Sound Companies
Erickson Sound Productions, SIR
Venues
Various, including Grace Cathedral
San Francisco, CA
Crew
- FOH Engineer: Adam Robinson
- Monitor Engineer: Micah Davis
- Tour Manager: Dave Ellison
- Production Manager: Britton Billik
- Backline Tech: Matthew Van Gasbeck
Gear
FOH
- Console: DiGiCo SD12
- Plugins: Waves, LiveProfessor, SSL, UAD, McDSP, Liquid Sonics, Plugin Alliance
MON
- Console: DiGiCo SD12
- Vocal Mics: sE V7, Sennheiser MMD435
- Guitar Amp Mic: Neural Quad Cortex
- Piano Mics: DPA 4021, Helpinstill Low Sensor
- IEMs: FIR Audio KR5, Shure PSM1000, P10r+
Event Details
Noise Pop, a music & arts festival that takes place in different San Francisco venues, returned with a wide variety of acts that performed from Feb. 14-March 1 this year. The annual event, which got its start in 1993 as a “five bands for five dollars show” at one venue, has since expanded into a multi-day, multiple-venue showcase for emerging talent throughout San Francisco.
During Noise Pop 2025, St. Vincent performed a special intimate show at Grace Cathedral on Feb. 23. For this rare St. Vincent performance, it was just Anne Clark (vocals and guitar) accompanied by pianist Rachel Eckroth. Playing in a French Gothic architectural church from the 1930’s made for a unique show indeed and the audiences true respect for the performance, with all ears on Annie (St. Vincent), you could hear a pin drop while she performed. Mixing FOH was Adam Robinson (Jonas Brothers, Machine Gun Kelly, Josh Groban, among many), and Monitor Engineer Micah Davis.
FOH Engineer Adam Robinson was mixing St. Vincent on this one-off show on a DiGiCo SD12. Robinson notes that consoles nowadays definitely have a wide range of flavors built in, but for a show like this, he still often goes back to the plugins he is familiar with. “I’ll be on lots of different consoles for this small duo show format since we often do it for unique events like this one, so bringing a plugin system with me means I can get to the same results quickly with whatever desk I need to work on for a particular show. For the full band show (where I’m carrying control), I’m definitely leaning hard into the built-in processing of the desk.”
Robinson only brought his plugin system, piano mics and vocal mics for this show. “I worked to spec narrow coverage pattern speakers as to keep as much off the walls as I could. I knew I could get rid of some initial reflections, but the natural reverberation of the space was still there, so I just played into it. I only added FX in a few spots since the room was already adding its own. Live sound is a game of compromises- what can we do to give the best sounding show to the most people attending. For an event like this, working to maximize what I could do with the PA was more important than being a stickler about a certain console.”
Robinson says he was actually impressed at how lush the room’s natural reverb was. “It ended up being quite beautiful and useful. The frequencies that hung were all below the articulation range of her vocal, so it was a nice surprise that I could keep it sounding very clean and clear throughout the space.”
This was the first show date for Micah Davis who was just brought on as Monitor Engineer. “For this show it was a quick in and out fly date, so everything was rented except for Annie’s guitar rig. The only things I brought to the gig were my IEMs and a console file. Vocal mics consisted of an sE V7 for Annie Clark (St. Vincent) and a Sennheiser MMD435 for pianist Rachel Eckroth. For IEMs right now, we’re on FIR Audio’s Krypton-5’s, we’re using Shure PSM1000’s with P10r+ packs for RF.”
“This show was all onboard processing for me. It was an intimate performance in an amazing space. So I wanted to do my best to present it to Annie and Rachel accurately and honestly. We had four stereo pairs of mics in play to capture the audience and ambience of the room. So that’s all the reverb I could ever ask for.
On some gigs, trying to keep the sound of the room out of the ears can be really important. Especially when drums are involved. That was definitely not the case here. For this, I felt like it was important to get out of the way and let the magic that Adam (Robinson) was making out front, gel into what we had going on stage.”
—Steve Jennings
