Warpaint is a Los Angeles-based “dream pop” band currently on tour in support of their third album, “Heads Up.”
The tour, which has played high-profile venues from Australia’s Sydney Opera House to England’s Glastonbury Festival, carries two Allen & Heath dLive S5000 surfaces with DM64 MixRacks for front of house and monitors.
Front of house engineer Hanford Pittman first encountered the dLive at the “Music Tastes Good” festival in Long Beach.
“Right away, I fell in love with it,” he says. “I set things up with the dLive Director and I was pretty much self-sufficient right away. Then, as soon as I heard that first kick, I knew it sounded amazing.”
Maxine Gilmore mixes monitors for Warpaint on the dLive S5000.Maxine Gilmore, Warpaint’s monitor engineer tried the dLive at the same festival and Pittman says, “Once she realized that she could set it up exactly how she thinks, it was a no-brainer. Then, we tried it out with the band and they noticed the difference right away in the sound and the on-board effects.”
Pittman manages Warpaint’s 38 sources using dLive layers. “What’s great about this,” he says, “is that each bank and layer are independent and they’re completely customizable, so Maxine’s desk in monitor world looks completely different from mine at front of house.”
He uses dLive scenes to assign and customize the dLive’s internal effects. “I’m using three reverbs,” he says, “and the echo and the stereo tapped delay.” He uses the dLive’s multi-band compressor on vocals, bass and the left-right bus, calling it “ liquid smooth,” and he loves the dLive’s parallel path for compression. “With four singers, it’s really nice to be able to add or take away the dry signal to help whoever’s singing lead at the time,” he says.
Warpaint uses a mix of in-ear and wedge monitors and monitor engineer Gilmore provides fifteen mixes to the band and the tech crew. Emily, one of Warpaint’s lead vocalists and guitarists, mixes her own monitors using a dLive IP6 remote controller and Pittman says the band may add IP6s for its three other musicians.
Pittman comments, “The desk should allow you to sculpt what you want in the sound. And, that’s what the dLive does. It provides you with a blank slate and you can add effects and ‘dirty it up’ as much as you want or keep it as clean as you want.”
He adds, “Warpaint is very conscious about playing live and being real and authentic. And, when they heard the sound quality of the dLive, I knew we’d made a good decision with these desks.”
