Los Angeles-based music collective Flight of Voices features ensembles performing in a variety of unique venues, such as Malibu’s Saddlerock Gardens to Village Studios to a room in Beverly Hills made entirely of pink salt. Everything for the organization is mixed and recorded with a QSC TouchMix-30 Pro compact digital mixer, while two K12.2 powered loudspeakers serve as mains, supplemented by a KS112 powered subwoofer and three K10.2 powered loudspeakers for monitor duties.
“We do gigs in all different kinds of locations,” says Flight of Voices co-owner Alex Nimier. “Mountains, caves, studios — and we’ve always used QSC, even back when we were literally renting the stuff from Guitar Center every week.”
The ever-changing rotation of venues means Flight of Voices’ sound system needs to be scalable, unobtrusive, and able to turn on a dime. “Our shows can range from 12 people in the audience up to about 200,” explains audio engineer Robert Richardson. “We use this same setup for all of them, indoors and out. The system performs wonderfully. The K12.2 speakers — I mean, those things are 2,000 watts. They project plenty to our largest audiences. For our smallest audiences, they remain very nuanced and hi-fi sounding. Unlike other speakers, you don’t lose detail if you turn them down.”
It’s not just the audiences that vary wildly, as founder & co-owner Sophie Ilys explains: “We create combinations of genres and voices to give the audience a different experience every time. We might pair a jazz singer with someone from the folk world, then maybe a soul singer, add a Latin percussionist, and so on. Sometimes artists do several shows together. For others, it’s the first time that they’ve met.”
The capability of the TouchMix-30 Pro assists in this regard, offering scenes for quick setup of different vocal and instrument types, anti-feedback and room tuning, and remote control via tablet, and more. “I hook up a strong Wi-Fi router and set up my own VPN,” says Richardson. “Then I just roam around the venue controlling the TouchMix with my iPad, checking the sound from any spot. We don’t have to run masses of cables or snakes under guests’ feet, which would be bad in the places we play in.
“The interface on the iPad is an exact mirror of the mixer itself, so there’s no learning curve between the two, and there’s no latency that’s been a problem. In fact, I barely touch the mixer itself while the show is going on.”
Richardson also speaks to the TouchMix’s audio quality. “The preamps, EQ, compression, effects on the TouchMix all sound top-notch. Because of the diversity of venues and artists, I’ll use EQ on every channel to get everything into a cohesive sonic space, then compression as needed, reverb as needed. I’m always able to dial in the sound very quickly.”
“On a recent Saturday in the Moroccan Ballroom at Village Studios, we had eight musicians onstage,” adds Alex Nimier. “There was a Flamenco guitarist, a ‘cocktail’ drum kit, upright bass, sax, flute, clarinet, acoustic guitar, and then our lead artist singing and playing a grand piano. It sounded brilliant. The system is always enough, yet it never gets to be too much for the room.”
