Copenhagen, Denmark (August 22, 2024)—FOH engineer Frank Grønbæk couldn’t find the right console for his live sound needs until he encountered a solution more typically found in broadcast applications.
For the past eight years, Grønbæk, FOH engineer with Grammy-nominated, global chart-topping Danish pop band Lukas Graham, has been using various lightweight, portable mixing consoles while continuing to search for a solution that also offers exceptional sound quality and reliability. When he visited Solid State Logic‘s U.K. headquarters and had a demonstration of the System T Tempest Control App, paired with a lightweight TE1 processing engine and a 16-channel Fader Tile, he realized he had found a system with the power and agility he requires.
“I said, ‘Hey, I’ll have one of those, that’s exactly what we’ve been looking for!’” recalls Grønbæk, who is also a live and studio product specialist at Nordic Pro Audio, one of SSL’s partners in Denmark. He has worked with Lukas Graham since 2012.
Grønbæk’s idea, beginning in 2016 with Lukas Graham’s busy touring schedule, was to find a lightweight mixing console that took up minimal rack space and occupied a very small footprint at FOH, yet offered super high-quality audio, he says. “We travel a lot and do as many as 90 gigs a year, all over the world. We need to be able to travel light when we fly, so the weight can never exceed 32 kilos for the whole rack. But we also want to maintain a high level of audio quality and consistency. It doesn’t matter if we’re playing a festival for 30,000 people, a showcase for 500 people or a morning TV show, it has to sound exactly the same all the time.”
In Grønbæk’s one-of-a-kind, custom-configured FOH mixing package, a System T 16-channel Furniture Fader Tile and a dedicated touchscreen, are housed in a custom case to protect the rig in transit. A single-rack-space SSL TE1 Tempest Engine, which supports up to 256 paths, is paired with a custom-configured Windows-based computer running SSL’s Tempest Control App.
Grønbæk’s TCA Flypack is interfaced to an outboard hardware interface managing routing and matrixing in and out of the setup, as well as a hardware processor providing multi-zone P.A. management. A Mac Mini computer also acts as a server, hosting plug-ins and presets that Grønbæk has developed during more than a decade with Lukas Graham, and additionally runs sound level measurement and metering apps.
Grønbæk first took his new TCA console out on a U.S. tour with Lukas Graham in January 2024. The band is currently playing festivals across Europe.
SSL’s System T TCA Packs will make their European debut at IBC 2024 in Amsterdam.
