Knoxville, TN (March 7, 2017)—Faced with a year-long tour mixing EDM artist Nicolas Jaar in venues ranging from clubs to major festivals, with lots of fly gigs in between long stretches of tour bus travel, engineer Vance Galloway had to reinvent his FOH set-up. Ultimately, he opted for the Waves eMotion LV1 live mixer, SoundGrid servers and various plugins.
The compact system consisting of a Waves SoundGrid server and a 2014 Mac Mini running Windows 10 with two 20-inch Dell 10-point touchscreens—all of which fits in one Pelican case, weighs less than 50 pounds and meets standard airline luggage size requirements.
Additionally, he carries a single rolling rack with two DiGiGrid IOX audio interfaces, which act as a stage box (24 input, 12 output), and he uses a DiGiGrid D interface, which serves as a talkback mic input, headphone out and a stereo out for FOH.
Galloway explained, “The LV1 is absolutely the best choice I could find in a system that could fly with me easily…. I need a system that gives me the tools to deal with whatever comes my way, and having the full suite of Waves plugins allows me to compensate for PA or room issues, while the I/O flexibility that the LV1 offers enables me to deal with different front fill, delay and recording feeds every night. A really unique feature of the LV1 is how easily I can integrate audio coming from computers into the system; instead of taking analog audio from an audio interface attached to the artist’s computer, I can simply connect that machine to the Waves SoundGrid network and have 32 channels or more of pristine digital audio, using less hardware and achieving better sound quality than I’ve ever been able to get before with other setups.”
With the Waves-based system, he finds “Often when I’m working with Nicolas Jaar, I end up practically ‘playing’ plugins, manipulating their settings constantly to keep up with the music. This is something that just isn’t possible on most other digital mixing environments, and being able to integrate laptops both as inputs from stage and for recording and virtual soundcheck has been fantastic. Most of all, though, it’s the sound quality: The LV1 sounds absolutely fantastic. Nico and I work very closely to ensure that we put on a show that exceeds the audience’s expectations, and the LV1 has totally come through for me in terms of sound quality.”
