Indie pop sensation Rilo Kiley (Jenny Lewis, vocals/guitar/keyboards; Blake Sennet, guitar/vocals; Pierre de Reeder, bass; and Jason Boesel, drums) are out supporting their third album, More Adventurous. We caught up with the band’s front-of-house engineer, Robbie Lackritz, in mid-June at San Francisco’s The Grand Ballroom at the Regency Center. The band then heads out to Europe before returning to the U.S. for a string of East Coast dates supporting Coldplay.
“I really got into using BSS DPR-404s and 402s on this tour, especially on vocals,” Lackritz says. “I have extremely different types of voices, snaps, handclaps, tambourines, a harmonica and a trumpet that all come down my center vocal channel multiple times. I can use the BSS’ de-essing function to quickly adjust for timbre changes by sweeping the frequency to the problem area. Jenny has a very soft but full voice that requires more gain than the typical voice and is more prone to excessive sibilance around 8k to 10k. The shared vocals and trumpet both produce a harsh 2k to 3.15k region. Blake has a very breathy voice that produces an excessive amount of 200 Hz, but lacks slightly in midrange clarity.” Other choice outboard gear for Lackritz includes Drawmer DS404 and BSS 504 gates, Yamaha SPX-990s and TC Electronic D2. The band is on Sennheiser 300 Series in-ear transmitter/receivers. “I can run two mixes off of one transmitter by sending one mono mix to each XLR input on the transmitter and then hard-panning each mono receiver left and right.
“The band has a lot of aspects about their music that draw from really diverse influences,” he continues. “There are folk songs, loud rock songs with triumphant guitar harmonies and ballads — a really fun band to mix.”
