The Missions.Me outreach organisation recently completed its 1DayLA weeklong service event with The Freedom Experience concert, headlined by Justin Bieber with Kari Jobe and husband Cody Carnes at LA’s SoFi Stadium.
Veteran front-of-house and mixing engineer Jim Ebdon mixed Bieber on a Solid State Logic Live L550 digital mixing console. ‘I like the sound quality of the SSL Live,’ he says. ‘I always say it’s like an analogue console with a save button. There are some really cool features on that board, and I find that the SSL has a lot more depth to the stereo bus. The overall mix bus sounds just different to everything else.’
The Freedom Experience concert was attended by the more than 20,000 volunteers from across Southern California, who contributed to city beautification projects, back-to-school events, free medical clinics, homeless assistance and aid distribution. It took place at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, the new home of the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers football teams.
Clair Global provides Ebdon with an L550 and three 32-input Network I/O SB 32.24 Stage Boxes, for many of Bieber’s shows. San Diego-based Pro Audio AV supplied the L-Acoustics K1 PA system for the 1DayLA event.
Ebdon also mixed the entire Freedom Experience concert for streaming on the 1DayLA.com website beginning the following week using the console. ‘I took the front-of-house set-up back to my studio at home and did a remix of the whole thing, tidied it up a bit and added in the audience mics to make it sound like a live concert,’ he says. ‘It was exactly the same gear – so the SSL Live is great for that, as well.’
Having added an SSL Fusion stereo analogue processor to the Live L550 console, Ebdon has been able to eliminate an outboard compressor from his mix bus: ‘I find on the SSL that I don’t need that compressor at all. There’s something within the console that is doing everything, or giving me the impression that it’s doing everything, that the other compressor would do, so I tend to bypass it. The Fusion really glues the mix together. I’m only using it very lightly, and only half of it – the input and output stage – but it makes the mix nice to listen to.’
On the night, Ebdon mixed Bieber’s hour-long, 13-song set, which featured guest appearances from Chance the Rapper, Kid Laroi, Jaden Smith and Tori Kelly, as well as a grand finale, featuring Kari Jobe, Cody Carnes and Bieber. ‘Justin’s band played earlier for Tori Kelly, so I also mixed that,’ Ebdon says. Kelly is also featured on Bieber’s recent gospel album release, Freedom.
The Freedom Experience was the first large-scale show for Ebdon since he began working with Bieber in 2020. ‘We’ve done a lot of live streams, a few club shows and a theatre show in Las Vegas,’ he says. ‘So it was nice to go out and mix a big gig.’
Bieber has announced that his 52-date Justice World Tour of North American arenas, rescheduled due to the coronavirus pandemic, will now kick off in February 2022, in San Diego.
Ebdon is handling around 72 inputs from Bieber, his band and some Pro Tools playback elements: ‘Plus, nowadays, every band member has a talkback, a whole network of talkback systems going to different places, so that takes up a ton of inputs as well.’
More: www.solidstatelogic.com
