Supreme Nashville Sound – RIVAGE PM Mixes Country Music Radio’s Big Annual Event

Nashville's annual Country Radio Seminar brings together a wide range of country music artists and industry leaders for three days of performances, seminars, meetings and more. For 20 years CTS AVL has been the event’s audio partner, relying on Yamaha digital mixing consoles to deliver stellar performances from the latest new talent to the industry’s biggest stars.

The 2024 Country Radio Seminar took place at the Omni Nashville Hotel, with its ballroom the setting for everything from breakfast meetings and executive luncheon performances to evening shows which go on long into the night. The show features a wide variety of artists and an intense program of performances. Long-time audio product production partner CTS AVL needs to deliver consistently great sound, yet be flexible enough to suit very different musical styles in minutes. CTS AVL knew that Yamaha digital mixers could satisfy these difficult demands and deliver their long-time motto ‘Move The Room, Move The World’.

“We were brought in by Scott and Julie De Vos of De Lux Productions, who have produced the show for many years,” says CTS AVL president Mike Taylor. “They knew from our track record that we could deliver great sound for any musical style and switch between styles quickly with no loss of quality.

“The key part of the brief is that this is radio’s event. The artists are invited to perform and show the radio personalities and executives what they’ve got, but it has to be a 100% neutral environment, with everybody getting exactly the same opportunity. We treat them all equally, everyone gets the full production.”

The company initially used Yamaha PM1D digital mixing consoles, moved to PM5Ds and now have RIVAGE PM10s at front of house and monitors, plus a RIVAGE PM3 as a production console for video playback and wherever else needed. Two RPio I/O racks take care of all inputs and outputs, with all systems on a shared network.

One of the challenges faced by the CTS team is that it’s essentially a corporate event, but the format of the performances changes continually throughout the three days, with extremely fast changeovers. This puts a lot of pressure on the audio team.

“Every year we spend a lot of time in team discussions about the flow of the event, because it’s effectively multiple different events in the same space, with little time between each,” says CTS AVL audio manager Mark Kimmel, who has worked the Country Radio Seminar for 11 years.

“There are different aspects to each of them that are challenging and different timeframes that things have to be executed within, so we treat each event like it's the biggest one. And overall, because of the corporate nature of it, everything has to be tidy. Our snakes and delay cabling have to be flown on truss, so we work closely with the in-house rigging team. Through collaborations like that, we can deliver consistently from year to year.”

The variety of scenarios is a particular challenge for Jonathan Schwarz of Schwarz Sound, who manages the CRS front of house sound for CTS AVL.

“They're constantly rearranging the room. There will be a luncheon with tables, then the next session it might be chairs. Some of the higher profile artists will do a longer set and bring their own engineer, then there are sessions where, for example, a record label may have 10 artists that it wants to showcase, each doing one song and I’ll mix all of them,” he says.

“You can have laid-back songs that are more soulful or twangy, then you'll have full-on honky-tonk rock ‘n roll. We have to figure out how to give the artist the power and impact that they want from a performance, while recognizing that it’s a corporate-style event. You're entertaining radio personalities, managers, there’s a lot of networking going on. You have to translate the music and create that emotional impact where people go ‘I want to play that on the radio,’ while not making plates rattle.

“We don't want to make people spill their soup,” he adds, with a smile.

With a tight schedule, multiple artists and little soundcheck time, as well as delivering great sound, front of house needs a universally accepted mixing console which any engineer can use with no issues.

“The Yamaha RIVAGE PM backbone facilitates that,” says Jonathan. “Engineers can bring in a show file, or we have a pre-programmed festival style show file with their inputs and things ready to go, so all they have to do is step in and mix.

“We actually have two complete systems with separate RPios going through monitors, which can operate independent of front of house. So if they have to make their own gain staging or do anything with the transformer emulation and RND SILK processing, they have the opportunity to do that independently of what the front of house engineers are doing.”

One of the things Jonathan enjoys about the event is giving engineers who may not have previously used the Yamaha RIVAGE PM series the opportunity to mix on it.

“Some of the younger artists in particular may not have had the chance to mix on a flagship product like the RIVAGE PM system. So it’s exciting for me to show them what it’s like, the features like the Rupert Neve Designs SILK processing. It’s such a cool feature, which is unique to this product,” he says.

“Then we have others with experience on RIVAGE PM and that's great as well. I love watching other engineers come in, seeing their methodology, their workflow and the little tips and tricks they do for their artists which are unique to their mixing style. Something different than maybe I would do, because there are a lot of really cool ways to do anything on the system.”

Another Yamaha family product which has proved popular is the NEXO PS8, two-way point source speaker.

“The PS8 is fantastic because it sounds great, it’s very low profile and the rotatable horn means we can lay it on its side,” says Jonathan. “The stage is fairly compact, and we have a thrust. Being able to place PS8s on stands around the front of the stage means we can have great functional coverage, with the volume, tone and clarity to keep up with the rest of the PA, but they’re out of the way of the artist.”

With another successful Country Radio Seminar concluded, CTS AVL is already looking to next year’s event, again using Yamaha and NEXO.

“Every year we look at how can we improve upon on the previous one,” says Mark. “After 20 years we’ve got the production really fine-tuned. And everybody is always relieved to hear that we have the RIVAGE PM system.”

Company president Mike agrees, adding, “The Country Radio Seminar is a very important event for both the country music radio industry and the many artists who are invited to perform. We have a really deep relationship with all of our customers involved and we strive to deliver the highest quality production for both the performers and the audience. Yamaha digital mixing is an integral part of it and it’s always a fun one for us to do.”

CTS AVL team at CRS 2024:

Jonathan Schwarz - FOH engineer; Jeff Redwine - Monitor engineer; Gunther Bethge and Adam Boe - Sound techs; Taite McKinney - System tech; Richie Lawson - Graphics ops.