Knoxville, TN (December 21, 2017)—Hip-hop supergroup Run The Jewels has become a phenomenon in part from doing things its own way, whether releasing its debut album as a free download, or reworking its second album into an album-length remix entirely of cat sounds, duly titled Meow The Jewels. Just as independently minded, engineer Tomas Wolfe has been using a Waves eMotion LV1 Live Mixer to mix the duo’s tour.
Wolfe is no stranger to touring, having worked with The Neighborhood, Danny Brown, Everlast, House of Pain, The Faint and The Mowglis, among others. For the Run The Jewels jaunt, he found the eMotion LV1 met his needs. “We are doing a lot of back-to-back fly dates with Run the Jewels, and we needed something that we could carry on to the plane but without compromising the sound quality,” he said.
On his setup, Wolfe said, “Our LV1 Mixer setup consists a Waves Extreme Server for DSP and DiGiGrid IOX interfaces for I/O on stage, and Waves Icon Platform M and Icon Platform X as the tactile fader controller. Setup is really quick and easy with this rig. The small footprint helps in festival situations, where space is at a premium. It is easy to advance a Cat 6 cable to connect the interfaces on stage to the LV1 Mixer at FOH so I don’t have to run my own, and that helps save precious time at load outs.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Wolfe uses a number of Waves plug-ins for his shows and cites the F6 Floating-Band Dynamic EQ, the Primary Source Expander (PSE) and X-FDBK as his ‘go-to’ favorites.
“I use the F6 on every channel,” he said. “It is an incredible plug-in; it is particularly helpful for rappers that like to cup the mic, because I can adjust the dynamics to how they are positioning their hand on the mic and successfully eliminate the proximity effect, and for high-end expansion when the mics get dull halfway through the show due to saliva. In Run the Jewels, the bass is Very prominent, so it helps me control it, since there is a lot of 40 Hz in the tracks and I compress that frequency with the F6 to help clear up the muddiness. Then, I side-chain the vocal group to the F6 to duck out 4khz to create a pocket for the vocals to cut through. To get a good separation between the bass and the Kick drum, I side chain the Kick to the F6 as well.”
While the LV1 is unusually portable, the smaller form-factor belies its capabilities, according to Wolfe: “When I first tried out the LV1, I was immediately impressed by its portability, but the sound quality was a huge selling point. I could finally have with me the sound of the ‘big boy consoles,’ no matter what the travelling situation was. This is the best-sounding console I have ever used—it holds its weight against any other top-tier console.”
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