Dan Black tours Europe with iLive digital

9 September 2009

UK - Singer songwriter Dan Black, is currently touring Europe and the festival circuit with an innovative audio set up from Allen & Heath's iLive digital range.

Black's FOH engineer, Steve Pattison, has selected a compact touring system comprising an iDR-32 MixRack and a laptop loaded with iLive Editor software, which he uses as a virtual control surface. The system not only mixes FOH audio but also wedge and IEM monitor requirements.

"I'm running the iDR rack and that's it... no desk, no surface, just the stagebox, which is mounted into our onstage loopstation," says Pattison.

Pattison runs looms out of the loopstation to the band's mics and DI's and a loom into the house system so that all the mics and DI's run straight into the stagebox and from there are output to a master L&R mix and 3 wedge mixes, which are fed into the house multicore. For monitors, two lines are sent to the drummer's mixer for his headphone mix, and Ferdi, the band technician, listens to his stereo in-ears mix by plugging into the iDR's PFL output.

To operate the iDR-32, Pattison connects his laptop using a regular wireless router, to run the iLive Editor software and recall show settings.

"The lack of physical surface means I can choose which surface size I want to use in the software, so I'm not limited to a certain number of channels or faders. For the Dan Black tour I've been using the iLive-T80 split it into three desks - the top layer for FOH, second layer for wedge mixes and third layer for in-ear monitors - so each discipline has its own channels, EQ, gates, compressors and so on." he says.

"I can mix from wherever I like too. I can EQ wedges from the stage, or mix from the audience to get more of a feel for what the audience are hearing and not what's getting to FOH. I've also been surprised by the wireless range; it didn't drop out at the John Peel stage at Glastonbury and I was a good 50m away."

(Jim Evans)