Nordic rock band, The Cardigans, are currently touring with Allen & Heath‘s GLD Chrome digital mixing system, supplied and managed by Swedish PA company, Parashoot.
“We have been using Allen & Heath’s iLive systems on The Cardigans since the revival tour in 2012.” says Parashoot’s Oscar Söderlund.
“More recently, I used the GLD system on the Nina Persson’s Animal Heart solo tour, so it felt natural to move to the GLD Chrome for this summer tour. Nina’s vocals in particular sound so wonderful through GLD, I was confident about making the switch.”
Parashoot selected a Chrome GLD-112 for front of house, with a Chrome GLD-80 on monitors.
The band’s monitor set up is mixture of wedges, and wireless and hardwired in-ears. An AR2412 remote IO rack is installed as a stage box, with two 2 AR84 racks in another rack containing a multi-track player/recorder and the band’s and techs’ in-ear monitor system. This is connected by running two Cat5 cables between monitor/stage-box and the rack. A double CAT5e/6 connects monitor and front of house, and the monitor GLD-80 sends rack inputs to the front of house GLD-112 through a redundant ACE card setup.
“The speed of GLD makes it very easy for us to drag, drop, add or lose channels on the fly. This is particularly useful when, for example, guest musicians or new instruments are added during sound check or even line check,” says Söderlund. “At front of house, I use the onboard FX and dynamics. It’s fantastic that the same FX that I used on iLive also work and sound great on the GLD. I always use the classic A&H channel compressor, and am loving the new 16T and 16VU – they sound great and very much like the real deal. The Transient Controller is amazingly good, and so are the new delays.”
Parashoot has also established a simple stage communication system, enabling front of house and monitors to talk to each other through the PFL buses, plus the ability to talk to just the backline staff, or the band during sound check.
“In my opinion, Allen & Heath is leading the way in digital sound – it’s ground breaking stuff,” concludes Söderlund.