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Mixing CeeLo Green On The Road

On the road recently behind his latest album, Heart Blanche, CeeLo Green was backed by a sax and flute player, a percussionist and a DJ, mixed nightly through an Allen & Heath dLive S5000 mixer and DM48 MixRack.

Detroit, MI (March 29, 2016)—On the road recently behind his latest album, Heart Blanche, CeeLo Green was backed by a sax and flute player, a percussionist and a DJ, mixed nightly through an Allen & Heath dLive S5000 mixer and DM48 MixRack.

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

He noted that CeeLo’s stage level can be high. “This is hip-hop,” he said. “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 used the dLive’s input-channel gates on the vocal mics and the sax player’s instrument mic.

CeeLo cups the mic in his hands on some songs changing its sound quality, so Merriweather used the dLive’s multi-band compressor to clean up the sound on the songs and says it automatically dropped off when CeeLo moved his hands back down the mic. He uses two different dLive reverbs on the DJ, echo plus reverb on the sax and a pitch shifter on CeeLo’s hit song, “Crazy” to double the artist’s voice both two octaves up and two octaves down.

Because he had “more mixes than sources,” Merriweather set up the dLive with his outputs on the left-most faders and inputs on the center faders, using a second layer to manage effects and another for EQ settings. He did a multi-track recording of every performance via the dLive’s Dante card to a Mac Mini and played it back during setups using a dLive scene to implement the mixer’s “virtual sound check” capability.

Allen & Heath
www.allen-heath.com

American Music & Sound
www.americanmusicandsound.com

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