Based on the music of Green Day, the West End production of the rock opera American Idiot, finds FOH engineer Oscar Soderland at the helm of Allen & Heath dLive console with a DM64 box and a S7000 surface, and monitor engineer Peter Fredriksson with an Allen & Heath S7000 (with a M-Waves V2 card and M-DL-ADAPT card adapter). Soderland is running Waves using MultiRack SoundGrid.

‘I use the Waves CLA Classic Compressors bundle to smack guitar and drums up a bit, to get that CLA feel – which is very significant to the Green Day sound,’ says Fredriksson. ‘Doing a Green Day musical, you must have that CLA sound. I also use the Waves Vitamin Sonic Enhancer for widening the strings, and the Waves H-Reverb Hybrid Reverb is a favourite on a lot of stuff – it sounds amazing, and it is very easy to use. Waves H-Reverb is great when you need to really fine-tune your reverbs. I’m using the Waves C4 Multiband Compressor to control the dynamic and frequencies on some head mics.’

‘In one of the local card ports I have an A&H M-Waves V2 card, connecting to two Waves SoundGrid Server One units in a redundant set-up,’ Soderland offers. ‘A Waves MultiRack SoundGrid is installed on a MacBook Air; I use it to house and manage my Waves plug-ins. As this musical is based on Green Day’s album American Idiot and some of their other work, it was very important for me to get as close as possible to Green Day’s signature sound. I wanted to get a loud, in-your-face rock sound, but still keep vocals and dialog in focus, without losing attitude. There is a full punk band, 21 singers with head mics, singing on stage and backstage, nearly all the time. The orchestra pit has a string section together with the musical director, who also plays keyboards and operates an advanced Pro Tools project, controlling multiple clicks, LTC, backtracks etc. I knew I would need some clever Waves plug-ins to give me the sound, width and depth required in order to control the difficult and demanding composition of a live punk rock band, multiple head mics and a string section.’

‘There are different ways of approaching and using plug-ins,’ Soderland adds. ‘Sometimes I use them to season a mix, to add that little extra; sometimes I need them to be problem solvers; at times I use them to change the whole feel and sound of my entire mix; and occasionally I do all of these things at once. I love the Chris Lord-Alge Signature Series bundle, CLA Classic Compressors, and especially the CLA-76, which I use for parallel compression on drums, and also on vocals and guitars.

‘On the vocals, it gives me that rich, smooth, expensive-sounding vocal sound. With this plug-in, it’s easy to forget that I have 21 head mics up there at the same time; the CLA-76 gives me a phenomenal large choir sound, together with individual vocal leads. On rhythm guitars, it gives me thick and punchy sound that is still highly detailed and separated. Other than that, Vitamin Sonic Enhancer is my new favourite – it really helps me make room in the full mix. My other Waves go-to plug-ins are the PuigTec EQs on guitars, REDD, the NLS Non-Linear Summer, and of course the C6 Multiband Compressor.’