Behind the Live Sound of Coldplay with Daniel Green

Behind the Live Sound of Coldplay with Daniel Green

Watch FOH/studio engineer and producer Daniel Green as he shares his approach to mixing Coldplay live at the Hollywood Bowl and discusses his favorite plugins for live sound.
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0:00:07.7 –>
my name is Daniel Greene I’m co-producer and engineer for Coldplay and I’m currently mixing their live shows on the Mylo Xyloto tour well it’s the legendary Hollywood Bowl and so many great concerts happened here and you know it’s a great sounding place and just a great vibe all around the desk is a digit code sd7 which is like the main hub for everything you obviously been out of hosts waves plugins is a great feature and also the snapshots the amount of inputs and outputs that we can have now and we’ve got a system where we premix the broadcast sound you know for TV shows etc off of this desk so I can send the other co-producer Rick Simpson he mixes the live TV shows so you know I sent him sort of like some pre mixes of certain things and obviously that’s all got my waves processing going on we’ve

0:01:00.3 –>
got two servers got one on this side and another one here and obviously the way of plugins which are you know used extensively in the desk Chris’s vocal chamber got the 660 compressor which goes into an h eq and then into a c6 just to catch any unwanted you know frequencies which i can dynamically thank you I really love the H EQ at the moment find that the visual feedback on that’s really great and the c6 is always a favorite to get me out of trouble electric guitars we’ve got in fact it’s exactly the same yeah the 660 into the h eq into c6 bass guitar is into the silver place 1176 into a h eq but the drums i tend to take you know like say both kick drum mics route them into a group and then process them both together so with that I’ve got the API

0:02:02.4 –>
2500 into just some general compression and then into the heq for further a queuing and the same with the snare on the main mixer for the ssl compressor and followed by a SSL EQ so then just to add a bit of extra top-end and a bit of extra bass I just really like the way it glues everything together it just got a nice nice sound with our setup in the studio it’s we don’t really have a you know an analog console so to speak we normally just have like a great set of my counts into the box and then a lot of the processing is done with waves plugins I think with live concerts they’re slightly different to records whereas with records you can have lots of different details and you know space for lots of different sounds I think with concerts you know you’ve got a limited amount of things that you can actually project through the PA so I just try to get the main elements like the vocals and now have a nice solid bass and drums and you know if Johnny does a nice melody or something then you

0:03:01.5 –>
can hear that so just trying to you know bring out the main elements of the song plan is to hopefully you know go through all of the concerts and maybe at some point but together a good live record yeah record has just come straight off of des the st7 and just straight into our Pro Tools system yeah it’s quite a simple simple setup well ways that you know they’ve been doing it for so long and they’re specialists in that field you know so I just had got so much experience and you know brilliant emulations on their analog models and just really great high quality products mainly I think through computer-based music you know everyone’s can have the same tools now so you know if you go to do a show like you can you take your plug-in settings if you choose use the same plugins as you do on your laptop or on your Pro Tools rig in the studio and you know I think people now have got more opportunity with using you

0:04:01.2 –>
know high-end tools that they didn’t have before

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