RME chosen for Lily Allen tour

Lily Allen was in rehearsals with her band last week, in preparation for public appearances to promote her new single Air Balloon, and then the festival season later in the year to support her third album release.

System tech Sean Lascelles explains that RME was found everywhere: “I’ve spent the last four years touring as the main playback tech for Example, and I always chose RME solutions because of their reliability, their super low latency drivers, their sound and their general road worthiness. When the tour managers for Lily Allen called asking for my advice to build playback systems, RME was the obvious choice for me.”

He continues: “Of course most of what you’ll hear is the live band – guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. But we have a playback system, which is feeding a few stems into the mix from a MacBook Pro running Ableton, via an RME Fireface 800. We use a maximum of six channels into the mix, the other two analogue outputs of the Fireface carrying a click track for the drummer and a guide vocal for rehearsals.”

To guarantee his play back system is always running, Lascelles has specified an A and B mirrored solution, with two of everything, carrying identical audio. To start each song, the keyboard player only has to hit a pad on a dedicated Akai MPC, which then sends a MIDI start message to both computers. The computers start at the same time, and then if one fails they can be switched between in real time via a Radial analogue switcher.

In the rack next door there are two RME Fireface UCXs. These are the outputs for live drum sounds, which are either triggered from dedicated electronic pads, or from triggers on the acoustic kit.

The last piece of RME in the system is a newly delivered RME MADIface USB, which connects the monitor desk, a DiGiCo SD10, directly to yet another MacBook Pro, for recording the gigs, and also for virtual soundchecking.

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