ATLANTA — Mastodon band members took tracks from their Crack the Skye album to the live stage for the first time at the Bonnaroo Music Festival last year, and they also started relying on Shure PSM® 700 personal monitors instead of floor monitors. "For me, it's been tremendously better," drummer Brann Dailor said, on adjusting to the loss of traditional floor monitors. "There's just so much clarity in my mix now, and I can control exactly what I hear—make it sound just like the record if I want."
"When we got them, I was kind of nervous," guitarist Bill Kelliher said. "Going out in front of a crowd of people with no monitors in front of me; I had never done that in about 20 years of playing. What I can hear now sounds amazing. The clarity is really good, and our fans are telling us we never sounded better. I think we played our best show ever the first night we tried them."
On the input side of their stage plot, Mastodon has been using hardwired Shure Beta 57A® microphones for vocals at three positions across the frontline as well as for a “robot voice” produced by bass player Troy Sanders with the aid of tremolo pedal effects. The rest of the stage is hardwired as well, with SM7s chosen for guitar cabinets, and the drum kit receiving the full Shure treatment: SM98s on snare, an SM91 in the kick drum, SM81 on hat, and KSM44s flown above as overheads.
“I ultimately want to start double-micing the toms,” Mastodon FOH engineer Lewis Lovely said. “Right now I have a Beta 52®A on the floor tom. I want to add a Beta 56A there as well, winding both out-of-phase down to one input channel to get more bottom-end. The SM98s I have on the snares really add punch and meatiness if I need it.”
Although Lewis is tasked with delivering serious metal weight, “I don’t want to color anything they do, and I don’t want to step in the way of anything. I just want to give the audience an accurate representation of their sound. The challenge each night with Mastodon is to get good gain structure. If the tone is there, there’s not much to do except sit back and let it get loud. The band will do the rest.”
After the album’s release this year, Mastodon will perform more tracks live, with plans for a European summer tour with Metallica among other performances.
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