FOH Engineer Joel Gregg (Lo Moon, Purity Ring, Mumford & Sons) chooses tools from Waves Audio, including the eMotion LV1 Live Mixer and Waves plugins, for the 2020 Pony tour by English recording artist Rex Orange County.
As Gregg noted his eMotion LV1 setup includes Waves Axis One, SoundStudio STG-1608 as Local IO and two SoundGrid Extreme-C Servers: “The inputs on stage are coming from a MADI Stagebox through two DiGiGrid MGB interfaces. One MGB is on the LV1 input A patch, and the other is on the input B patch for redundancy. The FOH setup (Axis, main Extreme and two Dell screens) are housed in the OCD Labs’ LV1 Litefly casing. I love their product and support!”
About choosing the LV1, he remarked: “I decided to use the LV1 for its portability and sound quality. I can fly it with me everywhere. I’m travelling to Europe and then to South America for Lollapalooza. After that it’s Coachella, then Asia, a quick one-off in the U.K. and then Australia and New Zealand, followed by numerous festivals in Europe and North America. The thing I love about it most is that I’m not sacrificing sound quality for portability; I’m creating the best live mixes of my 20-year career while being able to do it on my own gear at every show. And as I said to a roadie friend of mine dropping in on a show recently, ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever been able to do everything I want to a mix.’”
Waves plugins are an essential component in his mixing workflow: “My go-to plugins are Waves Torque, which I use across my two drum groups. I have one on my ‘clean’ group and one on my compressed group, but each is set at slightly different frequencies. Torque thickens the drums up perfectly without cluttering my mix. The F6 Floating-Band Dynamic EQ is the perfect dynamic EQ and EQ problem-solver. I use it on almost everything! I love using the Waves Sibilance on vocals. Wow! Can’t believe I used to think 902’s were the be-all-and-end-all for de-essers… Another favorite is the Brauer Motion plugin. I have this one on a send and use it on so many things. I tend to mix in mono, so it makes guitar lead lines pop and makes it seem like tom rolls are coming from everywhere and it even sends the flute around everyone’s heads.”
He continued: “With Rex Orange County I have six very accomplished musicians, all vying for a position in the mix. Using Waves eMotion LV1 allows me to find a place for each of them, without tearing my mix apart or prioritizing one over another. It’s pop music at heart with a kind of big soul band. So I have to not only give each member of a very loud band some space, but I also have to sit the lead vocal squarely on top of the mix. When the show starts, every single person in the audience starts singing every single word, so I then have to sit the whole mix on top of that. LV1 makes the whole thing very easy!”
