French electronic pop duo, Air, recently completed an extensive tour of Europe and America to promote their new album, Love2, carrying a combined FOH and monitor iLive digital system from Allen & Heath.
“I’ve been using an iLive-112 system ever since I toured with Florence & the Machine in 2008,” explains AIR’s FOH engineer. Dave McDonald.
“iLive’s two greatest attributes are the way it’s laid out and the way it sounds. When I glance down everything’s in place telling me what’s going on and it’s very easy to understand, whereas with some of the other digital boards there’s a lot of scrolling and you end up becoming a mechanic, which kills the artistic side of mixing.”
The Air iLive system comprises an iDR10 MixRack digitally split to an iDR0 minirack positioned on stage, with iLive-112 Control Surfaces at FOH and monitors.
“The FX are amazing too, so I don’t need outboard to recreate Air’s studio productions. They don’t sound like an ‘out of the box’ set of FX – there’s definitely more of an organic character about them. I love the ADT and I’m so impressed with the Chorus, which I use for the vocals on ‘Sexy Boy’.”
Without the aid of any pre-recorded backing material, AIR’s live set is performed by the two band members on keyboards and guitar, accompanied by a drummer. The iLive system is also fitted with a MADI audio networking plug-in card so the engineers are able to record the performances.
“We’re taking the MADI feed into Logic on a 17” MacBook Pro laptop, via a MADIface interface, and all the tracks are going direct to a hard drive. It’s very simple and painless!” comments McDonald.
“If we wanted, we could use the same MADI-enabled system to perform virtual sound checks by feeding a gig multi-track recording through iLive at FOH.”
Monitor requirements include a stereo mix to the three artists’ IEMs and local stage wedges.
“I’d never really liked the digital format before,” comments monitor engineer, Wilo, who had no previous experience of the system. “iLive has changed my mind to some extent because it’s so easy and very stable.”
At one point in the European schedule, the tour was unable to take all of the band’s equipment into Russia for dates in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Allen & Heath’s distributor, MixArt, provided an iLive system on hire.
“It was not the exact same system hardware but that didn’t matter,” explains McDonald. “We simply took a USB key with our configuration, plugged it in and there was our show!”
