Grammy-Award Winning Hip-Hop and R&B artist CeeLo Green recently completed an
eleven-city “Love Train’ tour celebrating the release of his new album HEART
BLANCHE. Although past performances featured a full acoustic band, CeeLo wanted
to “pull it back’ for this tour and, for these audiences he performed with just a sax
and flute player, a percussionist and a DJ. However, the simplicity of CeeLo’s stage
masked a complex production with music ranging from hip-hop to jazz and a
sophisticated audio system using an Allen & Heath dLive S5000 mixer and DM48
MixRack.
Art Merriweather, CeeLo’s front-of-house and monitor engineer used wireless mics
for CeeLo and all three backup vocalists and connected the sax player’s pedal
board, the percussionist’s feeds and the DJ via direct inputs to the DM48 MixRack on
stage. Merriweather mixed and grouped these sources into as many as eleven
different feeds for the house sound system and on-stage monitors. He noted that
CeeLo’s stage level can be high. “This is hip-hop,’ he said, “They want it loud so
they can feel it. And, nobody on the tour likes in-ear monitors, so we’ve got
powered wedges on the stage.’ To minimize bleed caused by the high stage level
Merriweather uses the dLive’s input-channel gates on the vocal mics and the sax
player’s instrument mic.
CeeLo cups the mic in his hands on some songs changing its sound quality.
Merriweather uses the dLive’s multi-band compressor to clean up the sound on
these songs and says it automatically drops off when CeeLo moves his hands back
down the mic.
Merriweather praises the dLive’s several vintage reverb emulators calling them
“spot-on the best I’ve heard.’ He uses two different dLive reverbs on the DJ, echo
plus reverb on the sax and a pitch shifter on CeeLo’s hit song, “Crazy’ to double the
artist’s voice both two octaves up and two octaves down.
Because he has “more mixes than sources’, Merriweather sets up the dLive with his
outputs on the left-most faders and inputs on the centre faders. He uses a second
layer to manage effects and another for EQ settings. He does a multi-track
recording of every performance via the dLive’s Dante card to a Mac Mini and plays
it back during setups using a dLive scene to implement the mixer’s “virtual sound
check’ capability. Merriweather says CeeLo’s show hits the dLive hard but it has
ample dynamic range and its 96k sample rate makes it better sounding than other
digital mixers he’s used in the past. He has the desk highly customized with colours
and labels and loves the ease of drag-n-drop setup.
