New York, NY (July 14, 2025)—One of the most notable sleeper success stories in music over the last year has been indie synthpop duo Magdalena Bay, thanks to its breakout album Imaginal Disk. The band hit the road this past spring for a sold-out U.S. club tour before heading overseas to open on Billie Eilish’s U.K. tour—a trek that wraps up later this week. Throughout it all, engineer Michael Tomas Regina has been along for the journey, tackling the front-of-house mix on his Avantis Solo mixing surface.
Regina recently moved to using the Advantis Solo after touring with another indie buzz band, TV Girl with an Allen & Heath SQ last year: “I liked the way it sounded and how small it was, [but] at a certain point, I realized I needed more I/O and FX, so I explored what the next step up would be.”
The result is that now he uses the Avantis Solo for both acts, taking advantage of the fact that the diminutive desk is an all-in-one solution, making it portable enough that he’s flown with it to Australia, New Zealand and Europe, as well as around North America. Beyond the Solo surface itself, Regina’s system also includes a pair of DX168 96kHz stageboxes, which connect back to the console with redundancy via two DX-HUBs and a gigaACE card. “I don’t have to touch the house snakes,” he noted. “I have a stagebox near the drums and another in keyboard world, and everything comes back to the console over redundant CAT cables.”
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Magdalena Bay’s dreampop sound naturally lends itself to effects, and Regina brings them to the fore in his mixes, making use of the dPack plug-in package installed on his system, particularly the DYN8, a combination multiband compressor and dynamic EQ plug-in. “I use DYN8 on vocals, my drum bus, and even my Main bus sometimes,” he said. “The dynamic EQ allows me to really shape the sound to match what we’re looking for.”
Likewise, DYN8 gets a workout thanks to the dynamic voice of Magdalena Bay vocalist Mica Tenenbaum, varying between intimate and high energy moments. “There are FX triggered from the stage to add overdrive and distortion at times,” said Regina. “That’s where DYN8 helps a lot. I still have my fingers on the faders, but dynamic EQ helps to catch a lot of those energetic moments.”
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While the desk has 12 faders, Regina has customized his fader layout using a combination of DCAs and subgroups to keep everything crucial under his fingers at all times. “I reserve the six faders on the right for DCAs and Groups across the top four layers,” he said. “The six left faders I use for input channels, and the bottom two layers can be FX sends and returns or anything else I need. It was definitely a concern to move to a 12-fader console, but it’s totally fine after setting it up this way.”
The band, engineer and console will all get a workout in the coming months, hitting festivals this summer before stepping up to a theater tour this fall, playing venues like MGM Music Hall in Boston and The Anthem in Washington, D.C.
