Waves SuperRack used for the Bud Light Super Bowl Music Fest Broadcast

We caught up with Music Mix Mobile, a remote facilities company who captured performances at the 2020 Bud Light Super Bowl Music Fest for broadcast, to hear about their use of Waves SuperRack and plugins.

Music Mix Mobile (M3), is a New Jersey-based remote facilities company that combines the talents of award-winning production professionals and state-of-the-art audio solutions. They recently captured performances at the Bud Light Super Bowl Music Fest, held January 30 through February 1.

The three-night festival leading up to Super Bowl LIV gave football fans and the city of Miami an opportunity to enjoy some of the top names in the music industry, including DJ Khaled, Maroon 5, DaBaby, Guns N’ Roses, Snoop Dogg and Dan + Shay. Held at Miami’s American Airlines Arena, with highlights from the festival airing on the Fox network on Saturday, February 1, the event was captured onsite by M3 with their Eclipse truck, which was driven directly from the Grammy Awards to Miami.

The Eclipse truck features a LAWO mixing console, M&K Speakers, and signal processing from Waves, including an extensive selection of Waves plugins and the new Waves SuperRack SoundGrid—a cutting-edge plugin rack that lets live sound and broadcast engineers run up to 128 audio channels through multiple instances of Waves’ plugins, with near-zero latency and endless workflow customization options. M3 was responsible for the broadcast music mix. They tell us that their use of Waves products kept things running smoothly in the high-stress, high-stakes environment of live event broadcast audio.

M3 co-founder and Chief Engineer Joel Singer notes, “Our lead mixer Jay Vicari chose Waves for effects, reverbs, delays and specialized processing. The F6 Floating-Band Dynamic EQ, in particular, is essential to our vocal processing. The F6 is on all main vocal channels, along with a Renaissance DeEsser. Jay has become really comfortable using it: he uses the F6 alongside the console EQ and dynamics to get a vocal to work very nicely—without nearly as much console EQ as he’s used before. We now use minimal amounts of EQ, instead of having to EQ something drastically in order to try to get the vocal to sit properly. With F6, you’re able to find the trouble spot in the vocal, and just focus on that to make the vocal sit in the mix.”

The Bud Light Super Bowl Music Fest was M3’s first live use of the Waves SuperRack. Singer says, “We had been testing it for a month or so, and we finally put it to use in this show in our Eclipse truck. We took advantage of SuperRack’s new floating window option, which let us place the F6 at the top of the screen, while also being able to see the other plugins being used and control different plugins simultaneously. The overall layout in SuperRack is very helpful and practical: You can see a lot more of what’s going on. You can see your input, your output, and you can see them on a lot of channels simultaneously. The interface is just so user-friendly—very cool.”

When asked about the challenges of a show like the Bud Light Super Bowl Music Fest, Singer says, “We worked something like 45 hours in three days. Having the right tools helped us achieve a sound that was extremely uniform. Waves made the show sound really good, and it gave Jay the tools and the ability to hone the sound quickly. Waves has been a key component of our sound and workflow for years—and now with SuperRack, it’s taken the interface to a new level of ease.”

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