Attracting up to 60,000 brass music fans each June since its inception in 2011, the Woodstock der Blasmusik festival offered an evening of livestreamed performances from the festival site in Ort im Innkreis in Austria this year instead – another victim of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Featuring eight bands, the FOH and broadcast audio rig for this online incarnation of Woodstock Der Blasmusik was supplied and managed by Martin Bröll of Greenbee Records Studios, working with festival technical manager, Mario Schwarz, who oversaw all aspects of the audio, video and streaming.
With eight bands, three stages and more than 60 inputs to look after, Bröll chose his Allen & Heath DM32 MixRack as the core of a dLive system running the PA sound, broadcast mix and intercoms. Portable DX168 expanders were added for local IO on the main stages, plus a modular DX32 expander for front of house IO and connection of outboard FX and compressors.
The DM32 was fitted with a Waves3 card for integration with a Soundgrid Server One for additional plug-ins. The performances were mixed on a dLive S5000 Surface, with a secondary mixer taking care of summing mixes, video sound and interview mics. A Dante 128x128 card in the S5000 allowed Bröll to capture multitrack recordings of the performances on two laptops running Dante Virtual Soundcard.
‘With several bands performing on multiple stages over six hours, the main challenge with this event was managing the channel routing efficiently,’ he explains. ‘I had worked with iLive in the past and upgraded to dLive last September, so I knew it was the right solution. Another really important factor for me is dLive’s integration with Waves plug-ins and Dante.
‘You have to treat brass instruments like you do human voices,’ Bröll adds. ‘They have a huge dynamic range and many overtones, so you need to be very sparing with equalisation and compression. You have to really ride the console faders.’
The organisers of Woodstock der Blasmusik are pleased with the success of the livestream and the quality of the audio and are looking forward to the return of the brass-loving audience in 2021.
