Photo: Tony Felgueiras
Lindsey Stirling almost never stops moving. Uniquely combining her own virtuosa violin playing with live keys and drums, and prerecorded tracks, the America’s Got Talent finalist dances almost continuously as she plays.
Mixing the 44-date U.S. tour, which is selling out thousand-plus seaters nightly, is FOH Rob McWhorter, who’s been out with Stirling, drummer Drew Steen and keyboardist Jason Gaviati since September. Performance Audio of Salt Lake City, Utah (performanceaudio.com), put together a compact package that includes Stirling’s Shure PSM 1000/UHF-R wireless rig, an Avid Profile board and 52 channels of Pro Tools HD2 so McWhorter can record every show.
“Her YouTube ties have been really big, and we have a videographer on the road, so we thought we better make sure we always have audio,” McWhorter says. “We never know what we’re going to use.”
McWhorter, a partner in studio Why Sound (Logan, Utah) when he’s not on the road, uses an onboard Eventide plug-in bundle, and particularly likes the reverb: “I can do a long reverb tail, but it doesn’t feel cheesy or wet,” he says. “It doesn’t feel like an effect; it just feels real and big.”
McWhorter also handles the monitor mix on this high-energy tour; he has all the musicians on JH Audio JH16 Pro in-ears. “When Lindsey was out previously doing her solo shows, that was a little bit of a ‘ghetto’ scenario with cheap consumer headphones,” he says. “Now she’s on great, true in-ears, but it’s a big job mixing FOH and monitors, so I use a lot of snapshot recalls for the in-ear mixes. FOH is not recalled, though. It’s live, and it’s different, every night.”
