Among LA’s creative enclaves, Echo Park is home to prospering and aspiring artists, writers and musicians and celebrates its community culture each year with the Echo Park Rising festival. This year, the event’s main Liberty Stage used Allen & Heath dLive S5000 and C1500 control surfaces supported respectively by the processing and networking power of DM48 and CDM32 MixRack systems for its sound.
The Liberty Stage hosted many of the festival’s must-see acts. ‘The level of activity at Liberty Stage can best be described as that which you’d expect from what just may be the ultimate block party,’ says Oscar Zambrano of AOP Entertainment, which managed production for the event. ‘Crowds ebbed and flowed throughout the day and night. The bands that performed ranged from those just starting out to some of the hottest acts around. In turn, we had to be ready for anything.’
The stage’s PA was tuned by Brandon Operchuck and Kyle Gish of Audio Geer. Allen & Heath’s dLive S5000/DM48 mixing system managed the sound out front, with stage monitors fed from a dLive C1500/CDM32 system, expanded to handle 48 channels of input with the aid of a 96kHz Allen & Heath DX168 I/O expander.
‘Our consoles had to be user-friendly,’ Operchuck says of the mixing system choices. ‘That way we could accommodate the less experienced guest engineers taking the helm at the beginning of the day. Conversely, we needed the horsepower and 96kHz sonic quality demanded of the riders submitted by the engineers serving the headliners at night. The Allen & Heath dLive systems gave us both and couldn’t have worked out better.’
Beyond the guest engineers that rotated through both days of the festival, the majority of the acts had their house mix orchestrated by Lead Engineer Leticia Castaneda. During the few times she took a break, either Operchuck or Zambrano took over. ‘She was a real trooper mixing an eclectic and nearly nonstop stream of acts over long days,’ Operchuck says of Castaneda. ‘The rest of us can only wish we had that kind of stamina.’
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