Front of house engineer Travis Wade is utilizing an Allen & Heath dLive mix system for his work with Sacramento-based heavy rock band Dance Gavin Dance, which formed in 2005 and has sold over a million records and performed in nearly 30 countries.
Wade first mixed on a dLive under some chaotic circumstances. “We were only expecting about 600 people at a Suicidal Tendencies concert,” he explains. “About 4,000 attendees showed up.” The rental company did not have Wade’s usual audio console but assured him that the available dLive S5000 was up to the task. “I ended up having my mind blown by the desk. It was super easy to get going. I didn’t find myself having to navigate through many pages to get to the parameters I needed.
“For this tour, I went with a dLive S7000 surface and a DM48 MixRack rented through Sacramento Production Services,” he continues. “It’s hands-down my favorite desk I’ve ever been on. I’ve worked on consoles by many different manufacturers, and nothing could beat what it was like mixing on dLive.”
For additional I/O at the front of house position, Wade uses a DX168 expander that adds 16 dLive mic preamps and 8 line outputs, and connects directly to a dedicated DX port on the back of his control surface. He adds that he doesn’t need an external server to achieve what he’s seeking for channel processing: “Everyone’s had that nightmare where the external digital FX processor goes down mid-show and your entire mix is gone. That was a big draw for dLive for me — everything I need is built in.”
In December of 2020, Dance Gavin Dance held a unique livestream performance from the historic Tower Bridge in Sacramento that Wade mixed and captured through his dLive. “We had only 12 hours to load in, get the performances, and tear down before they had to re-open the bridge for traffic,” recalled Wade. “We didn’t have time for any errors.”
Dance Gavin Dance is set to perform next at the upcoming When We Were Young festival in Las Vegas this October alongside other big-name rock groups such as My Chemical Romance and Paramore. For future tour dates in Europe, Wade notes that he will be bringing along a C1500 dLive surface to maintain the same processing power in a more portable form factor: “It is under the weight limit for airlines, which means I can fly with it with no issue.”
