With his eighth solo LP Tracker receiving much acclaim, guitarist and vocalist Mark
Knopfler is in the midst of an eight month, 88 date world tour. A pair of DiGiCo
SD7s is ensuring every nuance of these musically complex shows is heard clearly.

The tour is currently playing European arenas and festivals, with US and Canada
theatres to follow. Front of House engineer Dave Dixon and monitor engineer Kerry
Lewis are both mixing on DiGiCo SD7s.

“As well as Mark on guitar and lead vocals, the band features drums, bass guitar,
two sets of keyboards, a second guitarist and two multi instrumentalists, who play a
lot of different things including citterns, flutes, pipes and acoustic guitars,’ says
Dave. “Mark and the second guitarist also play an array of electric and acoustic
instruments, so there are around 90 inputs in total.’

Due to the complexity of the instrumentation, each song is programmed on the
SD7s as a snapshot, but at FoH Dave rides the faders throughout. “There are so
many instrument changes you wouldn’t have time to set the board up between
songs,’ he says. “God bless snapshots, it would be very hard without them.

“With the different types of acoustic instruments it is a challenge to get them
sounding natural at volume. I have to use microphones as not all have pickups. I’m
not using much processing or outboard, but the EQ and dynamics on the SD7 really
helps.’

A DiGiCo SD11 is used by Tom Calcaterra, guitar tech for Knopfler’s second guitarist
of 20 years, Richard Bennett, to mix the guitars.

“We just run inputs, and then we run VCAs, because he has mics and DIs, so we run
them off mutes,’ says Tom. “We send it to the split, so basically I turn him on and
off. Richard has multiple acoustic lines, and we just take out one acoustic line, then
we gain trim it all here on the inputs. I used to have a series of different mute
boxes, you know, and a whole bunch of A-Bs all linking into each other, but now it’s
just one button, and that’s all.’

Sound Crew:

Dave Dixon – Front of House engineer
Kerry Lewis – Monitor engineer
Ben Byford – Crew chief and stage technician
Ulf Oeckel – Systems Engineer
Bjorn Bornecke – System technician
Gareth Lewis – System technician