As they prepare for a busy 2017 touring schedule, Los Angeles based indie-rock band, Local Natives, is celebrating its successful 2016 USA and European concert series, with Allen & Heath‘s dLive S Class digital mixing system managing monitor requirements.
Promoting their third studio album, Sunlit Youth, the 16-week tour extensively covered venues across the USA and Europe. Monitor engineer, Laurence Eaves, provided the five-piece band with 12 separate in-ear and wedge mixes from 48 on-stage sources, using a dLive S5000 Surface with DM64 MixRack.
“Local Natives is a fun band to mix because there’s so much going on,” Eaves says. “Taylor and Kelcey are the main singers but the whole band kind of swaps positions during the show.”
To keep up with these changes, Eaves uses dLive scenes to repatch mics as the musicians change positions onstage, and to reconfigure mixes, and he employs the dLive’s recall filter to quickly modify scenes when needed. He keeps frequently-used mics and direct feeds on the dLive’s top layers, and places reverb sends, main ear outputs and wedge outputs on lower layers.
Eaves uses dLive plate reverbs for each band member and a plate and hall reverb on the snare and toms. He uses the dual stage valve preamp, which emulates tube harmonics, on bass and drum mics and the dynamic EQ and onboard delay on drums and other sources. He uses the dLive’s 16T and 16VU compressors on vocal mics and loves the dLive’s transient controllers.
“They make my drums really pop out of the mix and add body to things. And, if the toms are ringing too much I can just pull back the sustain.” Eaves commented, “I’m basically using all of the onboard effects. They sound fantastic.”
A Dante card installed in the S5000 surface enables multi-track digital recording and Eaves uses the virtual soundcheck to help set up each night’s performance.
“We’ve done a few shows without live sound checks,” he explains. “I can really get in there and fix things that were wrong the night before or change things about the way my ambient mics are fitting with each person’s ear mix. This is just so easy with the dLive compared to the mixer I was using before. I don’t think I’ve been as confident on any console I’ve used on the road. Everyone’s happy with the way we’re headed and I think a big part of that is the dLive.”
