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FE Livestream “Altes Pfandhaus”


Date:
13th December 2020

This must have been the most complex livestream I have done by now – because we went bilingual with this one. A cooperation between Fortuna Ehrenfeld, the Goethe-Institut and WRDforyou, the stakes were high on this one – but it eventually all worked out with only 98% of our trusty X32’s channels, groups and matrices used.

Okay, here’s a quick write-up of what we used. At the centre of audio world, we had two X32s, one as the main console and the second one sub-mixing 5 SM58s during the talk session (2nd half of the stream). Band inputs and outputs went via one DL32 stagebox. The main X32 was also connected to a router, which enabled Fabian to mix monitors and later on mix the Turkish dubbed version of the stream. He also had my X-Touch faderpack, which I used for the previous Fortuna Ehrenfeld tour, as physical controls.

Mic-wise, we had some interesting things going on. Shure Beta 91a and Audix D6 on kick, Audix i5 on snare, Line Audio CM4 on hat, Sennheiser e604 on snare bot and tom. So far, fairly standard, but what I really liked was having 2 Mic Parts S25 as overheads. They did a great job at capturing the whole kit and didn’t require much processing. Stationary vocals were handled by Sennheiser e945. Tbh it was a little hard controlling the proximity effect on those sometimes, since the X32 doesn’t have dynamic EQs. We thought about using LDCs at these positions as well, but decided against it because of bleed. Talking about bleed: Two Line Audio CM3 on grand piano, which you can hear around 25:37.  I really love the way they sound, but in the position they were in and at the volume we needed for the grand, they also doubled as room mics. For the Turkish version of the stream, we set the speaker up with an EV RE320.

The challenge, however, came from the different outputs we had to provide, We had the German stream, the Turkish stream, an N-1 that went to the three guests in Istanbul – and monitors for the band, monitors for the guests, and a monitor for the talk part of the stream. We had some routing issues at rehearsal (some things in bus/matrix routing behave a little different in the offline editor compared to the “real” board, it seems), introducing some phasing to the German stream, but we could resolve those.

Shoutout to everyone involved! Everyone worked very hard of this, and it all worked in the end, making this one of the most thrilling days I had in 2020.