United Kingdom (April 4, 2024)—Rick Wakeman may be 74 years old, but the legendary keyboardist—and CBE, thank you very much—has the touring stamina of artists a third his age. Whether touring solo or with other musicians, he is inevitably on the road while fitting recording and other activities in between ambitious tour legs all over the world. While he’s currently barnstorming through South America, Wakeman recently finished up a run through the UK with his English Rock Ensemble, tearing through classic Yes material and more.
FOH engineer Ian Barfoot has worked with Wakeman for just shy of 40 years, and these days also rental house Tech-Serv Audio Consultants. Even after manning the mix for so long, he still takes the responsibility of bringing across a mix as seriously as ever. He explained, “I’ve worked with Rick since 1985, and I think this band is probably the best he’s ever worked with, so there’s a certain amount of pressure, even after all these years, to really do them justice—the flexibility, sound and power of the Allen & Heath ecosystem has been instrumental in enabling us to do that.”
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With that in mind, he spent the tour behind an Avantis 64-channel/42-bus mixer, noting, “I think we have 40 channels on this show, so Avantis is a great, compact choice for these kind of situations…. I’m running this show with the GX4816 Audio Expander, which gives us plenty of inputs, and I’m using all internal effects, so it’s a really streamlined but powerful set-up. I have the dPack on the Avantis so I can access the same brilliant reverbs and Dyn-8 compressor as dLive and I use the ADT a good deal too—the onboard options are wonderful.”
Wakeman’s longtime co-producer/engineer Erik Jordan tied together 32 channels of Moog, Korg Roland and Yamaha models from different eras for the keyboardist with an Allen & Heath Qu-32 mixer at the heart of the set-up. Jordan explained, “I mix all of Rick’s synths and just send FOH two stereo pairs—a main stereo keys and main stereo solo keys—that’s all he has to worry about from me. The patch changes on the Qu take care of all the changes in routing and define which instruments are ‘accompaniment’ and which are ‘solo’ at any particular time. That might change in the middle of a song, so it’s incredibly powerful to be able to do it at our end.”
Echoing Jordan’s remarks about the old-school “no backing tracks” nature of the shows, monitor engineer Will Feeley—who used a dLive S7000 surface for the tour—said, “I approach this very much like a traditional, analogue show and use the dLive accordingly. Originally, I built the show as scenes, but it really didn’t work best like that. It’s not a typical sequential modern show, but much more live and things can change from night-to-night…. I buss everything and have notes on a setlist and I can deliver exactly what the band wants. They’re really interactive with each other on-stage and the timing aspects of the songs are crucial, with lots of odd time changes, but I can react to what’s going on really quickly. It’s been my first full-on touring experience with dLive but I’m an absolute convert.”
