Among the largest electronic music events in the world, the 2014 Creamfields festival featured multiple stages that attracted crowds upwards of 60,000 daily. Swedish DJ, remix artist and producer Avicii headlined the South Stage, with FOH engineer Wayne ‘Rabbit’ Sargeant using an SSL Live.L500 console. The main North and South Stages both featured large-scale PA systems supplied by Britannia Row Productions, with SSL Live consoles at FOH.

‘Avicii has a simple set-up, with Pioneer CDJ-2000NXS players feeding a DJM-900NXS DJ mixer,’ Sargeant says. ‘Unlike other engineers, I’d rather keep everything in the digital domain and avoid doing unnecessary A/D and D/A conversions, so I use the SPDIF digital output of the DJM and convert it to the AES digital format. The XLR analogue outputs on the mixer have limited headroom, so when a DJ hits them hard the outputs will distort. Using an SSL Live digital stagebox with the console gave me the capability that I needed, with an AES digital input to accept the mixer’s output at the stage.

‘Patching the digital signal into the L500 gave me plenty of headroom on the output of the mixer and a cleaner signal path. I’ve found that in large venues where the bottom end is hard to control I’ll get a much tighter bottom at a 96kHz sample rate, which is what I get with the SSL Live.’

Sargeant describes FOH for Avicii akin to on-the-fly, live mastering: ‘What I am doing during the show is tuning the system and mastering the tracks that Avicii is sending to me,’ he explains. ‘I used the L500 onboard multiband compression and dynamic EQ to enhance the tracks, make them sound consistent, and fine-tune the bass for the venue. I’m also using the Waves Maxx BCL processors as an AES insert to the console, and this is the best I’ve heard it. For EQ, I’m mainly using L500’s dynamic EQ, adjusting it to suit the different types of tracks – if it’s a techno track, you need a driving high-mid to keep the snare going. Some of the vocal tracks tend to be harsher, so I need to compress them and I find that the dynamic EQ works better for that application because it’s more subtle than just tweaking the parametric EQ. When mixing on other consoles, I generally find some of the high frequencies to be quite harsh. I’d have to EQ that out, but the SSL Live has this warmth and depth of the solid lo-mid response that balances the high frequencies.

‘I constantly have to adjust the EQ on the left and right signal path as you would do when you’re in a mastering suite, which makes sense because a lot of Avicci’s tracks have varying degrees of mastering,’ he continues. ‘He also had 11 new songs in the set that haven’t yet been mastered, so I used a lot of those mastering techniques to make the levels correspond with his other tracks.’

With limited time to become familiar with the L500, Sargeant put the dynamic EQ on the large screen and the standard parametric EQ on the Channel Control Tile: ‘That set-up allowed me to do two things at one time that would normally be done separately on an analogue surface,’ he says. ‘The interesting thing about the SSL is that there’s many different ways of working, so when you’re in the heat of the action you can keep it simple and straightforward. I was able to use the physical knobs and the touch screen controls for quick access to the EQ.’

As Creamfields was Sargeant’s first experience of SSL Live, he didn’t have time to do a full soundcheck, which is often the case with multi-act festivals. ‘Thankfully, I had an opportunity to A/B the L500 against another popular digital desk before Avicii’s performance and the results blew my mind,’ he says. ‘It was like listening to a high-quality, 180g vinyl pressing being played on a Linn Sondek turntable, then amplified with amazing speakers. The sound was so analogue, with creamy, thick low-mids and warmth. I think that part of the spectrum has largely been ignored in the digital desks, but through the SSL it was thick, warm and huge. SSL Live has picked up live audio after the market was sort of dormant for years. It’s an exciting prospect for live sound.’

See also:
Creamfields 2014 

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