San Diego, CA (November 5, 2026)—J.P. Huff, FOH engineer for Pierce the Veil, has been touring with the SSL Live platform since the beginning of 2025, most recently using an L550 Plus during the band’s Australian tour.
Huff, with Pierce the Veil since 2022, has now mixed the band on every console model in the SSL Live range. He takes advantage of SSL Live’s showfile compatibility across the entire console range to move seamlessly between models, from the compact L100 Plus to the flagship L650, while retaining the same showfiles.
“I built the showfile on an L350 Plus and deployed it across an L650, L200 Plus and L100 Plus using SSL Live’s compatibility mode,” Huff says. “The only real difference between my setups is the stem architecture. From the L350 Plus up to the L650, I’ve pushed stem usage to almost the maximum, which is a big part of my workflow.”
He elaborates: “I leave certain inputs mono to do time-based effects on the channel. With Pierce the Veil, it’s stereo guitars, but they’re both mono until they hit the stem, so there are four inputs and four stems—two stereo stems—that go to a guitars master stem and then go to a band master stem. And there are also stems for vocals, and for kick, snare, drums, parallel drums, parallel distortion drums, cymbals, toms, et cetera,” he says.
There are also “buried” stems, he says, including a talkback stem that sums all of the talkback channels together and can be muted when needed.
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He continues: “I’ve got crowd mics on stage coming to front-of-house, and I can pick off my master bus and send it to a channel. That channel feeds a stem, and then I have another stem with all the crowd mics. I time-align those, then sidechain-compress the crowd mic stem while the band’s playing. When the band’s not playing, the crowd cheers and you get all the ambience. All that prints to a stem, and that is a quick broadcast mix in the box.”
Huff first used SSL’s Live consoles several years ago with pop singer Jake Miller, mixing on an L200, and later took an L300 on tour with R&B/jazz artist Masego. “The SSL Live desk was the undisputed champion every time I took it out,” he says.
