Vance Joy hasn’t had what you’d call a slow and steady climb up the charts. It’s been one big jump after another. In 2013, his single “Riptide” off his first EP, God Loves You When You’re Dancing, was both an Australian and U.S. commercial radio hit. He followed that up in 2014 by joining Taylor Swift’s The 1989 World Tour, appearing on all North American, UK and Australian dates. Now he’s headlining his own U.S. tour off his second studio album, Nation of Two. Mix caught up with FOH engineer Edgardo “Verta” Vertanessian at the band’s Seattle stop in July.
“The concept of the band is that every single part of the music should be played live by a band member, night in and out, and by doing so, every performance becomes unique,” Vertanessian explains. “I apply the same concept to my FOH mixing, and I do not use snapshots or any major automation. Although I have a number of cues per song, I do them manually every night, with the help of a few specific macros which I may or may not use depending on that night’s performance. We have a fair amount of acoustic guitars, ukeleles and guiteleles, whose sound can change drastically under different weather conditions.
“The Avid S6L has a fantastic sound by itself. I only use a handful of really good plugins and let the desk do the rest. However, for reverbs I rely heavily on hardware units—Bricasti M7, Lexicon PCM 92, TC 3000 and TC 4000,” he continues. “In terms of microphones, we have DPA d:facto on the main vocal, DPA 2011s on snare drum, DPA 4099s on toms and horns, and a combination of Shure, Sennheiser, Audio-Technica, and Audix for the rest of the inputs. All our DIs are Radial.”
Tour Profile: Juanes, by Candace Horgan, July 1, 2008
“All the band is on Ultimate Ears UE11s,” adds monitor engineer Mani Hammond. “I am running nine channels of Shure PSM900 with two Shure P9HW hardwired packs for drums and keys. Things need to scale back when doing fly dates, and carrying the same set of IEMs to these shows helps me keep the sound consistent for the band wherever we are. We always carry our mic package. Once you switch to DPA mics there really is no going back in my opinion.”
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