The band's FOH sound engineer Will Markwell says: " Adlib have supplied a great system and really looked after us. Everything has gone extremely smoothly and above all they are really nice people." The short DCFC tour was overseen by Adlib's own Steve Cole and James Neale.
It ended at Brixton Academy in London, where the system was configured as 10 VT 4889 elements per side with six Adlib DF4 subs, a favourite Adlib cabinet combination yields.
The top four cabinets in the flown VT array were arranged to maximise coverage across the Academy's cavernous stalls and balcony.
The VerTec was powered by Camco Vortex 6 amps and the subs by Crown VZ5002s. For fills, they used Adlib FD2s and the expediently-sized AA122's to give three sends of infill. These were EQ'd with BSS 366Ts and time aligned with SMAART software. The FOH console was a Midas H3000, used for both DCFC and opening act Viva Voce.
Adlib supplied a selection of outboards in the rack including TC M3000 and Lexicon PCM 81 effects processors, two Yamaha SPX 2000s and a TC D2 delay. But Markwell hardly touched them, preferring instead to leave the sound as unadulterated and raw as possible.
One of his challenges was ensuring that lead vocalist Ben Gibbard's relatively quiet voice gets out and up loud and clear above the rest of the mix. Other than that, in creative terms he tries to give the band as much energy and latitude as possible without losing any clarity or composition.
Across the system, they used a combination of Drawmer DS 501 gates and dbx 160As and BSS DPR402 compressors. The graphics were KT DN360s and the crossovers BSS 366Ts.
Monitor world was overseen by DCFC's Adam Wakeling, looking after five positions and four band members. They tour their own Shure IEM system, so Adlib supplied just two pairs of its own MP3 wedges plus an additional single one for the guitar and keyboard positions. These were powered by a combination of Crown 3600s and Pulse amps, and a dbx Drive Rack did the crossovers. DCFC supplied all their own mics - including a Shure SM58 for Gibbard.
Wakeling used a Yamaha PM5D console. He arrived with a disc, loaded up with all the settings and was ready to go. Just like his FOH counterpart, effects and general interference in the actual sound were kept to a minimum, and those that he did use were all onboard the console.
"All in all, it was a straightforward system," sums up Steve Cole. "They just wanted it loud, clear and dynamic - and that was the exact result we achieved!"
(Chris Henry)
