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Waves eMotion LV1 Delivers The Mixes At The Heat Latin Music Awards

Both front of house engineer Gabriel Cruz and monitor engineer JV Olivier note that the full integration of Waves plugins within the LV1 is one of several reasons the duo decided to adopt the mixer.

Front of house engineer Gabriel Cruz and monitor engineer JV Olivier, with the support of their local dealer Wholestage, utilized Waves eMotion LV1 live mixers for the recent Heat Latin Music Awards, an annual awards show held in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic and airing on the HTV cable channel that honors top Latin music acts.

“The eMotion LV1 is perfect for bringing my studio sound to a live environment,” Cruz says. “It offers me plenty of routing and processing options, all at impressive 96 kHz sound. More than anything else, I’m really impressed by the LV1’s superior sound quality. It has excellent preamps that let me drive them enough to get the color I am looking for in my final mix. Between that and the integrated workflow with Waves plugins, I can finally spend less time fixing problems and more time doing creative mixing.”

“Wholestage support and guidance was essential in the correct configuration of the system,” he continues. “The LV1’s quick, easy setup is also most impressive. I have my LV1 installed directly in a Circle Three Designs case, which gives me a 3U rack space with one DSPRO StageGrid 1000 for local I/O, a Waves Axis One and a SoundGrid Extreme Server-C, all together in a low-weight, easy-to-deploy setup This makes the LV1 system extremely portable. At the end of the day, I have a world-class mixer in a 60-pound Pelican 1637, which allows me to take my band and shows to another engineering level.”

FOH engineer Gabriel Cruz pictured with the Waves eMotion LV1 Live Mixer he employed at the Heat Latin Music Awards.

“Configuration is quick and simple,” Cruz adds. “Since I have everything mounted, I can easily set up my scene before arriving to the venue and tune up quickly until I get to the desired levels. When it comes to networking, I have a Waves SoundGrid network sharing multiple SoundGrid devices, allowing us to have shared talkbacks, wedges and side-fills between two stage monitor mixers and one FOH, plus sharing to broadcast through MADI. The LV1 mixer saves time in sound checks (monitoring wise) and enables me to easily tweak my mixes with a click at the channel section.”

He notes that the full integration of Waves plugins within the LV1 is another reason the duo decided to adopt the mixer: “The SSL G-Channel is my go-to channel strip: It provides me with filters and dynamics control such as gate, compression, EQ, input gain and output gain, and for me that is my starting point. If at that point it doesn’t already sound great, that means I should check the source. I always use the SSL G-Master Buss Compressor on mix groups and as a first master chain. It gives me control over the peaks on group busses and the master bus. The NLS Non-Linear Summer plugin is excellent for drive and boosting certain elements, like drums routed individually to the NLS bus through a NLS Channel: kicks, snares, toms, hats and ‘air,’ each assigned internally through a group, with different drives in order to achieve what I need – punchy and fat drums.”

“The LV1’s sound quality is a major draw,” states Olivier. “It just sounds amazing. The superior sound quality, the integrated plugin workflow, the ease of transportation and setup, and lots of flexibility with signal routing – they were all key factors in choosing this console. Being able to get such a great sound, with almost zero latency and minimum space and transportation requirements – this is of great value to me. I can take my stuff with me virtually everywhere and have it up and running by myself in minutes, with consistency day after day. Converters and preamps sound just right, and how many H-Reverbs is too many anyway?”

Waves plugins are also an integral part of Olivier’s workflow: “The F6 Floating-Band Dynamic EQ and the C6 Multiband Compressor for fixing problems and shaping sounds are winners. Having the option to change attack and release times on each band is nice, and the mid-size option on the F6 is great. I also use the SSL G-Master Buss Compressor for group and mix bus compression; the H-Reverb for creating a bit more dimension and depth (I will use as many of these as possible, followed by the Renaissance Reverb plugin); and the L2 Ultramaximizer for making things loud.”

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