In the space of seven years, four albums and a staggering 17 Top-5 singles on the Billboard Country chart, Luke Combs has become one of the biggest names in music. This year, he’s been taking his hits around the globe on a world tour, and while the journey will see him ultimately hit 16 countries—August was spent in Australia, and October will find him tearing through Europe—Combs spent most of the spring and summer packing NFL stadiums across the U.S. Playing to audiences of up to 65,000 a night, Combs entertained one and all with smashes from his most-recent collections, Growin’ Up, released last year, and its follow-up, Gettin’ Old, which came out in March.
Combs’ career took off like a rocket in 2016, and manning the front of house desk since those early days has been engineer Todd Lewis, the first person hired for the singer’s crew. “I missed out on the van touring days, but just barely,” Lewis said with a chuckle. “We were all on one bus; the band, me and the tour manager rode around on an XLII for a year and a half when we were opening for Brantley Gilbert. Then we graduated to two buses—and now we’re up to 60 or so on the crew.”
Also there each step of the way has been Special Event Services (SES) of Mocksville, North Carolina, providing sound and lighting. “As soon as we started opening, we needed gear that we just didn’t have,” said Lewis. “SES had some basic baby-band package that they let us use as we grew; we’ve stuck with them, and they have been awesome.”
The audio gear Combs has now isn’t a baby-band package, of course; Lewis builds house mixes on a DiGiCo Quantum7 console, and his FOH position runs light when it comes to outboard gear. “I’ve got a Bricasti M7 reverb, an Eventide H3000 Harmonizer, a Rupert Neve Designs 5045 and that’s really all I’m using,” he said. “I’m not using plug-ins or anything like that; those 7s just sound so dang good, I don’t feel like I need another weak point in the audio path, so everything’s in the desk. In a stadium show where you’re in a big concrete and metal box, you’re not going to hear the finer minutiae of all these crazy outboard units or plug-ins. You could turn every reverb off and it probably would clean up your mix, but you got to put a little spice on there.”
Lewis works with 56 inputs out at front of house, and the console’s snapshot feature comes in handy throughout the show, since Combs is backed by a seven-member band, many of which are multi-instrumentalists. He explained, “From an automation standpoint, it’d be great to just mix analog-style and not have any snapshots, but when the instruments change song-to-song, you’ve got to be able to move that stuff around, just to balance out the energies of the mix and keep it all in check.”
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That said, Lewis is perpetually riding the faders throughout every show, creating a dynamic mix that leans into the Southern Rock vibe that seeps into the show due to the slide guitars and B3 organ onstage. A far more crucial reason for riding the faders, however, is because the musicians are often out on the tour’s goal post-shaped thrust. “You get a banjo with a microphone inside of it 60 feet in front of a P.A., so you’re working to get the best mix,” he said. “I don’t sit there and compress the crap out of everything and just let it ride.”
Inevitably, the most challenging moment every night on the stadium run was to mix the show’s finale, where all four opening acts returned to the stage. “Our two mobile BGVs are out on the end of the thrust,” said Lewis, “so with Luke and the four guests, that’s seven in front of the P.A.—which can get interesting. It took a minute to wrangle that in and make it sound like humans singing again, but after the first two shows, we were pretty dialed in.”
All those guest vocals are captured with Shure Beta 58 capsules on Axient Digital wireless handhelds, while Combs himself is heard through a Shure KSM11 condenser mic. “It does the right things to his vocal in the right places,” said Lewis. Elsewhere onstage, background vocals are hardwired Beta 58s, and all guitars go direct into modeler units. Meanwhile, the drum kit is nabbed with the standard Beta 91 and 52 on kick, Beta 57 on snare, Sennheiser e 904s on the toms, Sennheiser e 614s on the hi-hat and ride cymbal, and a Shure VP8 for overhead.
With Combs and company using every inch of the stage and thrust, keeping track of which vocal is coming through which hardwired BGV mic in any given song could be an accident waiting to happen. However, monitor engineer Michael Zuehsow solved the issue by creating a GPIO routing system where every background vocal station has a multi-button footswitch with each singer’s name on it; the musician simply steps on their name to route that microphone to the right channel. “I’ve only got three background vocal channels,” said Lewis, “but if they step on their name, their vocal comes up on their channel strip; it’s pretty convenient and it keeps all the mixes the same.”
