Front Of house engineer Eric Friedlander utilized the Waves eMotion LV1 Live Mixer for the Recording Academy Producers & Engineers Wing’s 13th Annual GRAMMY Week Celebration honoring Dr. Dre and featuring a musical performance from Anderson .Paak at the Village Studios in Los Angeles.
Friedlander’s workflow for this special occasion included a two-screen up and down setup with one Waves Axis One custom-designed computer and one Waves SoundGrid Extreme Server-C, mounted in the new OCD Labs LiteFly housing system. His stage box was the DSPRO StageGrid 4000, while running some local I/O (monitoring, record feeds) off of a DiGiGrid D.
Friedlander states, “The band brought their touring engineers to help support the show, and we were able to set up the entire LV1 system in a corner of the green room, hours before our performance space was ready, in order for us all to program and patch inputs and outputs. Additionally, the monitor engineer was familiar with the LV1 as well, and after a quick call to bring in another server, he was up and running on his laptop, and with one connection of a Ca0t6 cable he was sharing the stage box I/O with me to build IEM mixes for the band.”
He continues, “Furthermore, with the audience being made up of some of the keenest ears in the industry, there’s an obvious requirement for a fantastic mix. Having access to the sonic tools from the Waves library, integrated seamlessly into the mixing platform, allowed me to open up and attack my mix from a variety of angles, both creatively and practically. I needed to tackle everything from removing noise and feedback on lectern microphones, to building an impactful but not aggressively loud drum mix for Anderson .Paak, while mixing a variety of broadcast mixes and instrument inputs in-between. Also, having worked with FOH engineer Will Madera on his system with Pitbull, and having significant prior experience with the LV1 platform, I’ve been extremely happy with the improvements in response and reliability of the Waves V11 release running on the Waves Axis One custom-designed computer.”
Friedlander adds, about using Waves plugins, “One of my favorite parts of the LV1 system is having the onboard Waves eMo plugins processing to work with. As I’m building a mix (especially in a time-constrained scenario), being able to quickly touch and grab different elements of the EQ or compressor in the channel strip makes dialing in settings really efficient and accurate. I’m a firm believer that plugins are a great tool for engineers to have in their toolbox, but not every input needs every tool in the toolbox used on it.
“This was my fourth year supporting this event, and it’s the first year that we had a full band performance using IEMs as well as the traditional awards ceremony and a live closed-circuit broadcast,” he concludes. “Given the amount of I/O and mix control needed, as well as the small size of the main room and FOH area, the eMotion LV1 was really the only desk that could provide all the features I needed, with no compromises, with the necessary footprint and a fast interface that the two-screen setup allowed.”
