Headlining the Stone Free festival at the London O2 Arena, Rick Wakeman was supported by leading artists, including Alice Cooper, The Darkness, Marillion, Therapy? and Yes guitaristSteve Hackett.
In the best traditions of prog rock, Wakeman performed with a full band and accompanying orchestra, and required a total of 120 inputs from the stage which were served by Allen & Heath’s dLive digital mixing system.
Stone Free is a major new festival, featuring two days of classic rock. Wakeman’s set comprised the debut live performance of the revised album King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, which has not been performed since 1978.
Supplied by Stone Free’s PA company, Capital Sound, and sub-hired through SRD Group, the A&H dLive system comprised an S7000 Control Surface with a DM64 MixRack and two DX32 expander racks loaded with seven analogue input cards and one analogue output card. Orchestra and choir stem feeds were also required for recording and for the monitor console. As well as the headline performance with Rick Wakeman, FOH engineer Ian Barfoot also used dLive earlier in the day to mix the Symphonic Wish You Were Here, an orchestral reworking of the Pink Floyd album of that title.
‘The hi- and low-pass filters combined with the parametric EQ were particularly useful for this performance,’ Barfoot says. ‘The dLive filter system is so comprehensive, and the ability to switch filter slope characteristics is a big plus. In my very humble opinion, dLive is the best sounding digital live sound console out there.
‘The surface is very easy to mix on, and if you delve a little further it is such a powerful tool with its extremely comprehensive feature set that stunning results are achieved with surprising little effort. It has a very precise, detailed sound, which you don’t find on other consoles, whilst not sounding electronic – it’s almost analogue in nature. The quality of the built in FX and Dynamics package never ceases to impress, and being native there is very little latency, adding to the precise but not clinical sound.’
