I'd like to solicit some advice on how others have simplified their fly rigs. I'm working with a artist that's starting to build momentum and play more fly dates and out-of-town shows. It's a mixture of small headlining dates and larger dates where we're the opening act. Sometimes there's a monitor desk and sometimes monitors are from FOH.
My goal is to put something together that's flexible, light weight, small footprint, easy to transport and quick to set up.
The setup is for a 4-piece band. In general, they're handled by house production but for show-to-show consistency, what I provide is: 2 channels of wireless, 4 channels of IEMs, 8 channels of playback (from Qlab) and a Waves voical chain. This is all setup and run by one tech during shows.
What I do today, which works well but is not compact or easy to setup & use, is the following:
- Qlab laptop with interface. snake to FOH. (this lives at FOH)
- Waves rack with IOS and separate Waves laptop. Inputs from wireless rack. Output snake to FOH desk. (this lives at FOH)
- Wireless rack with PSMs & Axient. The Axient feeds the Waves rack. The PSMs take a feed from the FOH desk. (this rack can live at FOH or on stage)
One the main struggles I'm having is figuring out how to package the gear to support smaller shows where it will all be in one place and larger shows where the wireless will need to be on stage with the playback and Waves stuff at FOH.
It would be nice to only need one laptop. Could I run Superrack and Qlab both on the same machine? Taking that a step further, if I limited my processing, could I run Superrack Performer and use native processing so I eliminate the IOS? If so, could I output audio tracks from Qlab and audio from Superrack on the same interface? This could be the ideal situation if it all runs reliably.
Another option could be to add a Soundgrid interface to the wireless rack. Then it can patch right into the Waves network regardless of where the rack is. As a related solution, I could use LV1 (instead of Superrack) for the vocal processing and mix the tracks on the same system, feeding the main FOH desk with only L/R. I could get rid of the Qlab audio interface and go directly into the LV1 using Soundgrid. The other benefit is that I'll be able to output the processed vocals at either FOH or on stage. The downside is that Soundgrid interfaces are relatively large and expensive.
Maybe I'm better off using Dante for transport, since I can get inexpensive analog IO for where I need it.
I know that no one will be able to come up with a final solution that will work for all scenarios. I'm just wondering if there are any other unique products or ideas that I haven't thought of that could help simplify the system overall.
Or am I trying to do too much with too little (gear an manpower).
- Dave
