Europe - KLANG’s immersive mix capabilities made touring with Berlin band The BossHoss a trouble-free experience for sound engineer Manuel Knigge, with the whole tour benefitting from immersive mixes via the DMI-KLANG expansion card, installed in their DiGiCo SD12. Monitor mix intelligibility improved and band members were instantly more comfortable with their mixes, providing Knigge with a smooth and efficient workflow that freed him from extensive sound checks at every venue the band visited during their summer of outside events.
“Summer tours can involve a lot of different styles of venue, one night we would be in a field, the next a tent. Before using KLANG, we had to work really hard to get the mixes right for every space,” Knigge recalls. “We would make adjustments at sound check, but then the audience would come in and change the acoustics, so inevitably I would have to spend the first couple of songs each night perfecting the mix, only to have it completely change the night after. It was pretty full-on.”
A regular user of KLANG with his other clients, Knigge had explained to the band that KLANG would be the way forward for their IEM mixes, but when the opportunity to use DMI-KLANG with their SD12 finally came around, there was no pre-production rehearsal.
“There were no production rehearsals this year, just a day of prep at Clair Global’s Berlin facility. Luckily, I had the multi-track recordings from last year, so I could make a rough 3D panned mix, just to give them a little more space in the mix,” he says. “I just went for it during our first sound check. As soon as they started playing, their faces lifted to look straight at me. After the first song the band turned to me and said, ‘whatever you did, don’t touch anything!’ And I just thought, phew, that worked.
“From a playing perspective, the best show was the first one because they were all excited about the change and they loved it. The band joked that they no longer needed a sound check because nothing needed changing and, by the end of the tour, they actually started ditching sound check! We’ve never had such good monitor sound with these guys and I'm very happy with the system.”
