New York, NY (September 7, 2023)—A cornerstone of the New York City indie scene for ages, Yeah Yeah Yeahs have been touring the U.S.—and the rest of the world—behind last year’s Cool It Down album. Along for the ride has been a tour package from Nashville-based Worley Sound that is overseen nightly by engineers Daniel Good (FOH) and Nahuel Gutierrez (monitors).
The pair are each mixing on Allen & Heath dLive S5000 surfaces, along with DM0 MixRacks handling 128 channels of 96 kHz input processing. For I/O, various DX168 expanders are distributed on the stage. A SuperMADI card was also included, which allows for a multichannel broadcast feed when needed, as well as a 128-channel Waves card for multitrack recording and playback.
The production team wanted to use the same gear throughout the tour to minimize prep time locating rental equipment at each stop. “The way you can lay out Allen & Heath consoles and configure the hardware any way you want? We knew that it could accomplish what we needed quickly and easily,” said Good.
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At front of house, Good uses dLive’s display output to set up a live RTA on an external monitor. “It’s cool to have that without having SMAART, to see how things are translating.” He also makes use of the console’s ABCD input feature, which allows a user to swap the input source of a mic channel using a user-defined SoftKey. “There are so many SoftKeys that I was almost looking for reasons to use them,” he joked. “Karen will jump mics sometimes – I need to be ready to swap from wired mics to wireless instantly and in pitch black, so I can do that now with a single button push.”
For on-stage monitoring, Yeah Yeah Yeahs rely almost entirely on IEMs for their current tour. “Everyone uses in-ears except for the drummer, who receives stems into a small mixer and does his own headphone mix,” explained Gutierrez. “It’s the first full tour for the band on in-ears, but once they got used to them, they were really happy with it.”
Gutierrez, too, had good words for the console, noting, “We basically mix everything in the box, the DYN8 dynamic EQ is fantastic, as well as all the onboard FX and parallel compression options.” He also pointed to the dLive’s new Source Expander plug-in: “That’s becoming a really good tool to clean mixes. I have it inserted on cymbals, vocals, and a couple of the open mics that are not used frequently to eliminate background noise.”
For creating distorted vocals on certain songs, Gutierrez employs the Dual Stage Valve preamp emulation. “It’s probably one of the best vocal distortions I’ve heard,” he remarked. “We’ve tried pedals and a few other solutions, but nothing sounded right until we found this emulation.”
