New York, NY (March 7, 2017)—Snoop Dogg is always on the road, and recent swings through the southwest and West Coast found his monitor engineer, Freddie Johns III, mixing on an Allen & Heath dLive S Class S5000 Surface with DM64 MixRack.
Johns tried out a dLive for several days in Los Angeles, using multi-track recordings from previous concerts to set up Virtual Sound Checks and mix a couple of virtual shows. “I just became one with the board,” he said. “Ever since then, I’ve had it on every Snoop Dogg show.”
The tour’s monitor setup included in-ear monitors, floor wedges and side fills and Johns noted, “Snoop is on ears, but he likes to feel it on stage from the wedges. So, there’s a challenge in trying to balance the ears mix with the stage mix without getting a lot of ambient noise feeding into the mics.”
Hip-hop always revolves around the vocal, so to ensure Snoop Dogg was getting what he needed from the monitor mix, Johns used the dLive’s Dyn8 dynamic EQ on the vocal: “I have Snoop’s vocals double-patched, and, I do something different with his wedges than I do with his ears—on his ears, I have the Dyn8 and I really like that multi-band compressor, too. Snoop says it makes him sound like himself.”
In all, he noted, “The work flow is great on this board. It’s really set up for engineers, and the Allen & Heath preamps have a nice, warm sound.” He added, “After I started using the dLive, Snoop said to the production manager, ‘I’m not sure what you guys have been doing but this sounds amazing!’”
Allen & Heath • www.allen-heath.com
