Having fronted German bands H-Blockx and Söhne Mannheims, Henning Wehland is now touring under his own name and using an Allen & Heath mixing systems exclusively – dLive for FOH and a GLD-80 for monitors.
His recent tour, Der Letzte an der Bar (Last Man At The Bar), put Technical Director Ansgar Friemel – who been using A&H consoles for many years – at FOH: ‘The big challenge of this production is the bandwidth of gigs we play, from street parties to the big festivals,’ he says.
‘We needed a very flexible console at FOH which integrates into various Dante or Madi networks easily – and dLive delivers it all. I also love that dLive gets better with every firmware update. Allen & Heath really listens to their users and constantly optimises the mixing workflow.’
A central element to the stage set is a bar counter. In addition to providing an interesting stage design for the story of the production, this also hosts the complete monitoring set-up including the GLD-80 monitor desk and a Klang:fabrik from Klang:technologies for 3D in-ear monitoring.
‘We use the GLD-80 and Klang:fabrik in a Dante network plus a 96kHz, 24-bit gigaAce network for FOH,’ Friemel explains, ‘On top, we can also use Madi to run virtual soundchecks, multitrack recordings or deliver signals to an OB van.’
As Wehland sings in German, vocal clarity and intelligibility is extremely important – and can often be a real mixing challenge: ‘We use lots of parallel compression in the mix groups to tame Henning’s voice and make it clearly understandable even in dense and complex songs,’ Friemel says. ‘dLive has so many great dynamic tools like the PeakLimiter 76, the 16T, the slow-opto compressor or the multiband dynamics. But we also use the other effects a lot, like the plate reverbs, the de-esser, transient controller or echo.’
Friemel also uses various microphones from Audio-Technica for the drum kit: ‘We have an ATM350 on the snare, which is great for high and low-mid frequencies and has a perfect mounting system,’ he says. ‘For the floor tom and snare bottom we use an ATM230 which deliver a very full and natural sound. For capturing atmospheres we use two AT897 which create very detailed and nice image of the stage sound for monitor mix or live recordings.’
