British alt rockers Don Broco paired their Allen & Heath SQ-5 digital mixer with a full dLive system for a short festival run across the UK and Europe this summer, including appearances at Mad Cool in Madrid, the Meo Mares Festival in Porto and theTruck Festival in Oxfordshire.
Supplied by SSE Audio, a DM64 MixRack fitted with gigaAce and fibreAce cards formed the core of the system, paired with a dLive S3000 surface at FOH (with a Dante card), while a digital split from the gigaAce card allowed the band to use their own SQ-5 for monitors.
The band formed in 2008, releasing a debut album, Priorities, in 2012, and currently comprises Rob Damiani (lead vocals), Simon Delaney (guitar), Tom Doyle (bass and programing) and Matt Donnelly (drums, lead and backing vocals), Their most recent album, Technology, was released in February 2018.
‘When we started this project, we needed to build a system that would work with the band’s own SQ-5 on monitors,’ says FOH engineer and long-time user of Allen & Heath gear Adam Boole. ‘Happily, it was easy to achieve by having dLive on FOH. All I/O is set up through the DM64 MixRack, which just creates an extremely neat and tidy, yet small package.’
‘SQ has a very similar workflow to dLive,’ adds monitor engineer Scott Howarth. ‘It has an extremely small footprint and local I/O which I use for shouts and local festival drum subs/side fill. It’s great that we can pair it with pretty much any I/O from Allen & Heath too, it makes this owned console easily applicable to a host of uses for the band.’
Both Howarth and Boole made use of each console’s offline editor (new to SQ v1.4 firmware), as Howarth explains: ‘During the pre-production day at SSE and after we had built the show files for FOH and monitors – with everything we were ever going to need and more – we synced the files and made sure the two consoles networked while Adam patched the dLive to and from the SQ-5. Everything loading across seamlessly. Allen & Heath consoles are a real ecosystem that can live up to any task and can tackle it with ease.’
While the SQ runs without any extra processing required, Boole makes use of dLive’s built-in FX and Deep processing: ‘For vocals, I’m running the OptTronik compressor with the Dyn8 for fine adjustments,’ he says. ‘I’ve also got the OptTronik on bass – it’s a great compressor.
‘I used a LA-2A on bass for years, so OptTronik was a much-welcomed addition to dLive – Allen & Heath have done a great job with it. On drums, I’m running a mix of the Opto and 16T, I also have the kick going to a group with the Dyn8’s dynamic EQ inserted for more control over my low end.’
The band now head to Asia for a series of support shows before moving on to the US on a headline tour. Both sets of shows will see the SQ-5 in action again, covering FOH and monitors, along with two A&H AB168 stageboxes.
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