This year be-gan with a break from touring, which I needed to re-charge. In April and May, I had the pleasure of joining Margo Price and her extra-ordinary band on the road for a few shows @ FOH duties. Margo has a brand-new-album (happy album release) called Days of Unrest and her crew and band has been a got-damn delight to follow. Thanks Mar-go.

Now I am back out and about with my proverbial bedfellows in Allison Russell’s Rainbow Coalition. Allison has a brand-new-album (happy album release) called In the Hour of Chaos and her band has been a got-damn delight to follow. We are out on thee road at the behest of Sarah Mclachlan‘s Better Broken Tour; playing a lot of usual suspects in the way of ampitheaters and pavilions, and reminiscent of a 2024 support slot that we did, but new, and improved, and how I am enjoying the new songs that Allison & her world have written.

I could go on and on about the interpersonal pleasures of this tour and on, and on, but really I just want to put some thoughts on music-restructuring of FOH mixes and perpetual learning, as well as some things I am trying new to kick out of old habits. I have forgone bringing my personal Allen & Heath dLive for this tour, which I have had dialed into a show with Allison for a few years now, with which I’ve set up to mix monitors as well, so I sort of do a dance jumping between FOH and Monitor desk duties all show. In lieu of my comfort zone, I am mixing FOH on this tour from Sarah’s Solotech supplied Digico Quantum 338 (and a note to say that her audio team, and her production providers @ Solotech, have been absolute gems, generous with time and knowledge).

At this scale of touring, in a support slot, it is not an expected offer for the headline act to nest you into their own production; but it makes things easier for everyone when it works. I am really un-practiced with Digico desks, but I wanted to use it as an opportunity to re-think a mix approach and put the hours in.

I am only now hatching out of some of the (in)security blankets I have used because I’m sometimes too shy to take certain risks at FOH, especially on a show of this size. But, in a studio setting, every album or project I work on requires a different approach to setup, tracking, mix, etc… So I’ve been thinking it might be a little phoned-in to keep working off of the same mix approach that I used with Allison when I started working with her in 2021…

Any-ways. I’m not going to go into details of EQ and Compression and FX like some kind of god-damn dork. You can ask me about that if you are interested. This is really just a personal blog and life update, digital business card, etc., etc. And, maybe, some bit of it will be helpful or inspiring to someone thinking through these things. But I have been thinking of this re-working of my approach with this show, and what faders I ride and how I use (or don’t) use groups, group processing, what goes in, what comes out, etc… It is no-different than getting handed a certain guitar or drum, on a session; the first order of business is listening to the instrument in your hand, getting a feel for how it responds to you — it will play differently than the guitar you have at home, on your couch. You are best to adjust your playing, the instrument is inviting you to play it a certain way. I think mixing a show is like that, you have to “catch” the band from stage, and figure out what songs they are playing, and how they are playing them, and how they are asking you to translate that to the speakers in a venue, to an audience. Romantic!

One notes of taking a leap of faith and making a change, mainly I have been impressed and delighted by some Teegarden PAC-116 mics on “drum overhead” duties. They are dropped on the drum rug and get a nice, phase co-herent image of the kit, and more cymbal definition than you think; and no issues with feedback. I have been scared to try it because, by all means, it sounded like a really bad idea. Maybe I will try it later in the fall when we are playing some smaller rooms — but for now I have to say, BIG UPS to how they translate in lieu of overheads, and it keeps the look cleaner…