15 April 2010

ILIVE TOURS WITH THE TINDERSTICKS

British indie rock stalwarts, Tindersticks, recently embarked on a European tour to promote their 9th studio album, ‘Falling Down a Mountain', with FOH engineer, David ‘Milky’ Millward, selecting an Allen & Heath iLive digital mixing system as the FOH console.

"I've used almost all of the pro digital consoles around, and although a very familiar name to me since I started in the industry, I hadn’t encountered Allen & Heath’s iLive system until now,” explains Millward. "Faced with a European tour of varying size venues - including clubs, theatres and a cathedral - I was looking for a console that not only sounded excellent but was very small, light and flexible in its interconnections to different house PA systems, and could easily be configured for the various local support acts, without compromising the Tinderstick’s show.”

Millward, who is sound engineer for artists including Morrissey, Craig David and Swing Out Sister, selected the compact iLive-80 surface from the flagship iLive range with a fixed I/O iDR-48 mix rack.

"The combination of the iLive-80 surface and iDR-48 rack exceeded my expectations in every way. After an enjoyable afternoon’s demo, I felt very comfortable with iLive’s operation and sound quality. Prior to the tour, I configured the system offline at home on my Mac laptop using iLive’s Editor programme, which was very simple and meant that I only needed an hour or so with the actual console to check my show template before the gear departed for Europe.”

David Millward with the iLive-80 surface during sound check at Manchester Cathedral

Formed in the 1990's, Tindersticks were one of the most original and distinctive of the British acts to appear that decade, gaining a dedicated cult following in the mid '90s, beginning with their eponymous 1993 debut album, which was named Album of the Year by Melody Maker. The recent tour included dates in Germany, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and the UK.

“I was enjoying myself immensely straight away! After sound check, it was particularly satisfying to watch some of the house engineers' facial expressions when I would switch to my support template scene, quickly patch, name, colour and drop their channels onto the surface, and give them a 2 minute tutorial, before leaving them to mix the local support act. Without exception they were all up and mixing straight away and there were many compliments about iLive’s sound quality and ease of use too!”

Mid way through the European leg of the tour, Millward was asked to investigate the possibility of doing a multi-track recording of the UK shows. This was easily achieved using iLive’s MADI plug-in card slotted into the MixRack and connected to an RME Madiface using a MacBook Pro laptop.

“After sound check, I would switch all the Surface’s gain knobs to become trims so that nothing I did on the console would affect the recording levels. Another benefit was that I was also able to use the previous night’s recording as a virtual sound check the following day,” explains Millward.

Tindersticks will be embarking on a second European tour in April with a combined iLive system to manage FOH and monitors.

“I love the way I can drag and drop channels using Editor anywhere on the surface on the fly, even whilst mixing during the show and then save each scene’s channel strip placement so that for each song the channels I want are right at hand. With that sort of flexibility, who needs more than 20 faders visible to them at one time for most jobs?” concludes Millward.