Tomas Wolfe, pictured with the Roland M-5000 OHRCA Live Mixing Console.

L.A. native Tomas Wolfe worked his way up from the bottom in live audio: he began with stints at the quintessential Sunset Boulevard music venues the Viper Room and the Roxy Theatre. Two years on the L.A. club circuit led to touring, which he discovered he had even more affinity for. That led to road gigs with a series of artists including BØRNS, Belly, Everlast, the Mowgli’s and most recently The Neighbourhood, on U.S. and European tour legs. It was during this time that Wolfe first encountered the Roland M-5000 OHRCA Live Mixing Console. It was love at first sight — and sound. “I had read a bit about the M-5000, so I went to the Roland offices in L.A. and checked it out, and ended up doing a couple of shows with it in L.A. I found that I really liked the sound and the flexibility of the workflow.”

What Wolfe likes about the signal path on the M-5000 is that it’s his workflow, not one dictated by the console’s architecture. “It’s very customizable to my needs,” he explains. “The user layers and the user-defined sections are just that — designed for the user to configure it, so I can set up any show for the best way for me to work. Anywhere I want to go on the console is no more than a click or two away.” Sonically, Wolfe says the M-5000 is completely transparent. “What you put in is what comes out,” he says. “There’s no inherent coloration to the sound. The onboard EQ and dynamics are great. I’m a huge fan of the sound and smoothness of the dynamic EQ, and the multiband compressor. Then there are the onboard effects — I was a huge fan of the classic Roland [RE-201] Space Echo and I grew up on the SDE-3000 reverb and delay, and it’s so great to have all of them and more on the console. And the M-5000 is surprisingly scalable. Its open architecture lets me set it up to fit my workflow in any type of situation. It’s really the ultimate live-sound mixer.”