Allen & Heath’s dLive and Avantis consoles provided audio support for emerging British talent at the relocated British Music Embassy (BME) sessions earlier this month, after the cancellation of the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas.

For several years, the BME has hosted a live showcase for the hottest new British talent at SXSW and, when this year’s event was cancelled at short notice, the BME and its partners moved quickly to offer an alternative broadcast event for performers including Aaron Smith, Arlo Parks, Bess Atwell, Liz Lawrence, Jordan Mackampa, Porridge Radio and Steam Down.

The result was a series of closed-door studio sessions, staged at Production Park’s West London facility, The Mill, and broadcast via radio and live streams across social media. ‘It just seemed like an obvious solution for us and the British artists,’ Ant Forbes, Production Manager for the BME and The Mill, explains. ‘The format of showcasing artists in a virtual sense also made huge sense and felt like a natural progression. There’s definitely a future to this style of event and we’ll be looking at potentially recreating this after the event next year.’

With just a few days to pull the event together, the audio system was kept as close to the original plan as possible, with an emphasis on walk-up-and-mix usability for guest engineers working with tight turnaround times. An Allen & Heath dLive S5000 surface with a DM32 MixRack was used at FOH, with another S5000 paired with a DM64 on monitors, connected via gigaACE. A brand new Avantis console was chosen as the production console, fitted with gigaAce and Dante cards, allowing easy patching to the dLive systems and providing a multitrack feed for the BBC and MQA live-streams. A trio of Allen & Heath’s new Prime eight-channel preamps, fitted in a DX32 expander, was also deployed onstage for optimal audio quality.

‘Allen & Heath’s support has been amazing this year,’ says Steve Davies, engineer at Subfrantic Productions and monitor engineer for the BME’s SXSW showcase for the past seven years. ‘We’ve managed to pull this together on a tight budget, tight deadline and with A&H’s help, it’s really eased up the stress of everything else. The dLive, as every year, is a hugely welcomed addition to our production. The drag-and-drop user interface allows me to quickly build scenes, get rid of channels and navigate the console quickly and safely – it’s a great console to busk a gig on.’

‘The latest Avantis console is brilliant,’ adds freelance FOH engineer, Gareth Cox. ‘It’s user-friendly, and with those huge touchscreens you’ve got everything you need, it’s really putting the controls right at your fingertips and it sounds incredible – plus, it’s incredibly easy to patch between Avantis and dLive.’

More: www.allen-heath.com