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CeeLo Green Tours with Allen & Heath Console

dLive S5000 Enables Creative FOH and Monitor Configurations on Platinum Artist’s U.S. Tour

CeeLo Green Performing in Birmingham, Alabama.

Photo: Courtesy Dani Ransom

Grammy-Award winning hip-hop and R&B artist CeeLo Green recently completed an 11-city “Love Train” tour celebrating the release of his new album Heart Blanche. For this tour Green performed with a sax and flute player, a percussionist and a DJ, and traveled with an Allen & Heath dLive S5000 mixer and DM48 MixRack.

Art Merriweather, Green’s front-of-house and monitor engineer, used wireless mics for Green 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 onstage. Merriweather mixed and grouped these sources into as many as 11 different feeds for the house sound system and onstage monitors.

He notes that Green’s volume level onstage can be high. “This is hip-hop,” Merriweather says. “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.

Green cups the mic in his hands on some songs. In those instances Merriweather uses the dLive’s multiband compressor to clean up the sound on these songs and says it automatically drops off when Green moves his hands back down the mic.

FOH engineer Art Merriweather with Allen & Heath dLive

Photo: Courtesy Dani Ransom

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 Green’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 center 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 Green’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 colors and labels and loves the ease of drag-and-drop setup.

Merriweather has 12 years of experience as a front-of-house and recording engineer, and says this was his first experience with the dLive on tour but he wants to use it on other runs with different artists. He says he appreciates the dLive’s “analog feel,” which allows him to concentrate on the mix and not be distracted by the technology and says he’s looking forward to using the dLive’s wireless iPad control.

“I love this desk,” he says, “and, whatever it can do, I’m doing it!”

For more information, go to www.allen-heath.com/dlive-intro.

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