As for the Violet EQ section of Fusion, he says, “It’s nice to have a bit of shelving EQ on your stems. It’s quick to grab if you’ve got too much high-end on something in front of the PA, or if you want to add a little bit to drive it into the HF compressor. I find that really useful.”
Thomas is essentially live-mastering a stem-based mix of the live channels and playback tracks coming out of Ableton and over Dante, he says. “I’ve got playback stems that have been separated out into six stems — drums, bass, melodic stuff and backing vocals, plus the vocal stem and the onboard reverb and effects stem. I’m making quite a lot of use of EQ from song to song, and every song has been built on a scene-by-scene basis. The songs go from one extreme to another, from typical EDM to what I call commercial EDM pop. So I’m doing a lot of mastering on this gig.”
Part of the idea behind the multi-stem configuration was also that it provides feeds for any broadcast mix needs along the way. But so far on the tour, Thomas says, “They’ve been taking my left-right mix, because they like how it sounds. I input the shotgun mic and other condenser mics into the matrix and we can feed that to broadcast to vary the amount of crowd mics to add a bit of ambience into the mix.”