With the 11-city Love Train tour in support of new album Heart Blanche under his belt, CeeLo Green can reflect on his move away from full acoustic band to performing with just a sax and flute player, a percussionist and a DJ. The simplicity of the stage set-up masked a complex production, with music ranging from hip-hop to jazz and an Allen & Heath mixing system hard at work in support.
FOH/monitor engineer Art Merriweather used an A&H dLive S5000 mixer and DM48 MixRack, together with wireless mics for CeeLo and all three backup vocalists and connected the sax player’s pedalboard, the percussionist’s feeds and the DJ. He mixed and grouped these sources into as many as 11 feeds for the house sound system and stage monitors: ‘This is hip-hop,’ he says. ‘They want it loud so they can feel it. Nobody on the tour likes in-ear monitors, so we’ve got powered wedges on the stage.’
To minimise bleed from the high stage level, Merriweather uses the dLive’s input channel gates on the vocal mics and sax mic. CeeLo cups the mic in his hands on some songs changing its sound quality prompting Merriweather to use the dLive’s multi-band compressor to clean up the sound on these songs.
He says it automatically drops off when CeeLo moves his hands back down the mic. He also praises the dLive’s several vintage reverb emulators calling them ‘spot-on the best I’ve heard’, and uses two different dLive reverbs on the DJ, echo plus reverb on the sax and a pitch shifter on CeeLo’s hit song, ‘Crazy’ to double the artist’s voice both two octaves up and two octaves down.
Because he has ‘more mixes than sources’, Merriweather sets up the dLive with his outputs on the left-most faders and inputs on the centre faders. He uses a second layer to manage effects and another for EQ settings. He does a multitrack recording of every performance via the dLive’s Dante card to a Mac Mini and plays it back during setups using a dLive scene to implement the mixer’s virtual soundcheck capability. Merriweather says CeeLo’s show hits the dLive hard but it has ample dynamic range and its 96kHz sample rate makes it better sounding than other digital mixers he’s used in the past. He has the desk highly customised with colors and labels and loves the ease of drag-and-drop set-up.
For Merriweather, who has 12 years’ experience as a front-of-house and recording engineer, this was his first experience with the dLive on tour, but he wants to use it on other runs with different artists. He appreciates the dLive’s ‘analogue feel’ which allows him to concentrate on the mix and not be distracted by the technology and says he’s looking forward to using the dLive’s wireless iPad control. ‘I love this desk,’ he said, ‘and, whatever it can do, I’m doing it.’
