New York, NY (July 23, 2025)—American singer-songwriter Teddy Swims has been touring the world this year, bringing his mix of country, pop and R&B around the globe, and he’s had systems from Clair Global covering every stop.
Along for the ride is FOH Mixer Drew Thornton, bringing his experience mixing the alt pop of Billie Eilish to the effort. “My history is mixing pop elements, attuned to mixing like a record, whereas Teddy’s tour is a nice hybrid,” explains Thornton. “This is a unique camp where they use a lot of my board feeds for Teddy’s social media. I’ll add a little bit of ambience and then sidechain it to timecode, so it dips it when the song’s happening. I’m basically building a broadcast mix.”
Thornton is riding the faders on an Allen & Heath dLive S5000: “I love how much I can get out of this desk,” he continues. “I don’t like going out of the console for anything that’s very show pertinent, such as effects or input processing.” Adjacent to it are a pair of Waves Extreme SoundGrid Servers. “There’s a lot of options with Waves, such as the SuperRack LiveBox VST3 plugins, but I also do enjoy the redundancy and the safety of it.”
Bringing the house mix to the masses is a sizable d&b audiotechnik KSL rig, chosen by Thornton “because of the cardioid factor. I think of it as wasted energy when you have omnidirectional, low-end drivers firing everywhere into the room. To me, there’s so many things happening in this show—a lot of people on stage needing attention—and I want everyone to sound big across the whole room.”
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Main hangs are a mixture of KSL8s & KSL12s and KSL side hangs. A decision to fly SL-Subs came as audience demand grew in the UK, and the audio team then opened the rig to 270-degrees, adding a rear hang of d&b V Series. Ground subs are more SL-Subs & Y10Ps for front fills.
In monitor world and by special request after the tour visited Australia, monitor tech Lara Smith was drafted in from the JPJ Audio offices in Sydney to support Teddy’s monitor engineer, Justin Walker. Smith sets up the stage and has been using the brand-new Shure Axient Digital PSM IEM system, powered by WMAS.
“We were one of the first tours in the world to take out the new system and it’s been fantastic,” she says. “They sound amazing; they’re incredible to work with, visually everything is at your fingertips, and we’ve been able to solve any wireless monitoring issues quickly and easily.”
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Walker is tackling monitor mixes on a DiGiCo Quantum 338 Pulse console, noting, “I was on an SD12 on our last tour, but as we’ve added three background vocalists and a couple more inputs, I need more internally to handle that. The Quantum processing has been great because I use Waves for additional processing, but they’re a very natural sounding band, so I don’t tweak a lot.”
With the team built and running smoothly, the tour just keeps going, well, swimmingly. Teddy Swims is now in the U.S. before the production returns to Australia this autumn, followed by Asia and the Middle East.
