S21 Digital Mixing console Tour:
DiGiCo S21 Overview – Drew Menard from Group Technologies gives us an overview of the new DiGiCo S21 digital console.
Video Text:
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i’m drew menard from group technologies we’re here with the new digico s21 the latest in the fleet of consoles from digico uh this is an all new format at an all new price it’s 21 faders 40 stereo channels 16 serial buses and much more io on the back there’s 24 analog in on the back and 12 analog out additional aes and then you can use any of the new dmi cards as well these buttons down here basically how you go through all the banks so the bottom one is lit up showing that we have banks that we can access below so if we punch down you can see us scrolling through now that we both are lit up so you can go both ways and when you get back up to the top that showing there’s only banks below these two buttons over here are shortcuts to get to your overview and come back and then to get to your set spill and come back these are your snapshot buttons forward
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and next when you set up snapshots and then you have your master control here here’s your headphone control there’s two headphone jacks down here which are 6.5 and 3.5 mil what’s the metric quarter inch and 8 inch for the rest of the world um so headphone control there as far as routing when you look at that that gives you a graphical representation of what’s on the back i will just do a quick run through with the new features of the s21 and how they compare to the sd series so looking at input channels input channels are blue just like the sd series like the sd series you’ve got your gain control at the top then your dynamic section then auxiliaries so you can see how things are displayed are a little bit different they’re actually much cleaner now so rather than looking at rotary controls for auxiliaries there’s lines you can see keys and you have a graphic representation of the eq so if i want to select that channel that’s going to open up our routing because i touch the top that’s gain
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control i can route into any inserts there if i want to do that or actually access eq that’s just a shortcut as well so eq’s control over here you can actually see the color of the encoders it’s going to change depending on what you’re doing select that band colors change over here now i can also do that all and because it’s multi-touch if you’re very deliberate you can change the queue as well the rotary encoders are also your buttons so you can toggle between low shelf high shelf and bell you also have high pass and low pass filters as well so you can change frequencies there whatever you want to do now below eq go back to the normal channel i want to adjust the compressor actually i’m going to go to a channel over here so adjust the compressor so now i have compressor control here so you can change things with rotaries here if you want to do it that way
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or once again finger control now under your compressor you have a mode so you can switch you get four multi-band compressors so you can select there that’s now a multi-band compressor now below that we have dynamics 2 which right now is set up to be a gate we can change mode so here’s our gate control once again all finger control or you can do that and you’re actually getting a graphical representation of that as we’re open for mode we can switch between a gate or a key gate if you want a ducker or a compressor with side chain then we’ll close all of those now below that we’ve got auxiliaries so right now we’re set up as eight auxiliaries all you do is just scroll through you can see there’s a pan and level control under stereo auxiliaries if i just select it it’ll put aux and unfaders there
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uh to toggle them on and off you just press the button and then we’ll have level control there so you can see level quite easily then to clear that out you just hit this bottom we’ll go back to normal fader mode as you can see here we’ve got different colors so groups which our master is one of right now is red scroll down and you can also see control groups here’s the rest of the groups and then auxiliaries are purple like the sd series as well one of the differences is that we don’t have a real master screen anymore there’s some quick select things here if i wanted to adjust my compression threshold on channels quickly i can actually hit select dynamics so i’m going to scroll over here select dynamics 1 you’ll see color will change down here and now the rotaries are changing compression thresholds here same thing with dynamic two um and you can get to eq this is your high pass filter
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once you get it there um so because we don’t have a real setup screen anymore those are the quick and then if you want to get to set up individual items you can go hit the digico button this gives you a couple things to set up such as saving looking at the graphics those are here uh and effects rec which is how we got there so you get eight effects engines to assign one you just select it you can pick whichever one so we’ll go to cathedral then you can edit it once again rotary control or button and you actually get a graphical representation now showing in your filters over here on your effects this actually acts as an rta and you can see what you’re filtering out on your signal going in and out wet dry mix down here exactly what you would expect it to be so we have a button down here that can screw rather than scrolling up and down
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we can go to a channel overview which is also in the quick select up there so now we’re looking at everything on the surface you can see inputs control groups groups auxiliaries all the stuff we were scrolling through before so if we want to edit hit the edit feature everything shrinks down and now we can move things around if we want so right now i’ve got the master next to input 29 which i don’t want i want to put input 30 back there so i’m just going to drag it up then the master pops down there i’ll actually put the master on the other screen back to where it first started but basically whenever you knock anything off it pops up down here in your unassigned channels then you can also move banks if you hit your organized banks now i’ll put 1 through 10 over there 11 through 12. happy with that put our reverb return back
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and put control tense we’re almost back how we started um then underneath that we have one spill set so your spill set is basically how you can get to any channels you’re going to use repeatedly very quickly right now we’ve got the master two inputs of verb all you do literally is drag it down it pops up as a green bar and it adds it to that now that is actually recalled by hitting your set spill up here and it appears from the right to left in your right hand bank and you can see they’re highlighted differently but those are quickly it doesn’t change how your console is laid out it’s just a momentary i need to get it quickly and then go back to where i was um here’s our ub madi port for built-in recording that you plug into pc or mac dvi out for overview screen got two network ports for remote control additional usb you have gpio one in and one ounce uh bnc for word clock and then you have an aec in and
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out uh the ub madi port that’s on the back of the console replaces the stand-alone ub maddie that digico came out with a few years ago which is basically usb 3 to matti converter giving you 48 channels into mac or pc so that’s now built onto the engine and you don’t need to use any external control you just plug your laptop in and off you go the other two ports that are new are the dmi ports so these are control of existing digico racks d-racks d2 racks madi racks sd racks all the mini racks but also interface with dante additional analog in and out additional aes in and out and calrec hydra 2 networking now these cards are actually used in the orange box which is coming out as well the orange box is just a 64 channel converter you pick whichever you want to go to dante to opticor aes into drac and it just converts either way so you can mix and match it has nothing to
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do with digicode console so you can use it with anything else you want to weight control is going to be able to go if you want to convert into dante and back rack control is still going to be transmitted so you can actually the things that will be controlled by sd racks now say via usb control will be tunneled through dante so you can plug a console in convert to dante use an existing infrastructure convert back to sd rack on the other side and still control all your gain phantom polarity all of that sort of stuff you
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