“We arrived at a venue in Norway and there was minimal crew and a tricky spiral staircase load in, so we only brought in Ben's monitor system and set it up at stage as normal. I set up my channels on the c and d layers, recalled my channel presets from a USB key, and loaded in a couple of my favourite FX. We ran a network cable to FOH and I operated Ben's desk from my laptop (nowt special just a £500 Sony) using the iLive Editor software, sat on the Midas house desk. One iLive system was used for 6 stereo in-ear mixes, 6 wedge mixes, 5 FX sends and returns, plus my stereo aux mix for FOH.
Two operators, one desk, and no one spat their dummy! I didn’t have any busy messages, and Ben didn't even notice I was doing stuff I was on a different layer so nothing popped up in front of him; I was tweaking my stereo mix whilst he was tweaking another - try that on another digital board! I know from experience that the PEQ system on a Digidesign will keep changing the screen so you can't mix if someone else wants to remotely tweak their mix, and the same goes for Yamaha’s editor software - it is only possible to operate one mix or aux at a time, so if I changed the aux I wanted to tweak on my laptop it would mirror it on the desk and prevent Ben doing what he wanted to do.......but not with iLive!
Ben and I used 64 inputs as we doubled up channels, which gave us our own gains as well as independent EQ's - all that and the system didn't complain once! I was very impressed, I expected the reaction time to be slow but it just ran as normal.
I may be brave but I'm not stupid! We also split our inputs into the house multi - our usual 30 odd channels plus my Left and Right, so I soundchecked on the house Midas desk and then brought up my 2 left and right channels from Ben's iLive, swapped from one to the other, and then stayed with the iLive because it gave me the sound I was after.”
Steve Pattison, FOH engineer, Alphabeat |
