Working up to a busy 2017 touring schedule, LA-based indie band Local Natives, are also looking back on successful tour of the US and Europe duting 2016 – with Allen & Heath’s dLive S Class digital mixing system serving their monitors.

Promoting a third studio album, Sunlit Youth, the 16-week tour extensively covered venues across the US and Europe. Monitor engineer Laurence Eaves provided the five-piece band with 12 separate in-ear and wedge mixes from 48 onstage sources, using a dLive S5000 Surface with DM64 MixRack. ‘Local Natives are a fun band to mix because there’s so much going on,’ he says. ‘Taylor and Kelcey are the main singers but the whole band kind of swaps positions during the show.’

To keep up with these changes, Eaves uses dLive scenes to re-patch mics as the musicians change positions onstage, and to reconfigure mixes, and he employs the dLive’s recall filter to quickly modify scenes when needed. He keeps frequently-used mics and direct feeds on the dLive’s top layers, and places reverb sends, main in-ear and wedge feeds on lower layers.

‘He also uses dLive plate reverbs for each band member and a plate and hall reverb on the snare and toms, and uses the dual stage valve preamp, which emulates tube harmonics, on bass and drum mics and the dynamic EQ and onboard delay on drums and other sources. The dLive’s 16T and 16VU compressors, meanwhile, have a part to play on vocal mics and loves the dLive’s transient controllers. ‘They make my drums really pop out of the mix and add body to things,’ Eaves reports. ‘And, if the toms are ringing too much I can just pull back the sustain.’ Eaves commented, ‘I’m basically using all of the onboard effects. They sound fantastic.’

A Dante card installed in the S5000 surface enables multitrack digital recording and Eaves uses the virtual soundcheck to help set up each night’s performance: ‘We’ve done a few shows without live sound checks,’ Eaves explains. ‘I can really get in there and fix things that were wrong the night before or change things about the way my ambient mics are fitting with each person’s ear mix. This is just so easy with the dLive compared to the mixer I was using before. I don’t think I’ve been as confident on any console I’ve used on the road. Everyone’s happy with the way we’re headed and I think a big part of that is the dLive.’

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