At the Speakeasy Stage at the recent BeachLife festival in Redondo Beach, CA, which celebrates California beach culture with multiple days of music performances, live music streaming service Volume.com broadcast audio and video online through its web platform in a process utilizing an Allen & Heath Avantis console.
“We have a video production rig running vMix,” explains Ian Morse of Volume.com. “That computer takes all our camera inputs and adds graphics, and also pushes our RTMP stream. We have a split on stage that feeds into both front of house and our GX4816 stagebox. We then mix it down to two track and feed it into our stream rig to get married with the video feed.”
With multiple bands performing on the Speakeasy stage, Morse notes that he often had to make use of the Avantis’ drag-and-drop strip assign function to adjust the fader bank layouts. “In a fast-moving festival situation, you don’t necessarily get much time to prepare with input lists or stage plots in advance,” he says. “Having fully configurable fader layers was huge, because I could just flip to a new fader layer and drag down exactly what I needed.”
He also employed some of the console’s DEEP processing capabilities for the stream mix, especially the built-in compressor emulations. “I really like the sound of the Opto compressor,” he notes. “I used that on the mix bus, as well as the VCA Bus compressor at times.” For individual channel processing, Morse made use of the DYN8 processor, which combines a Dynamic EQ and Multiband Compressor into a single insert plugin. “I liked to use it as somewhat of a de-esser, and I use it in conjunction with a standard vocal compressor.”
The BeachLife festival replay stream can be viewed on demand on Volume.com.
