Celebrating California beach culture with multiple days of music performances on four stages, the Redondo Beach BeachLife festival saw live music streaming service Volume.com on-site at the Speakeasy Stage for the second consecutive year, broadcasting audio and video online.
‘We have a video production rig running vMix,’ explains Volume.com’s Ian Morse, part of the Volume.com team at the event. ‘That computer takes all our camera inputs and adds graphics, and also pushes our RTMP stream.’
The team employed an Allen & Heath Avantis console to handle the mix for streaming. ‘We have a split on stage that feeds into both front of house and our GX4816 stagebox,’ Morse says. ‘We then mix it down to two track and feed it into our stream rig to get married with the video feed.’
With multiple bands performing on the Speakeasy Stage, Morse notes that he often made use of the Avantis’ drag-and-drop strip assign function to adjust the fader bank layouts. ‘In a fast-moving festival situation, you don’t necessarily get much time to prepare with input lists or stage plots in advance,’ he explains. ‘Having fully configurable fader layers was huge, because I could just flip to a new fader layer and drag down exactly what I needed.’
Morse also used Avantis’ Deep processing capabilities for the stream mix, particularly the compressor emulations. ‘I really like the sound of the Opto compressor,’ he admits. ‘I used that on the mix bus, as well as the VCA Bus compressor at times.’
For individual channel processing, Morse looked to the Dyn8 processor, which combines dynamic EQ and multiband compression into a single insert plug-in. ‘I liked to use it as somewhat of a de-esser, and I use it in conjunction with a standard vocal compressor.’
Morse believes his mixed audio background helps navigate live streaming scenarios for Volume.com. ‘I have studio experience and live experience, and I feel like mixing for a stream is a little more on the studio side. You have to think about translation a lot more, because people are watching these streams on a variety of devices. This sometimes means adding compression, and also making sure you can get the bass to sit right in the mix.’
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