Learn which audio tools and technologies remote broadcast company Music Mix Mobile uses to deliver its live broadcast mix of the annual Grammy Awards.
There’s one fact of life every live sound engineer will tell you: in a live show, you only get one chance to get it right. All the more so when you’re doing a live broadcast mix of the highest-profile music show around – the Grammys.
Music Mix Mobile, a New Jersey/California-based remote facilities company, has again chosen Waves tools to mix the live broadcast of the 58th annual Grammy® Awards, held at Los Angeles’ Staples Center and aired live in four time zones on the CBS television network. In its effort to combine the talents of their award-winning team with state-of-the-art audio solutions, Music Mix Mobile recently upgraded their Eclipse and Horizon trucks with Lawo mc256 consoles connected to a Waves Extreme server, as well as a DiGiGrid MGO audio interface allowing MADI inserts across the entire Lawo system, and the MultiRack SoundGrid® plugin host for running Waves plugin on the Lawo console.
We talked with Music Mix Mobile co-founder and Engineer-in-Charge Joel Singer to understand what lies behind his team’s worry-free and confident use of this new setup.
“This Grammy show was the first time we’ve used the Lawo console with Waves plugins in a major live production,” Joel says. “We had some shows prior to that, but this was the first major broadcast where we used this setup as a truly integrated solution. Being able to control all our Waves plugins from the Lawo enabled us to work much, much faster – crucial in getting all our different setups (different plugins, different channels and inserts) ready in time for different artists playing in quick succession one after the other.
“The task was enormous – but when you have two stellar products to work with, you can approach it with confidence. With Lawo and Waves, it’s like having two Ferraris. Just the high level of support and the concepts that go into these products gives you the highest level of self-assurance.
On using Waves plugins, Singer remarks: “One of the most important plugins is the H-Reverb Hybrid Reverb. We’re using it in a mono/in, 5.0-surround/out configuration. That way we’re able to create a space for vocals and instruments: the Staples Center sounds great, but it’s not the type of ambiance you would want on a vocal or on certain instruments. We used two instances of H-Reverb to be able to create different types of 5.0 reverb returns in order to fill out the entire surround infrastructure. We also used, again, the Renaissance Compressor and the Renaissance DeEsser on all the vocals, to be able to level them and keep them where the engineer and artist were happy with them. Some Waves plugins help add character, while some are true problem solvers that help us keep leveling exactly where it should be. They all came in extremely handy throughout the course of the entire event.
“The Lawo addition was a huge change for us,” Singer adds, “it was a next-generation broadcast solution for Music Mix Mobile. We are now eight years old, and moving into the next eight years we wanted something that will stand the test of time and be applicable in the future. What happened is that our previous platform had stagnated for us. The control was great, but the previous company had not created anything that met our broadcasting requirements. During that whole time, the one constant standard has been Waves. We want to use a lot of Waves plugins, and when we had to make a decision what hardware to use, choosing the Lawo made perfect sense because it sounds great, it works great, the support level is great, and that combination of Lawo and Waves just made sense.