Mexican guitar duo, Rodrigo Y Gabriella, recently embarked on the EU leg of their tour, stripping the show down to the sessentials – two people, two guitars and the right sound set-up.

Performing in a handful of intimate venues across Europe, the tour carried a compact Allen & Heath iLive digital system, comprising the iDR-16 MixRack and iLive-R72 rackmount Control Surface, with a Dante audio interface card for virtual soundcheck.

‘We kept all the gear down to just what we could carry,’ says Production Manager, Mike Taylor. ‘You might think that two guitarists can’t need much but we didn’t want to compromise quality just because we had to fly from venue to venue. Both Rodrigo and Gabriella have two set-ups each – a full electric and an acoustic – so in reality we are taking four guitar rigs. We are carrying a total of nine cases of guitars and production equipment, plus luggage, so “small” was the watch word for this tour. Allen & Heath has nailed it with this iLive system - there is absolutely no compromise, not even slightly.’

As well as being compact, FOH engineer, David Marchant, also wanted a desk that he could call on at a moment’s notice, and supplement what was in-house: ‘Rodrigo and Gabriela are extremely high energy and dynamic,’ Taylor says. ‘We needed a small desk with a big desk capability and we certainly found that in the iLive-R72. We have been turning up at venues and putting our small desk next to these big format analogue consoles and hearing a few sniggers from the local crew but that all stops the second the sound kicks in.’

We managed monitors and FOH from the same console, and also a number of matrix outputs for additional areas. Using inputs and outputs on both the Surface and MixRack we were able to adapt to everything the venues threw at us.’

Rodrigo Y Gabriella return to Europe and then move on to the US with their project ‘CUBA’, performing all of their hits with a full Cuban band.

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