRO6 for the first time said to me, ‘You know what? This is the first night I’m disappointed that I have to use my own desk.’ I love making those kinds of impressions. We had a couple of first-time PRO6 users at the Rock FORE Dough concert, too. Shawn Mullins’ FOH Engineer usually brings a Venice along with him, but he used the PRO6 and said it was as easy to set up and use as any console he’d ever seen. It sounded great and was hassle-free. He loved that there wasn’t much EQ’ing that needed to be done and that the PRO6 was very flat-sounding and very warm.
“Midas totally worked everything out with the PRO6,” says Smith. “I went to Minnesota for the launch and the console is still impresses every time I use it. I still don’t know how Midas did it, how they made it sound like it does. No one else has been able to make a digital console sound like analog, but it was definitely worth waiting for. I’m glad the PRO6 came when it did, though, because I was tired of the old digital desks. It’s my job to mix, not program a computer; with the PRO6 I can finally feel the mix under my fingers again – but with all the convenience of digital.”
