The Million Dollar Quartet’s recent North American tour is part theatre, part rock-and-roll concert, describing a day in 1956 when Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley performed together at Sam Phillips’ Sun Records studio. Managing both FOH and monitors on the tour, Chris Wilson requested an Allen & Heath dLive S Class S5000 with DM64 MixRack from equipment provider Epicenter Productions of Bedford, Texas.
‘I’ve mixed theatre and I’ve mixed rock-and-roll, but, this show is different because it goes from theatrical dialogue to full rock-and-roll,’ he says. ‘I have to marry the two for the audience while I manage monitors for the cast.
To manage both tasks, Wilson splits each input channel to the dLive’s Layer F for FOH and Layer A for monitors. On both layers, he keeps DCAs on the right-hand fader bank as his master show control. He uses dLive effects to help maintain the show’s 1950s atmosphere.
‘I’m running a nice hall reverb on all of the Super 55 mics and a tap delay on Elvis and Johnny Cash to give them that nice, thick 55 echo/slap feel on ‘Ghost Riders’ and ‘16 Tons’,’ he says. ‘I’ve implemented the automatic mic mixer on my dialog over-ear mics to keep them from comb filtering and cancelling. That really cleaned up the intelligibility. And I’m using the on-board compressors for each channel. The ability to put dynamic EQ and multiband compression on so many channels is mind-boggling.’
The tour uses wedge monitors exclusively: ‘We don’t use in-ears because the producers are very serious about being 1950s period correct,’ Wilson explains. ‘But, we’re going from 800-seat to 4,000-seat rooms so the stage set changes dramatically from day to day.’
To speed the set-up, he adjusts monitors while walking the stage using the dLive’s Virtual Sound Check and the dLive Director software on his laptop. ‘With Virtual Sound Check, I know that I can get their mixes pretty much on point before they ever hit the stage,’ he says. ‘And I’m hearing. “this is absolutely a perfect mix” from the guys.
‘The dLive’s sound quality is dramatic, and, I love the built-in compression,’ he adds. ‘Even when you push it hard, there’s none of that digital hash. And, I can do parallel compression on my Super 55s without using another channel and with no phase shift. There’s not another desk on the planet that can do that.’
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