French space-pop group L’Impératrice spent much of 2022 on the road supporting the release of their Tako Tsubo album, with shows around including festival appearances at Coachella and Primavera Sound. Long-time sound engineer Antoine Guyonnard returned to his post the pandemic with a revised approach to mixing: ‘When the lockdown restrictions began to ease, we had to work with a smaller, lighter show than normal,’ he says. ‘That’s when I turned to Allen & Heath.’
For the early shows, Guyonnard used an A&H SQ-5, 96kHz 48-channel mixer with a pair of DX168 Expanders for onstage I/O. ‘We went all over the world with the SQ-5 which I pushed to its limits,’ he says. ‘I loved its audio quality and its size; you can’t get much more compact than that.’
After the first run of dates with the SQ-5, the live show moved to a larger scale production, which needed a step up in mixer size and channel count. ‘When we prepared the new show in a larger format, the choice of dLive was obvious,’ Guyonnard explains. ‘I had already experienced the power and audio quality of the dLive system on other projects, but for this tour, the most important factors were the scalability with the different MixRacks, Expanders and Surfaces, and above all the power-to-size ratio.’
With all dLive MixRacks built around the same 128-channel 96kHz processing core, Guyonnard had sufficient power to handle both FOH and monitor duties from one system. ‘I split important sources, like kick, snare, bass and vocals, to work on the audio specifically according to their destination, whether that’s the PA, IEMs or wedges,’ he says. ‘Here again, the available resources are more than sufficient to mix our 64 inputs, splits, effect returns, inserts, and so on.’
Guyonnard adds that when he moves from the 28 faders of the S5000 to the 12 faders of the C1500, he calls on one of dLive’s most popular features to ensure he can quickly access any required channels in an instant: ‘The number of DCAs available allows me to create multiple groups of faders that I can instantly recall as needed, via SoftKey, using the DCA Spill feature.
‘I exploit dLive’s control possibilities quite extensively,’ he continues. ‘The console’s automation is both intuitive and comprehensive, Midi over TCP/IP allows me to generate control commands to Ableton Live, and to follow automation from it. And thanks to the Embedded Recall function, I can trigger several events from a scene recall.’
When it comes to the mix, Guyonnard relies on dLive’s zero-latency Deep Processing and RackExtra FX to do the heavy lifting. ‘I really like the onboard processing and effects,’ he concludes. ‘All the reverbs, the emulations of preamps and compressors, the ADT doubler, the Dimension Chorus, and a special mention to the Source Expander which replaced all my gates. The new NEQ12 brings me up to 16 parametric bands available per bus, and the 64 DYN8s available without adding latency? It’s heaven.’
More: www.allen-heath.com
