After thriving in the audio industry for 10 years, live sound engineer Zoe Martin now relies on HARMAN’s Soundcraft Vi6 console and the new Realtime Rack while touring with international artists and bands such as Maverick Sabre, Bonobo and The Radiophonic Workshop. Having acquired substantial experience over the past decade, Martin also passes her mixing skills onto university students at the Brighton branch of the British and Irish Modern Music Institute with a Soundcraft Vi1 console.
Martin’s analogue background make the Soundcraft products the clear winner when it comes to her preferred mixing consoles, as the design and layout of the Vi Series are so meticulously geared towards ease of use and instant response. To this end, the Soundcraft Realtime Rack was also a logical addition to her toolkit.
Thanks to a unique collaboration between Soundcraft and Universal Audio, the new Soundcraft Realtime Rack not only brings industry-standard UAD plug-ins to Soundcraft consoles, but also adds full remote snapshot triggering and storing. With four SHARC DSPs on-board and a huge library of UAD powered plug-ins, as well as UAD Direct Developer Plug-Ins, it offers stable DSP levels and premium sound quality in a scalable, low-latency processing environment.
“I’ve always liked the Vi consoles, because they make the most ergonomic sense to me. The Soundcraft consoles are the most analog-like digital desks in terms of layout and give me exactly what I need,” said Martin. “The Realtime Rack is also a nice feature. It smoothes out each of my mixes where I have the precision bus compressor on. The compressors on the Vi6 are very nice to begin with, but the Realtime Rack definitely gives the whole mix a nice friendly squeeze.”
“Whether I’m teaching or touring, Vi consoles allow me to adapt quickly to situations because they’re so user-friendly,” Martin continued. “For example, if a mix needs more of a specific sound at the last minute, I find that with these consoles you can make on-the-fly changes instantly. I’m a very visual operator, so with features like Vistonics and FaderGlow, I’m able to see all the settings without much effort and can keep my eye on the band.”
