Kenny Chesney has never done anything small, and ever since he began playing stadiums in 2005, his tours have only drawn larger and larger crowds. The country star’s “Here and Now 2022” excursion was no exception, selling just shy of 1.3 million tickets across 41 shows, breaking a number of stadiums’ house records in the process.
“We had a phenomenal summer,” confirmed Phil “SidePhil” Robinson, Chesney’s monitor engineer since 2001. “People held their tickets for over four years for this thing; they didn’t sell. We gave them chances to throughout COVID, and a few did, but the majority didn’t; they held on to them because they like Kenny.”
Do they ever. When Chesney hit the stage in April for the opening night in Tampa, Fla. it seemed as if no time had passed since his last tour in 2019. Behind the scenes, however, much had changed. His longtime production provider, Morris Sound & Light, shuttered during the height of the pandemic, leading to a search for new vendors. Once Clair Global emerged as the tour’s audio provider, the hunt was on for a new front-of-house engineer who could not only create a quality mix befitting the stadium-filling star, but also fit into a production team now in transition.
That engineer turned out to be Robert Scovill. While the six-time TEC Award winner has been a key player in Avid’s VENUE design and development team from the start and has worked on a slew of high-profile award shows, he’s best-known for mixing acts that are in it for the long haul—most famously Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who he worked with from the mid-Nineties through their final 2017 40th anniversary tour.
After all those years, it came as a terrible shock to Scovill when Petty unexpectedly passed away at home, just seven days after that tour closed with a three-night stand at the Hollywood Bowl.
“I committed to taking some time off the road,” Scovill recalled. “I said, ‘You know what? Maybe this is a good time to pull the plug on touring for a little bit and find some other avenues.’ And then, of course, right about the time I was getting ready to go back to work, the pandemic hit.” While he spent much of the lockdown era creating live sound training videos for Avid, along with a weekly online outreach to industry professionals called The Back Lounge, when the opportunity to mix Chesney came up, it wasn’t a hard choice to make: “Honestly, I jumped at it. The idea of doing the Nashville thing, which is working on weekends, and having that be at the stadium level? That seemed very appetizing to me. I thought, ‘Yeah, I’ll go do that!’”
Having a mix of new production vendors, a new FOH pro, the continued specter of COVID-19 and other factors could have made for a challenging tour—but it was nothing of the sort.
“I have never in my life been on a tour of this scale and seen things run like this,” Scovill marveled, hours before the tour’s penultimate show at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass. “It’s like butter going in and out of these places, and frankly, that’s a testimony to Kenny’s longstanding production manager, Ed Wannebo, and stage manager, Tom Nisun. This is a huge crew, a huge production, and man, there’s no drama. It’s people working in harmony and nailing it every single day. That’s what makes it fun—whether it’s lighting, video, rigging, staging or audio, everybody’s buddy-buddy out here and has each other’s back. It’s so refreshing to see that many people all rowing in the same direction.”
That shared dedication was evident from the start, when the band and audio engineers conferred before the tour about reducing sub energy on stage. “I don’t mix a big sub show to begin with,” said Scovill, “but we set it all up initially with the subs in a traditional location underneath the stage. I remember walking around onstage when we were doing some tuning, thinking, ‘Okay, this is going to be a problem.’ Kenny has a T-shaped thrust that goes out 30 to 40 feet into the audience, and it was really resonating—there was some serious bottom-end happening out there. I made the call after the first rehearsal day in Raymond James Stadium: We took the sub package out from underneath the stage and moved it forward out into the audience under the T. That made a huge difference; we’re using a cardioid subwoofer deployment under the T, and that puts the band positions in the cardioid null, as opposed to the cardioid null being behind them when the subs are under the stage, with that canceled sub energy getting pushed up into their performance area. Now, with regard to sub energy, it’s really quiet up on stage.”
Out at the front-of-house mix position, Scovill used an Avid S6L 48 D console to mix roughly 100 inputs from Chesney and his six-member band. “It’s a 48-fader version that I requested specifically for this tour,” he said. “I got to the point where I said, ‘I am sick of trying to cram shows this size into 32 faders.’ It’s cool that you can do that, don’t get me wrong, but it’s like, why am I banging my head against the wall when there is a frame available with more faders?”
The added real estate came in handy, as it allowed him to use one of his favorite S6L features—Dual Operator Workflow: “I use Dual Operator on the console as a single operator, and I absolutely love it. It allows you to parse the console into two consoles, so you can have two completely different focuses; since it’s set up for two people to operate on it, I keep the right side of the console geared toward vocals and system drive, and the left side of the console as all band, instrumentation and more. They have independent layouts left and right, and I can navigate those two separate sections completely autonomously from each other. It works great.”
Leaning primarily on Avid and third-party plug-ins, Scovill had little in the way of outboard gear at FOH, outside of a Tube-Tech SMC 2BM multiband compressor used across the mix bus and four channels of Neve 5045 Primary Source Enhancers placed on the vocal mics of Chesney and his guests. “He’s out on the T for 80 percent of the show, and the 5045 is great at handling that,” said Scovill. “I could probably create a similar result on the S6L channel strip if I needed to, but when you couple the 5045 with S6L’s Automatic Delay Compensation on the console, which now addresses hardware inserts, it’s a no-brainer. It allows me to put this show at any volume I want, even with him out in front of the P.A., without having to hack his mic to death with EQ to avoid potential feedback.”
