US punk rockers At the Drive-In are currently on tour in support of their fourth studio album, in•ter a•li•a passing through Europe, Mexico and America with a rider that specifies an Allen & Heath dLive S Class S5000 Surface and DM64 MixRack for monitors.

Monitor engineer Jason Brandt inherited the band’s dLive from their previous monitor engineer: ‘I walked in there, never having touched the console,’ he recalls. ‘But, the dLive’s configuration is very powerful, and super-intuitive. I was able to set it up exactly the way I wanted it.’

When Brandt first joined the tour, each band member told him that they wanted the monitor mix to sound like their recordings. ‘At The Drive-In is very dynamic,’ he says. ‘On some songs they literally whisper and on some songs they’re screaming. But, I knew they could hear very well on stage with the help of the dLive.’

WIth the tour underway, the band reduced its equipment load by focusing on in-ear monitors having begun with a mix of wedges and in-ears to deliver more than 30 sources. ‘I never ran out of busses or DCAs or anything on the dLive,’ Brandt reports.

A Mac and DAW software allowed him to record each show and play it back during set-up using the dLive’s Virtual Sound Check (VSC). He used an iPad, with the dLive MixPad app, to help set up his mix for each show. ‘That was very useful,’ he says. ‘I could walk around and even sit on the drum stool and listen to my mix during set-up.’

Brandt designed a separate mix for each musician and he split and duplicated input channels allowing him to feed the same input to each band member with different EQ, compression, effects and gain trim. He used the dLive’s Waves card with Waves’ Vocal Rider compression to control the band’s dynamics, and also used Waves and Eventide effects routed through thr Mac and returned via the Dante card. He assigned a dLive layer to each musician’s mix along with a layer for effects returns and a show layer, which included DCAs and ‘everything else I needed’.

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