Dan Black has been thrust forth as a leader of a new genre of UK musicians, dubbed by the music press as Wonky Pop. His track HYPNTZ, featuring a mix of lyrics from the Notorious Big song Hypnotize, combined with a sample of Rihanna’s Umbrella, has earned him notoriety, radio play and subsequent performances at Glastonbury and throughout the European festival circuit this summer.

To complement Black’s unconventional mixture of samples and beats, engineer Steve Pattison has chosen an innovative and modern FOH set up that is far from the norm. Whatever the gig, Pattison uses a compact touring system comprising an Allen & Heath iDR-32 MixRack and a laptop loaded with iLive Editor software, which he uses as a virtual control surface. The system not only mixes FOH audio, but also wedges and IEMs.

“I’m running the iDR rack and that’s it... no desk, no surface, just the stagebox, which is mounted into our on-stage loopstation,” Pattison explains. He runs looms out of the loopstation to the band’s mics and DIs and a loom into the house system, so that all the mics and DIs run straight into the stagebox and from there outputs run to a master L&R mix and three wedge mixes, which are fed into the house multicore. For monitors, two lines are sent to the drummer’s mixer for his headphone mix, and Ferdi, the band technician, listens to his stereo in-ears mix by plugging into the iDR’s PFL output.

A Good thing in A little package
Despite its size, Pattison feels the iLive system is well equipped for any venue. “With such varying levels of kit available at each gig, the A&H system gives us great consistency, because I only ever need five channels from the house system, two for FOH and three for monitors, and I can run up to 32 inputs.”

Pattison connects his laptop, loaded with iLive editor software with saved show settings, to a normal wireless router to operate the iDR-32. “The lack of physical surface means I can choose which surface size I want to use in the software, so I’m not limited to a certain number of channels or faders. For the Dan Black tour I’ve been using the iLive-T80 split into three desks – the top layer for FOH, second layer for wedge mixes and third layer for IEMs, so each discipline has its own channels, eq, gates, compressors and so on.

“I can mix from wherever I like, too. I can eq wedges from the stage, or mix from the audience to get more of a feel for what they are hearing. I’ve also been surprised by the wireless range; it didn’t drop out at the John Peel stage at Glastonbury and I was a good 50m away.”
Pattison developed the iLive system used on Black’s tour during shows he did with Alphabeat last year. Finding some venues logistically challenging, he began to leave his FOH system in the trailer and use the channels and a control layer from the iLive monitor system, mixing remotely from a laptop.

“It’s definitely the smallest FOH footprint. It blows people’s minds when they see me rock up to FOH with a laptop and then just bring two faders up on their desk. Like any other engineer, I love knobs and faders, but once you’re comfortable with the Editor layout, mixing becomes second nature. It’s easy to drag and drop any fader to any layer mid gig, so you can decide exactly what you want on screen, just as you can on the actual surface.

“A colleague recently covered for me at Dan’s Koko show in London and the band asked if he’d use the iDR-32 because they know they only have to plug in and it’s all there – FOH, monitors, the lot. A couple of calls later and he ran the show from his laptop and had a great gig.”
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