Shortly after graduating from London College of Music, producer and studio co-owner Conor Cosimini was invited to join English singer/songwriter Dodie on tour as monitor engineer. He accepted with with zeal, ambition and an Audient iD14 audio interface.
Life on the road, first with Dodie’s You tour and the subsequent Spring Tour proved it to be invaluable in a live set-up. ‘The iD14 has come on both Dodie tours and every other show I’ve done since – and I couldn’t be happier with it,’ Cosimini confirms.
‘I use iD22 in my writing and location recording rigs all the time,’ he explains, rationalising the choice of the iD14. ‘When I’m on the road, I like to have an interface with me for two reasons. As FOH or monitor engineer, I use Smaart for real-time analysis and tuning of the PA/wedges, so I always need a super-clean mic preamp with high quality converters for this. I also like to have something for on the bus/in the van for listening to show records or working on other projects, and the ability for it to be bus powered is really important, as power isn’t always available. Coming from the iD22 the iD14 fits this bill perfectly.’
Dodie herself has enjoyed a rapid rise from YouTube ‘sensation’ to live performer. She posts both original and cover songs on her YouTube channel, ‘doddleoddle’, which has more than 1.5m subscribers, and a total in excess of 315m views across all her channels to date. Now, two independent EPs later, (both of which charted in the top 40 of the UK Album Chart) she’s very much on the touring scene, and has surrounded herself with a strong team of live sound professionals.
‘The portability of the iD14 is super important for me,’ Cosimini ays. ‘It takes up next to no space in my Peli but when combined with a good reference mic, it’s the ideal solution for running my RTA software with its incredibly clean gain on the mic preamp and ease of set-up.
‘Dodie: is an all-round great musician, however she’s not the loudest singer or player when she has the guitar or uke, so when on wedges they’re always running pretty hot. For the first tour I did with her I had the iD14 running Smaart for tuning her wedges, and then during the show it was a quick and easy visual representation of any frequencies that were threatening to take off.’
Describing how the iD14 has been particularly helpful on the latest tour, he says: ‘The balance box we had for some playback went down during one of the shows, and I quickly swapped the USB from my laptop to the playback machine and hooked the line outputs into our splitter – it was a 30-second fix, and no one was any the wiser.
‘When I’m running FOH, I mainly use the iD14 for tuning the system, but if the console I’m on doesn’t have the digital outs I need, it’s great for being able to throw a couple of jacks into and taking a copy of my master bus for a show record. Being able to do this on bus power is often a massive time saver too.’
Dodie’s recent tour is now over, leaving Cosimini with ongoing writing and production projects, and also preparing for live shows with Orla Gartland and Hannah Grace.
‘I think it’s my relationship with the artists and people I work with,’ he reflects. ‘I feel like it’s one thing to do the job well – I know there are plenty of people that could realistically do it better than me – but another to be a person people want to keep working with, so I guess to keep getting the call I must be doing something right.’
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