True artists make it all look easy, and that’s what country artist Thomas Rhett and his band is doing on the current Better in Boots tour. But the same can be said for the audio team, who puts on impressively consistent shows at every venue. Spectrum Sound is supporting the team with a d&b audiotechnik KSL Series system, and both FOH and monitor engineers are on DiGiCo Quantum 7 consoles.
The audio team is working for a band of nine, including two background singers. Thomas Rhett sings into a Shure Nexadyne 8 cardioid capsule, as do the background singers and members of the band who sing. But it’s all the places where that and other signals go that’s fascinating.
This is production manager Dustin Reynolds’ first tour with Thomas Rhett. “It’s a tight-knit audio crew,” he says. The success of the tour began with the rehearsals, where the band wanted to be as physically close to each other as possible to ensure tightness. “There was no ‘good enough;’ they wanted to take it all the way, and they have.”
From an Early Age….
FOH engineer Trey Smith was interested in being a FOH engineer from the time he eight years old. “I’m not sure how I knew about that job, but my parents have a drawing of a mixing console now framed at their house that I made growing up. When other kids came over to play with our karaoke machine, I wanted to be the person controlling the knobs.” He did some theater tech work in high school and during that time he also interned as a “grunt” at Mid-America Sound before attending Belmont University to study music business.
While at Belmont, Trey started touring with some friends he met at school, the Christian band Mikeschair. He was mixing FOH, driving a van and trailer, and “doing what I thought a tour manager should be doing.” This led to touring with various other Nashville-based singer/songwriters while still at school. At 21, he landed with pianist Jon McLaughlin when he was opening for Kelly Clarkson — Smith’s first big tour experience. McLaughlin then co-headlined with Sara Bareilles before she hit it big. In March of 2008, her team asked Smith to tour with her, and he still works with her when he’s not out with Thomas Rhett.
After nearly two years with OneRepublic, Smith joined the Thomas Rhett crew in 2018. “It’s a great place to be, and a blessing for me and my family,” he says, noting Rhett’s well-documented reputation for putting family first — not just his own, but his crew’s.
Outboard Gear & Headphones
Many engineers on the Quantum 7 use little to no outboard gear, but not Smith. “I mostly focus on adding more color and saturation with my outboard gear, to achieve a bit more sonic depth,” he says. At the top of his list of outboard gear are the Overstayer units. “They give me some of that drive you get from an analog [console].” Smith has gotten good results from the analog aspects of his outboard gear on Thomas Rhett’s vocal chain, along with group processing on drums, bass and other summed groups. He also leans on the Sonic Farm Creamliner III, as it creates “some of the most unique characteristics to the mix.”
Smith is also quick to credit his Steven Slate Audio VSX headphones. “When you mix in a studio, you want your mix environment to be as accurate and as flat as possible. This lets you mix for the music, versus what room you’re in.” Smith notes this concept is hard to achieve when building a mix for FOH, as tours essentially rehearse and set up the show in large empty warehouses. “The VSX headphones let me have a close to accurate ‘listening environment’ in rehearsal or on tour.” These flat-response headphones use psychoacoustics to emulate a treated recording studio. “My goal is to have my mix translate to whatever P.A. I am using, as well as live broadcasts, where people may be listening on their TV, phone or headphones. These let me make decisions with confidence when building my mix. Adjustments for EQ, reverb, panning, [etc.] aren’t as much of a guessing game as they are when mixing in whatever space you happen to be in.” He adds the headphones allow him to focus on what actually works for the music. (Then he laughs and jokes that he’s not getting paid to say this.)
Let’s Have a Party on the Lawn
System engineer Jeremy Bayne grew up playing the trumpet. He fell into audio at 14 when his church’s tech director moved away and left him the keys to the console. “I had no idea how to do that, but I said ‘Sure, I’ll do it,’” he recalls. He took to it and graduated from Belmont in 2010 with an audio engineering degree. He worked at CTS AVL in Nashville for nearly four years before mixing FOH for Irish hymn composers and performers Keith and Kristyn Getty for three years. At that point, he was hired by Spectrum, and account rep Bobby George called him to go out with Rhett, who he’s been with for four years.
During rehearsals, the band focused on unity and truly playing together, taking their time in their approach to the music. For the system engineer / FOH tech, it could be tedious, but Bayne kept busy making sure the P.A. and FOH rig was working. “My job really started at the production rehearsals in Atlanta, where I could fully deploy [the system], providing Trey with what he wanted,” he says.
Bayne planned out the tour in terms of venues, relying on an extensive Dropbox full of files — a “secret” folder of all the shows they’d ever done. “I can walk into a venue and hand over the file to the riggers, which is great. It’s also fun to look back and see what I was doing at a particular venue a year ago; it’s a constant learning process.”
The entire time, he’s been working with d&b systems. “This [system] is slightly different than the last time we were in amphitheaters. We went from 21 ground subs to 12 on the ground, but then we put eight subs in the air.” The flown subs ensure those farthest away from the stage felt the experience. “Every time I’ve walked the venue with [Rhett], he’d be up running around the lawn, saying ‘I want more P.A. up here — I want a party up here!’” Doing this makes for a tall audio rig, and sometimes it’s only 18 feet off the ground, and the production team does what it can to make sure sight lines aren’t obscured and the lighting rig gets its due. “I work really closely with our lighting director [Alec Takahashi] and I do what I can to make sure I’m not in the way.”
Bayne has been with Smith for four years and knows what he’s looking for. “My goal is to give him the same P.A., same sound, same everything every day, no matter what the circumstances are.” He tells the tale of a show last year at a festival when a rig that was not theirs presented them with a problem that was out of Bayne’s control. He worked the situation, the show went great, and no one was the wiser.
Regarding the d&b system, “I can do almost anything with it. I love the clarity of the box, how flexible it is, and how easy and fast it rigs. And it is one of the easiest systems to tune. It has a setting called temperature humidity control that I can live-edit, depending on how hot and humid it is, and you can hear it physically change the room.”
A Brit Row Guy
Monitor engineer Jimmy Nicholson is from York, England, where he played guitar in bands as a teenager. He studied audio engineering at University of York, originally pursuing a career in the studio. But in school, he worked for the student union’s technical department and fell in love with live audio. Moving to London in 2007, he began working with Britannia Row, a relationship that continued after their acquisition by Clair, with him moving to the States in 2017.
As a “Brit Row guy,” Nicholson had mostly toured with L-Acoustics, but went to d&b with Rhett. “The system that we have out now has one of the cleanest onstage sounds from a monitoring perspective,” he says. “It is kind of weird how little you get back from the P.A. and how clean it is on stage, yet it’s still filling a whole arena or shed. It’s impressive.”
Alongside the unusually large amount of outboard gear and effects in the audio package is a series of backline racks and workstations. For the guitars, the “Mother Ship” sits stage right while a “Mini-Ship” resides stage left for drum triggers, “keys world,” and Ableton/Automation. “All the racks, both audio and backline, are linked by a 10-gigabit Ethernet backbone running over redundant fiber links. We’re piping all the show control data for audio and backline through this setup.” They still have a regular Optocore loop with DiGiCo SD, SD-Mini and OrangeBox I/O racks in various places to move the audio to where it needs to go, but almost everything else goes through their “TR network.” “We use Dante to transfer time code to the teleprompter rig, and Dante from all the wireless receivers is available as a source for guitar techs ‘solo’ system. There is extensive use of RTP-MIDI over the network for program changes for keyboard sounds, guitar and bass patches and drum electronics, plus triggering of 60-odd macros on the monitor console just for backline techs.”
Those ‘Secret’ Files ….
A central file server also lives on this network, and all the show computers — Mainstage, Ableton etc. — are continuously automatically backing up the show files to this server. The guitar techs, for example, have a computer at each of their stations connected to the Line 6 Helix rackmount amp modelers. “Every time they save a new preset, these computers are backing it up.”
But wait, there’s more. The “TR Network” gets hardwire internet from the venue every day and the file server automatically mirrors everything to another server back at Smith’s house in Nashville. “It’s like a cloud for just us. Whenever you need any show-related file, you just log onto Trey’s server over a VPN and grab any files you need. There’s no need to remember which thumb drive you backed everything up to, or if you backed up at all!” (That “TR Network” and backline rig was designed by Live Performance Systems, a company he runs with Rhett’s backline techs Brad Lake and Michael Rhodes.)
Over the same network, Network Video Recorder (NVR) software connects IP cameras to a monitoring app on the techs’ utility computers. These cameras aren’t for public consumption but are for the backline crewmembers to monitor what is happening on stage in real time. For example, there is one on the drummer’s foot pedal. So, if it gets knocked out of position, the drum tech can instantly rush in and fix it, without relying on feeds from the video department.
Consistency Through Technology
This inherently technical labyrinth to maximize control and ensure consistency was painstakingly put together over several tours. “I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone else doing this, but it made a big difference to our rehearsal workflow,” Nicholson says. “We run what is essentially a version of TeamViewer remote desktop software, locally on the network and it doesn’t require internet.” It allows them to control any of the editing computers from anywhere else on the network from a computer in Smith’s world, and that allows the band/techs to edit their sounds in the context of the FOH mix as a whole.
“We call it ‘Virtual Soundcheck Squared’ — a virtual soundcheck on top of a virtual soundcheck. Trey records the guitars dry, straight from the wireless receiver before it goes through the amp modelers. He records that into Pro Tools along with the rest of the band inputs. Added latency from plug-ins through a FOH mix can make it difficult for the player to try to play along in the FOH mix room during rehearsals, so now they don’t need to play. Dry guitar signals are routed back to the amp modelers during Trey’s virtual sound check playback and the live inputs are enabled on just those channels. Now the players can loop specific parts and tweak their sounds to perfectly fit the mix, all while the rest of their bandmates take a coffee break!
“That was a game changer.”
AUDIO CREW
- Sound Company: Spectrum Sound
- Account Rep: Bobby George
- Production Manager: Dustin Reynolds
- Tour Managers: Jon Townley & Kamron Kimbro
- FOH Engineer: Trey Smith
- Monitor Engineer: Jimmy Nicholson
- System Engineer: Jeremy Bayne
- Audio Crew Chief/Monitor Tech: Taylor Nyquist
- P.A. Tech: Jake Waynick
- Patch/P.A. Tech: Tavie Wortman
- Stage Manager: Justin Sumrall
FOH GEAR
- FOH Console: DiGiCo Quantum 7
- P.A. Mains & Sides: d&b audiotechnik KSL
- Flown/Ground Subs: d&b audiotechnik KSL-SUBs
- Front Fills: d&b audiotechnik Y10P
- Amplifiers: d&b audiotechnik D80s & D40s
- System Processor: DirectOut Prodigy MP
MON GEAR
Monitor Console: DiGiCo Quantum 7
IEM Hardware: Shure Axient Digital PSM
Vocal Mics: Shure Nexadyne 8
