Over the past year, Neon Trees has cemented its reputation as one of the top up-and-coming indie rock acts in the U.S. with a chart topping single, a featured performance at this year’s SXSW festival, and a tour with My Chemical Romance.
With a number of one-off fly dates punctuating the tour, stage manager and monitor engineer Mike Bangs and front of house engineer Neal Duffy selected a pair of Allen & Heath iLive-T112 consoles to meet the band’s needs.
Neon Trees is a straightforward rock band, with two guitars, bass, keyboard and drums along with four vocals.
“We are using 24 inputs,” Bangs notes. “We are sharing preamps between monitors and FOH and doing a digital split from the Monitor console’s iDR-32, so our FOH snake is just one CAT5 cable. The second iDR-32 MixRack is currently being used for the FOH console’s DSP. That will change when we start headlining on our next tour. We will go with more stereo instruments for Neon Trees, and we will use the second iDR-32 to handle support band inputs without having to unpatch anything.”
Bangs, whose recent touring gigs include Kid Rock, Tom Petty, Aerosmith and Katy Perry, knew exactly what he was looking for in choosing his mixing desks.
“We had limited trailer space and some fly dates, so I was looking for a compact mixing system with lots of power,” he notes. “I needed something I could get into a case at under 50 pounds and put in the belly of a plane as checked baggage. The iDR-32 MixRack, racked in a Pelican case, comes in at 48.9 pounds. That was something that no one else could offer.”
“Since the iDR-32 is basically the brains of the console, it’s all I need for a fly date,” says Bangs. “Everything else goes in my carry-on bag. I did the first couple shows with just the laptop and iPad, using the Allen & Heath iPad App. Then I added the PL-6 so I could have some physical faders. That gives me hands-on control of the channels I’m constantly massaging – the crowd mics and vocal. The PL-6 is the perfect solution.”
