In the wake of a that concert lasted just four songs before the crowd got out of hand and the production had to be halted in the interests of safety, FOH engineer Travis Wade has adopted Allen & Heath’s dLive mixing system for tours with Sacramento-based heavy rock band Dance Gavin Dance.
As well as the chaos at the gig, Wade’s usual choice of console wasn’t available, but the hire company assured him that the dLive S5000 would be simple to learn. ‘I ended up having my mind blown by the desk,’ he reclls. ‘For this tour, I went with a dLive S7000 surface and a DM48 MixRack rented through Sacramento Production Services,’ Wade says. ‘It’s hands-down my favourite desk I’ve ever been on. I’ve worked on consoles by many different manufacturers, and nothing could beat what it was like mixing on dLive.’
For additional I/O, Wade uses a DX168 expander, adding 16 dLive mic preamps and eight line outputs, and connecting directly to a dedicated DX port on the rear of his control surface.
When it comes to channel processing, Wade is thankful that he doesn’t need an external server to achieve the right sound. ‘Everyone’s had that nightmare where the external digital FX processor goes down mid-show and your entire mix is gone,’ he says. ‘That was a big draw for dLive for me – everything I need is built-in.’
Dance Gavin Dance are due to perform next at the forhtcoming When We Were Young festival in Las Vegas in October, alongside other big name rock groups such as My Chemical Romance and Paramore – again using A&H’s S7000. For future tour dates in Europe, Wade will bring along a C1500 dLive surface to maintain the same processing power., but in a more portable form factor: ‘It is under the weight limit for airlines, which means I can fly with it with no issue,’ he says.
More: www.allen-heath.com
