‘The clubs aren’t concert venues,’ says Media Director Dean Laber, from US live music bar chain, Howl at the Moon. ‘We encourage the audience to get close to the stage, interact with the players and have a good time.’
With locations across the US, Howl at the Moon uses duelling pianists to provide an interactive audience experience. The audio system has recently been standardised using an Allen & Heath Qu-Pac rackmount mixer and AR-2412 Audio Rack to serve each location.
‘Since the players move around a lot and the stage is relatively small, we were challenged by having wedge monitors,’ Laber explains. ‘Now, we’ve upgraded the clubs to the Qu-Pac mixers and converted to in-ear monitoring systems. That brought improved clarity of sound and reduced the stage volume.’
Howl at the Moon performers control both their own house feed and their own monitor mix using Allen & Heath’s Qu-Pad iPad App or Qu-You iPhone App.
‘We do requests and Top 40 tunes so, if the song calls for an echo or a chorus effect or a doubler, some of the players will use the app to add that to their mix,’ Laber says. ‘And, I use the Qu-Pac’s graphic EQs to adjust the system to the room and to each performer. I’m a huge fan of the [AR-2412] dSnake. It’s made everything easier – cabling and routing problems have just gone away.
‘I think we’ve come to a great point in the quality of our sound. The Qu-Pac’s preamps have a nice warmth to them and the mixer has lots of headroom,’ he adds. ‘I’m really impressed with the equalisation section as well. It doesn’t have the harshness I expect from a digital mixer, so the quality of sound is there along with the ease of use and functionality. It’s also great to have recallable setups, so no matter what kind of adjustments might be changed during the performance, we can always recover the original set-up.
‘The iPad integration has been huge for us and the Qu-Pac and the other things we’ve invested in have really made the players more comfortable – and our sound is exponentially better than it was before.’
More: www.allen-heath.com
