The three-night Bud Light Super Bowl Music Fest leading up to Super Bowl LIV gave football fans and the city of Miami an opportunity to catch top artists including DJ Khaled, Maroon 5, Guns N’ Roses and Snoop Dogg at Miami’s American Airlines Arena. The event was captured onsite by New Jersey-based remote facilities company Music Mix Mobile (M3) with its Eclipse truck – which was driven directly from the Grammy Awards to Miami.
The Eclipse truck features a Lawo mc256 mixing console, M&K Speakers and signal processing from Waves, including an extensive selection of Waves plug-ins and the new SuperRack SoundGrid – that will run up to 128 audio channels through multiple instances of Waves’ plug-ins, with near-zero latency and extensive workflow customisation options. M3 was responsible for the broadcast music mix.
‘Our lead mixer, Jay Vicari, chose Waves for effects, reverbs, delays and specialised processing,’ M3 co-founder and Chief Engineer Joel Singer notes. ‘The F6 Floating-Band Dynamic EQ in particular is essential to our vocal processing. The F6 is on all main vocal channels, along with a Renaissance DeEsser. Jay has become really comfortable using it. He uses the F6 alongside the console EQ and dynamics to get a vocal to work very nicely – without nearly as much console EQ as he’s used before. We now use minimal amounts of EQ, instead of having to EQ something drastically in order to try to get the vocal to sit. With F6 you’re able to find the trouble spot in the vocal, and just focus on that to make the vocal sit in the mix.’
The Bud Light Super Bowl Music Fest was M3’s first live use of the Waves SuperRack: ‘We had been testing it for a month or so, and we finally put it to use in this show in our Eclipse truck,’ Singer says. ‘We took advantage of SuperRack’s new floating window option, which let us place the F6 at the top of the screen, while also being able to see the other plug-ins being used and control different plug-ins simultaneously. The overall layout in SuperRack is very helpful and practical: You can see a lot more of what’s going on. You can see your input, your output, and you can see them on a lot of channels simultaneously. The interface is just so user-friendly – very cool.’
‘We worked something like 45 hours in three days,’ he adds. ‘Having the right tools helped us achieve a sound that was extremely uniform. Waves made the show sound really good, and it gave Jay the tools and the ability to hone the sound quickly. Waves has been a key component of our sound and workflow for years – and now with SuperRack it’s taken the interface to a new level of ease.’
More: www.musicmixmobile.com
More: www.lawo.com
More: www.waves.com
