Milan, Italy (June 16, 2026)—Iron Maiden is on the loose again this summer, laying waste to stadiums across Europe, playing Milan tomorrow night and Paris later this week. Along for the ride is Ken “Pooch” Van Druten, manning the FOH desk, just as he has for the last nine years.
These days, the front-of-house mix position centers around a DiGiCo Quantum 7 console and Waves SuperRack SoundGrid, both of which have been cornerstones to his gear setup for the last few years “We spend a lot of time choosing gear that is consistent, doesn’t fail, and keeps going,” he remarked.
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However, that doesn’t mean that the setup doesn’t get augmented. The latest addition is a Waves LiveBox, allowing him to run third-party VST3 plug-ins alongside the Waves SoundGrid.
“SuperRack SoundGrid is pretty much all my outboard plug-in things, buses, individual inputs, those kinds of things,” he noted, “and the LiveBox operates alongside it on a completely separate network. The LiveBox is an all-internal unit where all the networking is inside, but the output of it is Dante—so I have Dante going to a Dante 64 card in the console itself. It’s two separate networks running and doing two totally different things.”
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It wasn’t an arbitrary decision, of course; rather, it gave him access to VST plug-ins like Alpha Labs’ DeFeedback, which gets a workout nightly tidying up the lead vocal mic. “With Iron Maiden, there are ramps that come out on the right and left-hand side of the stage that put vocalist Bruce Dickinson almost in the PA.—those have always been pretty hard to deal with,” said Pooch. “It’s really a game changer, it’s become a lot better now. DeFeedback is authorized to be used on the Waves LiveBox, and I just can’t get the same amount of instances on DeFeedback without the Waves LiveBox, so this setup is important for me.”
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The rest of Dickinson’s vocal chain resides in the SuperRack SoundGrid, passing through (in order) Waves CLA-2A for overall vocal compression; Waves C6 Multiband Compressor; Waves F6 dynamic EQ; Waves SSL EQ; Waves X-Feedback, as a failsafe backup to DeFeedback; and another F6 for overall dynamic control.