Having recently purchased their own Allen & Heath SQ-5 digital mixer, British Rockers Don Broco chose to pair it up with a full dLive system this summer for a short festival run across the UK & Europe, including appearances at Mad Cool, Meo Mares Festival and Truck Festival.
Supplied by SSE Audio, a DM64 MixRack fitted with gigaACE and fibreACE cards formed the core of the system; paired with a dLive S3000 surface at FOH (fitted with a Dante card), while a digital split from the gigaACE card allowed the band to use their own SQ-5 for monitor duties.
Adam Boole, FOH engineer and long-time user of Allen & Heath products, commented: “When we started this project, we needed to build a system that would work with the band’s own SQ-5 on monitors, luckily it was easy to achieve by having dLive on FOH. All I/O is set up through the DM64 MixRack, which just creates an extremely neat and tidy, yet small package.”
“SQ has a very similar workflow to dLive,” added monitor engineer, Scott Howarth. “It has an extremely small footprint and local I/O which I use for shouts and local festival drum subs / sidefills. It’s great that we can pair it with pretty much any I/O from Allen & Heath too, it makes this owned console easily applicable to a host of uses for the band.”
Both Howarth and Boole made use of each console’s offline editor – new to SQ V1.4 firmware – as Howarth explained: “During the pre-production day at SSE and after we had built the show files for FOH and monitors (with everything we were ever going to need, and more), we synced the files and made sure the two consoles networked while Boole patched the dLive to and from the SQ-5. Everything loading across seamlessly. Allen & Heath consoles are a real ecosystem that can live up to any task and can tackle it with ease!”
While the SQ runs without any extra processing required, Boole makes full use of dLive’s built-in FX and DEEP processing suite, “For vocals, I’m running the OptTronik compressor with the Dyn8 for fine adjustments. I’ve also got the OptTronik on bass – it’s a great compressor! I used a LA-2A on bass for years, so OptTronik was a much-welcomed addition to dLive – Allen & Heath have done a great job with it. On drums, I’m running a mix of the Opto and 16T, I also have the kick going to a group with the Dyn8’s dynamic EQ inserted for more control over my low end.”
The band now prepare to head to Asia for a series of support shows before moving on to the US on a headline tour – for a super-compact touring rig both sets of shows will feature the SQ-5 covering both FOH and monitors and two AB168 stage boxes.