World music star Fernando Lameirinhas is currently on tour with his latest project – with a Yamaha QL1 digital mixer making the most of a very limited touring budget.
Portuguese by birth, Lameirinhas has lived in Belgium and Holland, and now works with bass guitarist brother Antonio and other musicians. He has held a high profile in the Dutch music scene for 40 years. The current tour is titled Noir and sees Fernando and Antonio performing with guitarist Daniel de Moraes and a pair of African musicians, drummer Udo Demandt and Mola Sylla on vocals, mbira and kalimba. The tour explores the colour noir (black), subverting its traditional interpretation of being a dark, negative presence to explore how it can be a positive element.
Mixing both front of house and monitors on the tour is Paul Duwel, one of the Netherlands leading sound engineers and a long-term Yamaha user. Working originally with the company’s analogue consoles, he used the Netherlands’ first PM1D – owned by Peak Audio, Amsterdam – on monitors for Dutch superstar singer Marc Borsato (with whom he continues to work). Since the CL and then QL series were introduced, he is content to use a digital console for every occasion: ‘Using Yamaha gear makes me happy every time,’ he says. ‘It’s extremely reliable and working with digital mixer files is really easy now with the CLs and QLs. For this tour I decided to use a QL1 because I don’t need a lot of channels – just 14 inputs and five monitor sends – plus it sounds really good, it’s very small, easy to transport and it has great reverbs and effects.’
Using four reverbs, the onboard Rupert Neve compressors, and making multitrack recordings with Nuendo Live via Dante Virtual Soundcard, the QL1 gives Duwel high-quality sound in every venue, despite using house PA systems: ‘The QL1 has allowed me to use the sound of the show as an extra creative dimension, while touring on a very small budget. It’s a great desk,’ he says.
‘At the other end of the Yamaha spectrum, I and many other Dutch sound engineers are very interested in, and have high expectations of, the forthcoming PM10.’
