NBC’s long-running weeknight show Last Call with Carson Daly regularly features live bands – but rather than having them appear in the studio, music mixer Fred Archambault heads out to gigs to capture the excitement of regular performances.
A producer/engineer who has logged studio time with the likes of Alice Cooper and Panic at the Disco, Archambault has been Carson Daly’s go-to mixer since 2011. Until recently, he was using an ‘increasingly dilapidated legacy system that weighed about 400lb and caused problems with load-in at some venues’.
Then the show’s director asked him ‘if there was something smaller we could be using, so I began to look at the various options…’ His instinct was to build a laptop-based solution around familir software, but then he recalled JoeCo’s BlackBox Recorders from various venues around Los Angeles.
‘I called up my rep at RSPE Audio Solutions and arranged for them to provide a demo BBR1-MP system that we could trial at one of the shows,’ he says. ‘The team was so impressed by the BBR1-MP that they told me to order two of them right away.’
Since 2016’s autumn, Archambault has used two of the 24-channel standalone systems to capture performances from more than 30 artists, ranging from fast-rising English rock bands to former Hüsker Dü mainman Bob Mould and global sensation Ed Sheeran. Despite the demanding schedule and heavy workload, the BBR1-MP multitrack recorders – equipped JoeCo’s renowned preamps – have performed superbly.
‘For me it’s about the reliability and the very small footprint,’ Archambault says. ‘The BlackBox BBR1-MP is compact enough that it can be sneaked in anywhere, for example under a monitor console. It’s incredibly portable. The load-in problems we had with the previous system are a thing of the past, while the recorders close out the files so rapidly that I am back at home in bed much quicker than I used to be. The schedule for Last Call with Carson Daly is very busy and involves me mixing up to 180 songs per year, and the BlackBox Recorder makes my daily working life much easier.’
More: www.joeco.co.uk
