Brit Floyd returned to the road this summer following a year-long hiatus due to the coronavirus pandemic for a series of US dates beginning at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado. Performing selections from Pink Floyd’s The Wall, The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Division Bell and Meddle, the band’s long-time sound designer and FOH engineer Gareth Darlington manned a Solid State Logic L200 digital mixing console at front-of-house.
‘It’s the best console I’ve ever heard; there’s no two ways about it – it has a big, fat, wide, pleasant sound with lots of separation,’ he says. ‘I got the L200 because I wanted more faders. I’m a musician, and mixing is like playing an instrument. I’m not afraid to use a lot of EQ and shape everything, so I want to get my hands on everything.’
Darlington has been with the band full-time since 2011 but began his live sound career in 1998 when he joined his brother, Damian, Brit Floyd’s musical director, guitarist and vocalist, on the road with a previous Pink Floyd tribute band.
He familiarised himself with the Live console’s operation prior to its delivery by downloading the Solsa (SSL On/Off Line Setup Application) software to his computer. ‘I learned how to use it intuitively via the software. Then I spent a week at Parr Street Studios [in Liverpool] prepping the show with studio monitors, so I could really hear what it was doing. I’ve never worked on a console with that much flexibility. That’s the beauty of the console; you can set it up exactly as you want it starting from a clean slate. I quickly built a show that I was happy with and I haven’t changed it much since.
‘The L200 is the first console I’ve worked on where you can automate everything, including EQ and compression, scene by scene, with fade times and make the transitions absolutely seamless,’ he continues. ‘That was a huge gamechanger for me.’
Brit Floyd often perform ‘Echoes’, the 23-minute centrepiece of 1971’s Meddle album. ‘I have five or six scenes for that one song,’ Darlington says. ‘I meticulously edited the fade times so that everything transitions, and you don’t have to worry about exactly when you change scene.’
He recalls that Chas Cole, of UK-based CMP Entertainment, who produces and promotes Brit Floyd’s shows worldwide, approached him about adding a front-of-house console to the organisation’s equipment inventory in 2019. ‘He asked me to do some homework and recommend something that I’d be comfortable using. I gravitated towards the SSL Live through a lot of recommendations and the company’s reputation.’
One of the strongest recommendations came from Andrea Pellegrini, who alternates at FOH with Brit Floyd when Darlington is unavailable. Pellegrini has toured for 15 years mixing FOH for King Crimson and Tony Levin’s Stickmen, but is primarily a studio engineer. ‘I work with SSL every day,’ Pellegrini says, typically at a studio in Florence, Italy, which has an SSL 9000 J console, and heard the first Live to come off the SSL production line at a Peter Gabriel rehearsal. ‘The thing that I noticed was the space, the stereo image, that I also find on the 9000. It has become my first choice, because of the sound quality and the preamps.
‘I thought that desk was the best choice for CMP, because the show is about live music, effects and dynamics,’ he adds. ‘Automating fades between makes the transitions so smooth. You’re not tied to switching the scene at an exact time or otherwise you hear pops and clicks.
‘The L200 has all the features that I might need and is my favourite layout. I love to have all the faders on the same level. We don’t run anything externally, so it’s all done in the L200. The big screen is great; it works in sunlight at outdoor gigs way better than other brands.’
‘The all-pass filter on every output was a tremendously useful tool for me when it came to lining up my L-Acoustics K2 tops and SB28 subs,’ says Michael Skinner, who has worked as Brit Floyd’s systems engineer since 2018 and also recently toured with Deadmau5. ‘I could line up the phase at the crossover point, then get the shapes perfectly on top of each other using the variable Q on the all-pass filter. It was fantastic.’
Darlington has configured the L200 to run 80 channels with 64 inputs from a pair of SSL Dante AoIP SB 32.24 SuperAnalogue Stageboxes – with no backing tracks. ‘A lot of the reverbs and effects come back on stems, but some come back on channels. I have one tile of the console that is mainly VCAs and outputs. If you’ve got the show dialled in, you should be able to more or less just push the groups. I love the stems. Our drummer’s very dynamic and during the show I subtly balance all the drums, constantly. So a lot of my subgrouping is done with stems: drum kit into a stem into a bus,’ he says. ‘It’s very easy to manage.’
It requires a lot of effects processing in the L200, especially reverbs and chorus, to convincingly recreate Pink Floyd’s songs, Darlington says. ‘I spent a lot of time trying to emulate what they do, and I can get pretty close. Our drummer plays quite lightly and sometimes the snare doesn’t pop enough. I can get that pop with the transient plug-in. I also really like the saturation plug-ins, which I use on the kit as well. And I use the bus compressor on the master and a stem, which is basically the drum kit group. It’s fantastic and sounds wonderful.’
More: www.solidstatelogic.com
