A live performance by Ricardo Sanchez in San Antonio, Texas, recently saw veteran audio engineer Armando Fullwood using an Allen & Heath dLive S7000 Surface with DM64 MixRack for its mix. As Sanchez is to release a live recording of the concert as his next album (entitled Taste and See) Fullwood’s FOH mix needed to serve both the live audience and the recording.

The dLive’s parallel bus capabilities helped Fullwood achieve these two goals: ‘If you grew up in the studio, part of the secret was how you did parallel bus compression,’ he explains. ‘On dLive, you can do this on every channel without worrying about latency because it’s native to the console. I use this feature religiously on drums - it’s changed my whole process of drum mixing.’

Fullwood gates his drum mics using the dLive’s keying feature. ‘I key the gates off the resonant tone of each tom-tom or snare,’ he confirms. ‘That way, I don’t have to be as aggressive with the threshold but it keeps the cymbals out of those mics and, if the drummer is playing with a lot of dynamics, it’s all there.’

For Sanchez’s live performance, Fullwood used dLive’s internal compressors, EQ, reverbs and delays. He added Waves plug-ins with the dLive’s new Version 3 Waves card. ‘There are algorithms inside a Waves C6 or a Vitamin that go beyond just EQ and compression – I call that my finishing seasonings,’ he says.

Fullwood – Executive Director of multi-service dealer and integrator Wave – has mixed numerous live concerts and recording sessions for artists including Andrae Crouch and the Count Basie Orchestra. Based on his experience with Sanchez, he now plans to purchase a dLive for his own use.

‘If the concert itself doesn’t sound amazing, then the band won’t play well and the audience won’t respond and there won’t be energy going to the tape,’ he says. ‘But if the system and the acoustics of the room are calibrated appropriately to the board, then you essentially turn your room experience into a live sound stage.’

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