Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, attendees of the annual Woodstock der Blasmusik Festival in Austria this year needed to be content with an evening of livestreamed performances from the festival site featuring eight bands mixed with an Allen & Heath dLive system.
The front of house and broadcast audio rig for this online incarnation of the brass music festival, usually held each June in the Austrian town of Ort im Innkreis for crowds of up to 60,000, was supplied and managed by Martin Bröll of Greenbee Records Studios working closely with festival technical manager Mario Schwarz, who oversaw all aspects of the audio, video and streaming.
With eight bands, three stages and more than 60 inputs to look after, Bröll chose his DM32 MixRack as the core of a dLive system running the PA sound, broadcast mix and intercoms. Portable DX168 expanders were added for local IO on the main stages, plus a modular DX32 expander for front of house IO and connection of outboard FX and compressors. The DM32 was fitted with a Waves3 card for integration with a Soundgrid Server One for additional plugins.
The performances were mixed on a dLive S5000 surface, with a secondary mixer taking care of summing mixes, video sound and interview mics. A Dante 128 x 128 card in the S5000 allowed Bröll to capture multitrack recordings of the performances on two laptops running Dante Virtual Soundcard.
“With several bands performing on multiple stages over six hours, the main challenge with this event was managing the channel routing efficiently,” he explains. “I had worked with iLive in the past and upgraded to dLive last September, so I knew it was the right solution. Another really important factor for me is dLive’s easy integration with Waves plugins and Dante.”
Asked the secret to mixing brass instruments, Martin notes, “You have to treat brass instruments like human voices. They have a huge dynamic range and many overtones. You need to be very sparing with equalization and compression. You have to really ride the faders.”
Here’s a recording of the livestream:
