The BeachLife festival in Redondo Beach, CA celebrates California beach culture with multiple days of music performances across four stages. For the second consecutive year, live music streaming service Volume.comwas on-site at the festival’s Speakeasy Stage – broadcasting audio and video online through their web platform.
“We have a video production rig running vMix,” explained Volume.com‘s Ian Morse, who was part of the Volume.com team at the festival. “That computer takes all our camera inputs and adds graphics, and also pushes our RTMP stream.” For audio, the team employed an Allen & Heath Avantis console to capture and broadcast a high quality tailored mix for streaming. “We have a split on stage that feeds into both front of house and our GX4816 stagebox,” said Morse. “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 noted that he often had to make us 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 explained. “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 employed some of the Avantis’ powerful DEEP processing capabilities for the stream mix, especially the built-in compressor emulations. “I really like the sound of the Opto compressor,” he noted. “I used that on the mix bus, as well as the VCA Bus compressor at times.” For individual channel processing, Morse made use of the DYN8 processor, which combines a sophisticated Dynamic EQ and Multiband Compressor into a single insert plugin. “I liked to use it as somewhat of a de-esser, and I use it in conjunction with a standard vocal compressor.”
Morse notes that 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.”
