Los Angeles based ‘dream pop’ band Warpaint recently put in an appearance at the Glastonbury Festival as part of touring their third album, Heads Up. The tour, which has also played Australia’s Sydney Opera House, carries two Allen & Heath dLive S5000 Surfaces with DM64 MixRacks for FOH and monitors.
FOH engineer Hanford Pittman first encountered the dLive at the Music Tastes Good festival in Long Beach. ‘Right away, I fell in love with it,’ he says. ‘I set things up with the dLive Director and I was pretty much self-sufficient right away. Then, as soon as I heard that first kick, I knew it sounded amazing.’
Warpaint monitor engineer Maxine Gilmore tried the dLive at the same festival: ‘Once she realised that she could set it up exactly how she thinks, it was a no-brainer,’ Pittman says. ‘Then, we tried it out with the band and they noticed the difference right away in the sound and the onboard effects.’
Pittman manages Warpaint’s 38 sources using dLive layers: ‘Each bank and layer are independent and they’re completely customisable, so Maxine’s desk in monitor world looks completely different from mine at FOH.’
He also uses dLive scenes to assign and customise the desk’s internal effects – three reverbs, the echo and the stereo tapped delay. He uses the dLive’s multi-band compressor on vocals, bass and the left-right bus, calling it ‘liquid smooth’, and the dLive’s parallel path for compression. ‘With four singers, it’s really nice to be able to add or take away the dry signal to help whoever’s singing lead at the time,’ he says.
Warpaint uses a mix of in-ear and wedge monitors, and monitor engineer Gilmore provides 15 mixes to the band and the tech crew. Emily, one of Warpaint’s lead vocalists and guitarists, mixes her own monitors using a dLive IP6 Remote Controller and Pittman says the band may add IP6s for its three other musicians.
‘The desk should allow you to sculpt what you want in the sound, and that’s what the dLive does,’ Pittman comments. ‘It provides you with a blank slate and you can add effects and ‘dirty it up’ as much as you want or keep it as clean as you want.
‘Warpaint are very conscious about playing live and being real and authentic. And, when they heard the sound quality of the dLive, I knew we’d made a good decision with these desks.’
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