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Neon Trees Take Root

NEW YORK, NY—Neon Trees’ latest album, Pop Psychology, debuted at number one on Billboard’s Top Rock Albums chart warranting an extended tour that will find ‘The Trees’ on the road until late fall.

NEW YORK, NY—Neon Trees’ latest album, Pop Psychology, debuted at number one on Billboard’s Top Rock Albums chart warranting an extended tour that will find ‘The Trees’ on the road until late fall.

Neal Duffy, FOH engineer for Neon Trees, with an Allen & Heath iLive T‐112 console used on the band’s UK tour leg. “Some nights, it’s a concert hall or big club and everything has a pretty normal schedule.” shares Neal Duffy, FOH Engineer for the band. “Other nights, it a festival show and everything is Go! Go! Go!” Duffy has been with the band for three years, but all along, his aim has been to emulate the band’s album sound in concert. “Before I went out with the band this time, I spent a lot of time with their recordings,” begins Duffy. “I want to recreate for the fans the sound they have been listening to, but put my artistic touch on it to make the live setting fresh.”

A good sound starts with good input, and the band tour s with a sizable mic complement. Vocals are captured with Audio-Technica AE6100 handheld mics for the leads and the AE4100 model for the rest of the band. Meanwhile, the guitar and bass cabinets are miked with AT4040s and a Sennheiser e 609, respectively. For the drums, there’s a Shure Beta91 on the kick, and a Yamaha Subkick, too; otherwise, the drums are surrounded by Sennheiser e 604s on the toms, Audio-Technica ATM450s on hat and snare bottom, ATM650 on snare top and AT4033s for overheads. Rounding out the stage capturing are a slew of Radial DI boxes.

For the U.S. leg of the tour, Duffy has been using an Allen & Heath iLive-144 modular console at the FOH position with an iDR-10 and iDR-32 rack set up to fulfill opening act needs. Also on-hand at FOH is a Focusrite RedNet 4 preamp interface and a Manley VoxBox for the lead vocals.

“I’ve been using Allen & Heath for three years now,” said Duffy. “It’s a stable and sonically beautiful surface… then you have their tech support and there really is no comparison.”

“I’m at a gig and some people are checking out my original compact iLive T-112 console with comments, like ‘What’s that toy?’ because of the small footprint. I always say to them, ‘listen to my show, then we’ll talk about it.’ Afterwards, they come back and want to know everything about the ‘toy!’”

At stageside, monitor engineer Mike Bangs oversees another Allen & Heath iLive console—this one a T-112—with an iDR-48, which sends mixes to a cross-stage monitoring and front-fill solution. The unusual arrangement places a Vue Audiotechnik al-8 element and hs-25 subwoofer on both sides of the stage facing inward. A pair of subcompact al-4 elements in front of each al-8/hs-25 combination provide additional front fill.
American Music & Sound (A&H US Distributor)
americanmusicandsound.com

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