Although he only got his hands on it just prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, audio engineer and Tour Manager George Adrian has already taken his new Allen & Heath dLive rig out for several major live runs.
‘The palette of creativity and flexibility is unbelievable,’ he says. ‘I’m learning new things all the time, and the workflow makes a lot of sense to me.’
Recognising that owning his own touring desk offered numerous advantages, he was drawn to dLive after seeing one in use at a music festival. ‘I was really blown away by the compact form factor,’ he recalls. He subsequently settled on a 20-fader dLive C2500 surface and CDM64 MixRack, which features 64 dLive mic preamps and 32 line outputs, which is due out again shortly on a tour with American pop punk artist Maggie Lindemann. Adrian is preparing to run both FOH and in-ear monitors, which will make full use of dLive’s flexibility and processing.
‘I try to use minimal compression for in-ear mixes,’ he says. ‘That means double-patching some of the inputs and sending a different processed version to the front of house mix.’
He finds dLive’s Deep plug-in package handy, including the new Dual Threshold Expander introduced in dLive firmware 1.9. ‘I like it a lot for drums,’ he says. ‘I use it on basically all my channels.’
Adrian uses the Dyn8 Dynamic EQ for lead vocals and kick drums. ‘I like to be able to boost certain frequencies only when that frequency crosses a set threshold – and avoid just boosting everything in that signal at that frequency all the time, like you would with a static EQ.’
Adrian also has a Dante card installed in his dLive system, which allows flexible connectivity and expansion. ‘Using Dante, I can get audio to and from my SMAART rig, I can record multitracks, and also run Virtual Soundcheck,’ he explains. ‘On this run, we’re gonna have limited time before each performance, so we have to get a soundcheck done pretty quickly, and I can even check the IEM mixes without the artists actually playing on-stage.’
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