A series of sold-out concerts in Las Vegas saw ‘King of Country’ George Strait play in the round on a diamond-shaped stage. As he moves from corner to corner to connect with his audience, monitor engineer Josh Kaylor provides a consistent monitoring environment with separate mixes for Strait, members of his band and any guests using an Allen & Heath dLive S5000 surface and DM64 MixRack.
‘Speed and workflow are critical when I do monitors,’ Kaylor explains. ‘I need to move in and out of each instrument and each person and get to everything quickly and I’m able to do that with the dLive – it’s probably the fastest console I’ve been on and the latency is very low so it sounds really good. When I spoke into it for a mic check, it was very transparent. I didn’t feel like I was going through a bunch of processors.’
There are three wedge monitors and a drum sub on Strait’s stage, with nine of the 12 musicians (including Strait) using stereo, in-ear monitors. Kaylor says that Strait wants his ears to sound like a studio recording. To meet this goal, Kaylor mixes Strait like a FOH engineer pushing up solos or instruments and adjusting the mix for the house.
Despite being an old-school engineer, he makes good use of the dLive’s digital features, with dLive layers helping him to keep track of the 12 separate mixes and nearly 50 mics and direct feeds. He uses dLive compressors on Strait’s vocal mic and on bass. As the system is rented in for each of Strait’s Las Vegas shows, Kaylor backs up the dLive configuration to a USB thumb drive after each show.
Kaylor reports dLive as giving ‘vast improvements to quality and workflow’
‘When I first got the dLive, it was easy to understand and I figured out most of it by myself. It’s fast, it sounds good and it just made sense.’
More: www.allen-heath.com
