KNOXVILLE, TN— M3 (Music Mix Mobile), a New Jersey/California-based remote facilities company combining the talents of award-winning production professionals and state-of-the-art audio solutions, was recently tasked with capturing the broadcast audio for U2: Innocence + Experience Live in Paris. The concert was shot live on December 7 at the Accorhotels Arena in Bercy and aired exclusively on HBO that same day.
M3 co-founder and broadcast audio co-mixer John Harris, a multi-EMMY® and GRAMMY® winner, employed a wide variety of processing from Waves Audio, a leading provider of digital signal processing solutions. For the event, Harris chose Waves MultiRack, H-Reverb Hybrid Reverb, CLA-76 Compressor/Limiter and L360 Surround Limiter. “I basically live in a Waves world, that’s what I use every day, pretty much exclusively with my ProTools systems. Believe it or not, even though U2 is a four-piece band, I had to allocate 126 inputs for the show. There’s three different drum sets, 12 different bass channels, there’s just tons of stuff and I was able to cover it all using Waves plugins and MultiRack. I loved using the H-Reverb in surround. That was my main surround reverb, so when you listen to U2, the reverb you’re hearing that’s on almost everything is H-Reverb. It really worked great.”
One of the big advantages for Harris was that he was able to duplicate his Waves setup that he uses daily in the States in the M3 Eclipse truck for the U2 Paris shows. “Knowing that I am thousands of miles from home and being able to duplicate my Waves setup I have at home gave me a great sense of confidence and security,” stated Harris. “I was fortunate to have long-time U2 engineer Carl Glanville as co-mixer. Carl worked on the record and on tour pre-production, so even though I traveled with U2 for two months, recording 20 shows in six different countries to become super-familiar with the set, having Carl there was a big help for me. And using Waves to re-create live what was done in the studio was a big plus.”
One of the most challenging aspects of the show was making sure the home-viewing audience had the best possible audio experience. “The venue was not acoustically perfect, yet it is my job is to create an acoustic space [for the broadcast] that compensates for that. So I needed to create a space in which, when you hear U2 playing in that room on your TV, you go, ‘wow, that’s pretty cool, listen how cool the band sounds in that room!’ Well that’s the reverb we dialed in with the Waves H-Reverb!”
For more information, please visit www.waves.com.
