Front of house engineer Tomas Wolfe (Run the Jewels, The Neighborhood, Danny Brown, Everlast, House of Pain, The Faint, The Mowgli’s) has chosen the Waves eMotion LV1 live mixer for the Run the Jewels Tour.
On his setup, Wolfe notes, “Our LV1 mixer setup consists a Waves Extreme Server for DSP and DiGiGrid IOX interfaces for I/O on stage, and Waves Icon Platform M and Icon Platform X as the tactile fader controller. Setup is really quick and easy with this rig. The small footprint helps in festival situations, where space is at a premium. It is easy to advance a Cat6 cable to connect the interfaces on stage to the LV1 mixer at front of house so I don’t have to run my own, and that helps save precious time at load outs.”
Wolfe adds, regarding his use of Waves plugins, “My go-to plugins are especially the F6 Floating-Band Dynamic EQ, the Primary Source Expander (PSE) and X-FDBK. I use the F6 on every channel. It is an incredible plugin. It is particularly helpful for rappers that like to cup the mic, because I can adjust the dynamics to how they are positioning their hand on the mic and successfully eliminate the proximity effect, and for high-end expansion when the mics get dull half way during the show due to saliva.
“In Run the Jewels, the bass is very prominent, so it helps me control it, since there is a lot of 40Hz in the tracks and I compress that frequency with the F6 to help clear up the muddiness. Then, I side-chain the vocal group to the F6 to duck out 4khz to create a pocket for the vocals to cut through. To get a good separation between the bass and the Kick drum, I side chain the kick to the F6 as well.”
“Using the PSE, I can get very high gain before feedback, and it also does a great job of cleaning up stage noise and monitor bleed, which leaves me with a nice clean vocal.“
“We use the X-FDBK to quickly identify feedback frequencies while ringing out monitors. It is a godsend when in high-pressure and quick-changeover festival settings, where our monitor engineer can use it as an assistant so he doesn’t have to waste time running back and forth to the desk and back in front of the wedges.”
Wolfe remarks, on using the LV1, “We are doing a lot of back-to-back fly dates with Run the Jewels, and we needed something that we could carry on to the plane but without compromising the sound quality. When I first tried out the LV1, I was immediately impressed by its portability, but the sound quality was a huge selling point. I could finally have with me the sound of the ‘big boy consoles,’ no matter what the travelling situation was. This is the best-sounding console I have ever used. It holds its weight against any other top-tier console.”
