Hugo Pinzon is an FOH and Monitors engineer from Bogota, Colombia. After studying Music & Sound Engineering at university, he started working with bands in his country, gaining valuable experience along the way. We recently had a chat with Hugo about his work with DiGiGrid systems.
“I always like to investigate and stay up to date with new technologies – this allows you to use new tools that often make your job easier.
I’m currently working with J Balvin, the Colombian reggaetón singer, using a DiGiGrid MGB for SoundGrid connection. This lets me record, use Virtual Soundcheck and run live plugins – all this with a small powerful box! I also worked recently with the Colombian band Bomba Estereo using eMotion LV1 as the FOH console; in this setup I used a DiGigrid IOC for analogue and digital outputs for FOH, and on stage we used three DiGiGrid IOX for preamps.”
I was finding more and more that I needed to record for Virtual Soundcheck and also have SoundGrid to use plugins live, so I started using MGB for both solutions. We wanted to use the same console for all concerts, so we decided to use DiGiGrid hardware for top sound quality and stability in the live environment.
I know is not the cheapest product on the market but, as always, good things cost a little more – I prefer to buy DiGiGrid knowing that it is reliable and consistent hardware that is made with A-grade elements and will not let me down.
It’s really easy to record up to 128 channels with the DiGiGrid MGB, and it’s also perfect for Virtual Soundcheck – you just have to connect four MADI BNC cables and you can have 128 channels of recording and playback. It’s very flexible; the configuration that I’m using with J Balvin uses port 1 of the MGB to run Waves MultitRack SoundGrid and the second port for multitrack recording and Virtual Soundcheck.
The sound quality from DiGiGrid systems is incredible. This is reason enough to use it, but the portability and weight is also amazing for touring; the MGB is so small and the IOX and IOC need just one rack space. I really recommend DiGiGrid for any artist who wants to take their work to the next level.