Front of house and monitor engineer Hugo Pinzon (Latin Grammy Winners Aterciopelados, Andres Cabas,) utilizes Waves Audio MultiRack SoundGrid to run Waves plug-ins for the live musical production of “La Vuelta al Mundo en 80 Días” (“Around the World in 80 Days”).
“Mixing musical theater productions is much easier now that I use Waves plug-ins and the Waves SoundGrid system,” he states.
Specifically, Pinzon cites the Waves Dugan automixer as a “must-have” for mixing numerous headset microphones at the same time.
“It sounds so clear, with no comb filtering and a much lower probability of feedback,” he says. “In some cases, 10 or 15 actors are in front of the PA between viewers, and it is like magic – absolutely no feedback. I use the Waves C6 Multiband Compressor and Waves MaxxVolume for the singers. The C6 controls any kind of voice EQ issues, and a gate option on the Waves MaxxVolume plug-in enables me to have full control over unwanted bleeding on the 20 headsets.
“For the guitars, my chain includes the Waves NLS Non-Linear Summer (set to a Nevo preset) and the Waves Renaissance Axx,” he continues. “On the bass guitar I use the Waves C6 and the Waves CLA-3A Compressor/Limiter. On the drums I use the Waves SSL E Channel and the Waves CLA-76 Compressor/Limiter (Bluey) for snare and the Waves CLA-76 (Blacky) for toms.”
In addition to running plug-ins, Hugo takes advantage of SoundGrid networking capabilities to share the inputs and outputs of his Yamaha PM5D and DiGiCo SD9 consoles, using the Waves WSG-Y16 YGDAI-to-SoundGrid card (for Yamaha) and the DiGiGrid MGB MADI-to-SoundGrid interface (for DiGiCo). All of the above are connected to two Waves SoundGrid Impact servers (one for redundancy), firing around 125 snapshots in MultiRack SoundGrid via MIDI from SD9.
“My workflow has completely changed,” he concludes. “Using Waves plug-ins makes everything so much easier, punchier, cleaner, and most importantly, more musical.”