Lana Del Rey completed her first all-stadium tour of Great Britain and Ireland with two nights at London’s Wembley Stadium. On the road in support of her latest album, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, has employed SSL Live mixing consoles since the beginning.
FOH engineer Dani Muñoz joined the tour in late spring 2024 and is currently mixing on a Live L550 Plus console. ‘I think it’s the best sounding console out there,’ he says. ‘My favourite feature is the way this console deals with the summing. Obviously, the preamps are huge and a big part of the sound., but I love how I can push things into my groups and buses. I also love the open architecture and the flexibility of routing anything, anywhere.
The SSL Live console’s open architecture and speed of operation have also been welcomed by monitor engineer Caleb Rodrigues, who was a technician on the tour before taking on the role of monitor engineer. Rodrigues handles a significant number of inputs and outputs on an L550 Plus console, including as many as 40 talkback channels for the band and various department techs.
‘This console has been the right tool for this job,’ he says. ‘There are a lot of inputs that are constantly being added or repurposed. Being able to move them around and route them from different places on this console has been fast and easy to do.’
Much of Muñoz’s focus during the show is minimising PA and crowd noise leakage into Del Rey’s mic, potentially impacting her signature reverb-heavy sound. For parts of the show she sings on a platform in front of the main PA, and her fans are very vocal in their appreciation.’
SSL’s Sourcerer expander plug-in allows him to see any problematic frequencies on the RTA display and filter them out. ‘It sounds very transparent and helps me avoid crowd noise or bleed from the stage,’ he says. ‘I use Sourcerer to control a lot of live mics onstage.’
Muñoz has a second fader with a different EQ setting that is programmed to automatically take control of the vocal channel whenever she moves in front of the PA. ‘She’s right in front of the hardest hitting speakers in the stadium,’ he says. ‘I set a threshold in the Event Manager and when I bring that second fader up it mutes my main channel, and when I take it down it unmutes it, returning control to the main vocal channel fader.’
For Rodrigues, the Query button by each fader is indispensable, allowing him to quickly see what inputs are feeding an aux or stem and assign or unassign sources as necessary. ‘I can’t imagine working without this button. It’s the most used feature for me,’ he says.
Also useful are the user buttons on the Master Tile: ‘I use those for my talkback groups, to assign things and talk to specific people or specific groups of people, like my principal or groups of techs. Those are handy and fast, especially on a gig like this with a lot of talkback channels.’
Rodrigues builds monitor mixes for Del Rey, musicians the technicians using the console’s stems: ‘In a lot of ways stems have reshaped the way that I mix monitors. I use stems to group tracks together, other vocalists together and then band members together for Lana. Then I can mix those individual stems as their own thing and mix her ears much faster when there needs to be more band or more tracks overall,’ he says.
The same workflow applies to the techs’ mixes: ‘They’re not asking for more snare top, for example, so having a drum group that I can add more or less drums into is really handy.’
SSL Live V6 software adds an onboard Fusion Effect Rack that emulates the five key ‘colour’ circuits found on the original Fusion outboard unit. Having the ability to change the order of the five separate coloration modules mimics the hardware. ‘You can put anything – EQs, dynamics – before or after anything,’ Muñoz says. ‘That’s something that I don’t think I’ve seen on any other console, and it’s crucial, because, with the amount of outboard I have, I can choose where to insert it.’
‘This console has been phenomenal for me,’ Rodrigues says. ‘I’ve continued to expand and push it to its limits, and it has stayed with me every inch of the way.’
‘It’s a big sounding console and I absolutely recommend it,’ Muñoz says. ‘I’ve been spreading the gospel to my colleagues.’
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