Nottingham, UK (September 25, 2026)—One of the rules of being on tour is never do a firmware update on the road. Wait until you’re in the shop, with access to reliable internet and phone, when you have a reasonable expectation of getting tech support if needed (while maintaining your sanity). Truth.
And, so, sometimes firmware updates get overlooked because we’re too busy, um… working!
I’ll do it after this run of dates… I’ll do it when I’m sure the update is solid (that sounds like an iOS conundrum!).
I’m currently on tour in the UK and Europe running FOH for Jon Anderson & The Band Geeks tour, “Performing Yes Epics, Classics and More.” I’ve had the pleasure of working with the folks at 22live Ltd. (Redditch, UK), who are totally on point; our systems techs, Nick, Tom and Ryan, are making these shows an absolute pleasure.
We’re running Yamaha DM7s at FOH and monitors, and the other day, we encountered a mystery. As I have quoted Captain James T. Kirk in the past, “… I don’t like mysteries. They give me a bellyache, and I got a beauty right now.” Oh, yeah.
Our day at the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham earlier this week went something like this…
3:00 P.M., Line Check
Our Yamaha DM7s are connected to two 32-channel RIO 3224 D2 RIOs with 50 inputs from the stage, and two playback channels for walk-in and walk-out music from FOH. Line check is fine. The band is rehearsing and I’m getting a feel for the room. This one is going to be difficult. It’s a great space for a symphony orchestra, but for an amplified show with a rock band? Not so much.
4:00 P.M.-ish
My merch seller, Zak, has arrived and I have to leave my desk to check in with him. The previous venue made an absolute mess of our merch, and I’m sure the count was wrong, which makes today’s count more critical. Have I mentioned how much of a pain in the arse it can be to be a tour manager? Don’t do it!!! Unless you’re a glutton for punishment (like me).
Zak counts in all of approx. 700 pieces of merch (God bless him) and sends me the info. As suspected, the previous venue botched it. We log in the correct numbers. Meanwhile, the band is onstage working out some parts and getting their rigs dialed in before Jon arrives.
5:00 P.M., Security Meeting (I’m running late)
Jon is on stage doing his soundcheck and I’ve already missed the first song. Not good. Depending upon the day, he might only soundcheck two or three songs, but luckily for me, three songs can easily take 30 minutes. By the time I get to FOH, they’re almost done with the second song. I unmute my desk and the mix sounds weird, like the lead vocal mic has a different band member singing into it….
…because it does. One of the backing vocal mics is coming down Jon’s lead vocal channel. I ask my monitor engineer Drew Gantert if he’s having the same issue, and even from across the venue I can tell he’s looking at me like I should be wearing a straight jacket (which is debatable).
Knowing that I’m about as graceful on a touchscreen as Jackson Pollock was with a can of paint on canvas, I start checking settings in the DM7: Dante setup shows my two RIOs, connected and sync’d. Dante patch shows that, indeed, the two RIOs are connected to inputs 1 through 32 and 33 through 64, respectively. Channels 1 through 32 (the first stage box) are patched 1:1, showing up where they should. But starting at channel 33, everything is messed up. Input 33 (RIO #2, channel 1) is feeding channels 33 and 34. But not at the monitor desk. I haven’t been this disoriented since I accidentally ate a poison mushroom at Woodstock in 1969 (no, I didn’t, and no, I wasn’t).
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Nick (soon to be St. Nick, Father Christmas notwithstanding) and I try the usual remedies: We recheck the input patch (nothing wrong there), we recheck the Dante patch (nothing wrong there either). We recall yesterday’s scene (which worked fine), and it exhibits the same symptoms. We recall a blank startup scene; same thing. We restart the desk and restart the RIO to no avail.
Meanwhile, Drew is not experiencing any of the same problems in monitor world. While I’m busy scratching my head, he searches the symptoms online and discovers that this is a known bug that was fixed in DM7 firmware V2.00: Dante patches between DM7 and mounted Dante devices may be unintentionally offset. Yup, that about sums it up. And a quick trip to the main menu on the DM7 verifies that we are (both) running firmware V1.75.
If you find yourself in a similar situation, you can check the firmware version by navigating to the Main menu (upper-right corner of the touchscreen), and selecting the General tab, at which point it will show the version of software currently installed.
Here’s the fix:
- Dismount the RIO by pressing Setup. Navigate to I/O Device > Dante Setup. Tap the Device Mount Tab. Select the RIO you want to disconnect. Press Unmount.
- Unpatch the inputs.
- Reboot the console, then the RIO.
- Remount the RIO
- Repatch the inputs
This should cure the issue.
We proceed. It works. Yay! I’m doing my best not to flip out. What if this bug returns during the show? Yikes. Our fail-safe is to double-patch Jon’s main lead vocal microphone to a spare channel on the first RIO, so I’ll have it on channel 20 as well as channel 36.
7:30 P.M., Showtime
The show opens with “Close to the Edge,” and I make some adjustments now that the room is full. Strange, the room sounds much drier than it did during soundcheck. There’s a section of the song where I splash a long delay on Jon’s voice. I’m turning up the FX send, but I can’t hear any delay. And why are my background vocals so low in level?
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Grrrrrr. I pull up my FX returns and none of them are showing any activity. They were all unpatched when we reset the RIOs. Awesome! Oddly, all of the sends remained patched. I’m repatching the returns while trying to mix the show, busier than a centipede at a toe-counting contest. What remains of my brain realizes that it’d be a good idea to pull down the DCA master for my FX before I hot-patch the FX outputs to the return channels.
I get through the patch and hold my breath while I slowly raise the FX master. Ahhhh, there it is… I splash another delay on Jon’s vocal, and this time, I hear the delay. All is well in the world—just in time for “Perpetual Change.”
