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Dan + Shay Tour Takes ‘Good Things’ On Tour

PRG provided audio, video, and lighting systems for the latest tour by country stars Dan + Shay, backing their 'Good Things' album.

The Dan + Shay audio crew at front of house. Front row, left to right: Austin Brucker (Monitor Engineer), Taylor Bray (FOH Engineer), and Eric Thomas (SE/Crew Chief). Back row: Taylor Pescatore (PA/Stage Patch), Justin Stiepleman (PA/B Stage), and Justin Curtiss (Monitor Tech/RF).
The Dan + Shay audio crew at front of house. Front row, left to right: Austin Brucker (Monitor Engineer), Taylor Bray (FOH Engineer), and Eric Thomas (SE/Crew Chief). Back row: Taylor Pescatore (PA/Stage Patch), Justin Stiepleman (PA/B Stage), and Justin Curtiss (Monitor Tech/RF).

Nashville, TN (February 22, 2022)—When COVID brought the entire touring industry to a halt in March, 2020, few tours felt that swift impact more than the jaunt headlined by country stars Dan + Shay. A mere three sold-out shows into the run behind their Good Things album, they had to pull up stakes and go home. When the production finally resumed, the crew dusted off its audio, video and lighting systems—all provided by PRG—and got back to work.

For audio, PRG accommodated a request by Taylor Bray, Dan + Shay’s front-of-house engineer for the past eight years, and provided a single-truck pack of 32 K1, 40 K2 and a half-dozen Kara enclosures, 18 KS28 subs and 48 LA12X amplified controllers housed in custom racks. For the shows, main arrays comprised 16 K1 flown over four K2 downs per side, augmented by adjacent out-fill arrays of 16 K2 per side. Ground subs were grouped in threes and vertically strapped to six KS28 chariots in an asymmetrical cardioid configuration, and each sub cluster was topped by a single Kara front-fill enclosure. A pair of L-Acoustics P1 processors paired with M1 measurement tools provided overall system tuning and processing.

A Tour of Duty with The War On Drugs

Each night, the artists would open their show out on a plus sign-shaped B stage 60 feet out from downstage, returning there several times throughout the two-hour performance for their quieter, more intimate numbers. With the full-band portions of the show being louder, the audio crew point to LA Network Manager’s relatively new Cardioid Extended (Cx) preset library as aiding keeping the full system under control.

One of the tour’s six KS28 cardioid-configured ground sub clusters on its chariot and topped with a single Kara enclosure for front-fill
One of the tour’s six KS28 cardioid-configured ground sub clusters on its chariot and topped with a single Kara enclosure for front-fill.

“The Cx preset for the KS28 subs really cleaned up everything—not only the stage but the room, too,” says Eric Thomas, PRG’s FOH system tech. “It really helped keep the energy in the room and tighten up the low end. It felt like a 100-percent improvement in sub energy.” With K1/K2 arrays paired with KS28 subs, Thomas notes that the crowd was “all smiles” regardless of where they were standing or seated. “I would walk around quite a bit while the band performed and found that our coverage was within 3dB almost everywhere.”

Bray shared one shining moment, noting, “My mom even came to a show and told me, ‘Their voices sounded great—I could understand them, and it felt really good.’ And yet, at the same performance, I put enough energy on the floor that management came back saying, ‘Hey, it’s pumpin’!’ So if you can make both mom and management happy in the same room, that’s a special rig.”

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