Acclaimed Canadian pop/rock quartet Marianas Trench kicked off their début European tour at the end of September with production support from Entec Sound & Light and its newly purchased DiGiCo S21.

Fronted by lead vocalist, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Josh Ramsay, the Vancouver band are performing at clubs and theatres including Manchester’s Sound Control and the O2 Academy in both Birmingham and Islington, before heading over to European venues such as Amsterdam’s Paradiso and Les Etoiles in Paris.

Entec’s role on the tour came via an interesting route. The company was recommended by Phil McDonnell, the founder of Horizon Entertainment Cargo and co-founder of the new bus firm CSUK, which provided one of its impressive vehicles for the tour.

“Through a contact in America, I was asked to assemble the production for the band’s European tour and I didn’t hesitate to put Entec’s name forward,” says McDonnell. “I was a production manager for many years before I started Horizon and started using Entec in 1975 for acts like Van Morrison and Rory Gallagher. Very rarely have I gone anywhere else because in all that time, they’ve never let me down and they’ve always been fantastic people to deal with.”

In preparation for their European Vacation tour, Marianas Trench’s tour manager/FOH engineer Melvin Godfrey and monitor engineer Mike Rowland liaised with Entec’s head of sound, Jonny Clark, about the most practical console package for the trip. This resulted in Entec’s purchase of a pair of DiGiCo S21 desks, as Jonny explains.

“The band has come over from doing arenas and wanted to maintain their standard of consoles for these smaller dates,” he says. “DiGiCo is a brand they recognise and their choice of S21s has been with a view to building towards the larger format digital models in the future.”

DiGiCo’s S21 has all the benefits of the brand’s Stealth Digital Processing technology within a smaller work surface that offers 24 mic/line inputs locally, 40 flex channels (equivalent to 80 DSP channels), 46 busses, 10 control groups, eight effects engines and 16 assignable 32-band graphic EQs amongst a raft of features.

Each of the consoles has been supplied to Marianas Trench with a DiGiCo D2 48 input Stage Rack and Waves endorsee Melvin Godfrey is using a Waves SoundGrid Extreme DSP server in tandem with his S21.

“The S21 is a solid, practical choice for the band at the right price point,” concludes Jonny. “Being very compact and lightweight, it’s easy to travel with the S21 by air because it’s under the 32kg luggage limit.”

The S21 is a solid, practical choice for the band at the right price point," concludes Jonny. "Being very compact and lightweight, it’s easy to travel with the S21 by air because it’s under the 32kg luggage limit."