Washburn and Woods Hit the Road with Compact Rig

New York, NY (November 6, 2025)—As a live engineer, Brent Washburn has always kept it small, even as the venues he started working in were getting bigger. For the last few years, that means he’s brought the compact Allen & Heath-centric FOH rig he bought a few years ago into increasingly larger spaces, like the One Republic arena tour where he mixed opener Juno Award-winning Canadian Pop artist Jessia. “I’ll never forget walking into the first arena show I mixed with my C1500,” he recalled. “The headlining front of house guy looked at me and said, ‘There’s no way you’re about to tour like this.’ It was the most punk-rock thing he’d ever seen.”

It worked out just fine, however, and he’ll have it on the road this month mixing Elijah Woods on a tour that will include shows in New York and Los Angeles. His mixing rig includes an iPad running the dLive MixPad app, a DM0 dLive MixRack, and two DX168 stageboxes, as well as the aforementioned dLive C1500 control surface for more hands-on mixing. The Woods tour will also carry a second dLive mixrack for monitors, connected in a digital split over Dante.

“It’s been rock solid from day one,” he said. “I’ve taken this system all across North America, Europe, Asia… it’s great that such a small form factor has the ability to scale up to 128 inputs.”

While he’s had most of the rig since 2020 when he first bought it, Washburn keeps it up to date and has been using features in dLive firmware V2.1. “The group-to-group routing is a complete game-changer,” he said. “I previously had to use some workarounds to accomplish that type of complex routing, and now it’s completely streamlined.”

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dLive V2.1 also introduced a new CompStortion compressor model that Washburn immediately started implementing. “Elijah (Woods) records with a similar processor in the studio,” he explained. “The dLive version got his stamp of approval that it sounds just as good as the hardware.”

Washburn also inserts dLive’s powerful DYN8 processor for Woods’ lead vocal channel, which is a combination Dynamic EQ and Multiband Compressor. “I actually double-patch the channel to get 8 bands of Dynamic EQ,” he explained. “I use it a lot in the upper bands to duck out cymbals and snare and any bleed from the drums.”

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Despite bringing new features into the mix, Washburn says he welcomes the consistency that carrying his own system ensures. “It gives me the confidence to walk into any venue knowing I’ll deliver the best possible mix,” he said. “At this point, I can’t imagine touring without it.”