All the 34 dates on Disturbed’s 25th Anniversary Tour of their breakthrough debut album The Sickness is special — after all, they are selling out every arena for the trek running from February through May. But Production Manager George Reeves had to say how especially special the Chicago show at the United Center on March 8 was. “It was a sold-out show in their hometown, and it was just a great moment,” Reeves says. “That show was 25 years and one day from when that album went on sale.”
The pyro-heavy show brought out old and re-imagined gags and played through a Cohesion P.A. system that audio vendor Clair Global provided. At the helm of that was FOH engineer Brad Divens. “Thankfully, we’re really lucky to have Brad mixing front of house — he’s a world-class engineer,” monitor engineer Blair Bondy says. “His mixes are literally some of the best I’ve ever heard, and he’s able to get an impactful mix across that really impresses people even at only 98 dB.”
Feeling Loud without Being Loud
Divens will tell you he’s grateful he’s never been pigeon-holed into one genre. Last year he was featured in these pages for his work with Enrique Iglesias. Sharing space on that list is Jane’s Addiction, Cyndi Lauper and Garbage, among others. He is from McConnellsburg, PA, and was a struggling musician in Los Angeles when a chance to be a tour manager came up in 1997. Soon he transitioned to mixing.
Under the category “we do it because sometimes it works,” in 2022, with summer dawning and his calendar empty, he shot an email one morning to FOH Engineer Greg Price expecting a “keep you in mind” type reply. “He sent me back an email in under five minutes saying he was busy with Metallica, asking if I want to do some work with Disturbed.” Summer one-offs turned into a tour, and now they are on his list of steady clients.
He prepped by listening to the band’s music and working with the tracks from Ashton Parsons, the previous monitor engineer. “I listen to the previous files and then make them my own. This was not that difficult — you’ve got four great band members including a phenomenal singer, and you just work with that.”
Remarkably, Divens is able to keep volume pumped in a manner that feels loud without actually being loud. “When I put things together, I use a lot of compression,” he explains. And he does it all along the signal flow from inputs to groups to the mix bus. For example, 18 inputs are needed on the drums, and he works to make sure each one sounds good; but then you want to treat the kit as one instrument. “So I’ve got bits of compression throughout those inputs, then compression and EQ on the group when it gets down to the mix bus. Now you add bass, guitar, and vocals, and the process of it for all of it remains the same for everything.”
Because of that work he does on the individual signal, it comes to the board with a perceived loudness. “I was in the arena yesterday and I turned my master fader almost all the way down, I could just hear the music coming out of the PA and I could hear everything at 120 feet away. I think a lot of times people have this misconception that it’s got to be loud to sound good. That’s absolutely not true; but obviously it’s got to sound good before it can be loud, because louder is not better.”
He adds that he makes sure that no one part like the snare is stepping on another part, like the vocals. “When I put it all together, it’s one cohesive element. When it all comes out of the PA, the last thing you want is to have one element jumping out at you.”
Detour from Feedback City
Divens is driving an Avid S6L-32D console for this gig. “That was the one in play when Greg handed it over to me,” he says. (Typically, he uses a Yamaha Rivage PM10.)
But for him, it’s about the outboard gear. “We have all the tools available to us; we have everything that people use to make great sounding records, and I say use it. People will say ‘You don’t need all that stuff.’ Well, tell that Chris Lord-Alge or Andy Wallace when they are mixing a record. So why not use everything for a live performance?” He’s hard-pressed to name three of his “desert island” picks, but the Rupert Neve Designs Master Bus Transformer makes the cut, so does the Stam Audio 4000MK3 with Neve Mod and RND Shelford Channel. “Also, the Rupert Neve Tape Emulator, which I use on the guitar group … I could go through my whole list and tell you why I like every piece of it.”
The stage is clean of amps, all being handled backstage. Guitarist Dan Donegan has two cabinets, powered by a Bogner and a 5150, and both are run direct to the board. The bass is simply going through two Rupert Neve DI’s — one clean, one dirty.
Vocalist David Draiman sings through the DPA d:facto 4018VL. “The rejection it has is great, it doesn’t pick up a lot of ambience, and the sonic characteristics lend itself to David’s voice.” For the drums, he uses a combination of Earthworks, DPA, AKG 414 and Neumann KM 184 mics — plus a couple of Shure 91s thrown in for good measure.
During the show, he says his eyes are on the audience, watching how they react. “Then I’m also watching David, because he’s moving a lot, including onto the thrust, which puts him in front of the PA a lot.” He says “99.9% of the time” he has no issues keeping feedback at bay. He does it by monitoring the flow on the low passes without taking away the top end of the microphone. “You don’t need 12K out of a lead vocal in an arena. I started doing that trick with Enrique because he always has a massive thrust and early on, he was on another microphone, and it was feedback city. So, I’m like low pass 10K and boom — no more feedback.”
Otherwise, he just makes sure that everything is heard. “If I look at Dan, I hear what he’s playing; if I look at [drummer] Mikey [Wengren] and I see him hit a cymbal, I want to hear it.”
Monitor World
Blair Bondy grew up near Detroit in Windsor, Ontario in a musical family. Bondy recalls being taken to his first concert at 10. “It was Red Hot Chili Peppers’ By the Way tour,” which ran from 2002-2003. “From that point on, I was just obsessed with live music.”
When his church needed volunteers to help with the audio, Bondy stepped forward. Then he also started working sound for his older brother’s band. To get into shows, the underaged kid would pretend to be a sound person. “That’s how I started to encounter sound equipment and sound people.” By the time he hit tenth grade, he was determined to be a pro audio person.
He attended the Ontario Institute of Audio Recording Technology, completing an intense 11-month immersion program. Then he took audio work on a cruise ship to the Caribbean for a year. He was grateful for the work and experience, “but the ship like felt like prison.” Work with a small local production company followed, and then he started to get a taste for the road. “The company would get hired by an up-and-coming rapper, and then all of a sudden a week later that rapper hit number one on the Billboard charts.” He has gotten to mix monitors on tour for Post Malone, Jack Harlow, Hollywood Vampires, Alice Cooper, and many others.
“My last two gigs have both been handed down to me from Ashton Parsons, including this one,” he says. Bondy had filled in twice with Disturbed, and when Parsons wanted to move on to a new gig, they took Parsons’ advice to hire Blair.
The Right Knob
“David [Draiman] was asking for his vocal to go up and down here and there, but I figured out that it’s not technically turning his vocal up and down; it’s about the mix ratio on his mix bus compressor. I just tweaked that, and ever since he’s been fine. I got lucky and found the right knob.” Bondy works with artists by looking beyond what they say to what they mean. “They usually aren’t engineers, so when they tell you what they think is wrong or what they want you to do, I just translate that to ‘these are the symptoms.’”
Prior to the tour, the band rehearsed in the bar co-owned by drummer Mike Wengren in Oconomowoc, WI. “Dan [Donegan, the guitarist] was about two feet from the drum kit, and it was a small room, so it was a bit of a struggle at first.” Bondy’s priority became making sure the band was happy with what they were hearing in their IEMs so they could work out their songs to perfection. Then when they had tech rehearsals at an amphitheater in Phoenix, he went to work adjusting the show file. This was followed by a run-through before the first show at Ford Idaho Center Arena in Nampa, ID. “I’ve learned not to get too worked up over the years; but at the same time, the audio guy does not want to be the reason a rehearsal stops, so that first run-through with full PA was a bit nerve-racking.”
Communicating with the band on an intellectual level is important. “The artist has so much on their mind with a show like this — it’s a new show, they are worried about new lasers, there’s the day-to-day craziness and the ‘problem of the day’ — so the monitor engineer is in the hotseat because you don’t want them worried about what they are hearing on top of the big picture things they may be stressed about.”
Like Divens, Bondy is also mixing on an Avid S6L-32D. “Probably part of the reason I got the gig is Ashton knew I had been using it almost exclusively for six years now. People see a picture of you in front of one on Instagram and they associate you with [a specific board] and you get calls about gigs on them.” He does like the platform, saying, “it does pretty much everything I want to do and sounds great. You can create all sorts of snapshots, triggers, and events that make it really versatile.” That and a couple of Waves Titan SoundGrid servers is all he needs — and he doesn’t even rely on those too much. “I try to keep monitors simple. It’s a delicate balance between letting them hear the rawness of what they are actually doing and making it sound nice and polished.”
Draiman prefers Jerry Harvey Audio JH16 Pro V1 IEMs. “That is really good for me, because I personally wear the JH13 V1s. Those allow me to know what is going on and have been my favorite IEM for nine years.” The other bandmembers are happy on JH Roxannes with the bass control wide open.
Draiman moving constantly on the stage is a small challenge, he says, but otherwise it’s manageable. “At this point, these guys are veterans. They’ve been doing this for about 30 years now, so David knows if he goes out on the thrust all the way in front of the PA there will be some consequences; but it’s also my job to clean it up as much as possible. Between adding a light downward expander to his vocal and doubler and having the PA system toed out three degrees it’s fine; and David says his ears have never sounded this good in his entire career, so I guess things are going well,” he laughs.
New System, New System Tech
Scott Jarecki has a special affinity for Disturbed. The Chicago-based system tech was around in the 1990s when the band was trying to break through the area clubs there. “I had worked at J.J. Kelley’s” in Lansing, IL, “which is where Disturbed got their start at years earlier,” he says. “So it was a serendipitous occasion to be working on this tour.” Jarecki also came from a musical family, though at an early age he was more drawn to science of it. He worked audio for his high school theater and then followed the Vans Warped Tour around, “begging people to give me a job.” Back in Chicago, he was able to get hired at Performance Recording and Sound in 2008. There audio engineer and Latin Grammy winner Marty Bilecki took him under his wing. “He was one of the first people in Chicago to get the Avid console, and he taught me about live sound, how speakers work, and how to network a system.” A stint at Columbia College was followed by more work at another production house, Live International. There he went out with various R&B acts including Kem and Charlie Wilson. Next, he got hired at the now defunct VER where “Brett Stec took a shot with me and got me my first real livable wage.” After VER closed down, Stec took him to Clair. Most recently he toured with the Zac Brown band for three years. He moved up to the System Tech position and went out with Megadeth last year.
On this tour, Jarecki’s working with Clair’s Cohesion speakers for the first time. “It’s a good sounding box,” he says. “The main shortcoming is on the software side, but they are remedying that by creating their own software. And the box itself is very efficient. You’re able to do larger rooms with fewer boxes; it’s a light box to tour with and quick to hang, which is wonderful. It takes up less truck space, too.” He says he’s able to get it the PA up and working in less than two hours.
Since the band is playing similar rooms from city to city, Jarecki hasn’t faced any insurmountable hurdles in handing a consistent rig over to Divens. “That allows him to give a consistent mix to the artist and the audience, which is great.” This is the first time he’s worked with Divens, and as always, that involves “figuring out the engineer’s preferences. For example, you have a lot of engineers say they want a flat system, but that’s not actually what they want.”
With the PA system for Disturbed, Jarecki takes a measured approach. “I don’t come at this from an artistic background; I come from a mathematical and physics angle, figuring out how it’s going to work best. I leave the artistic approach to the engineers. So, there’s always new, more avant-garde or artistic approaches to things that I don’t necessarily see from that point of view.” Communication is key, as is building trust. “I’ll walk in and tell [Divens] exactly what is going on — like that the room sucks in this one spot, and then we work together to navigate that. And he’s able to come to me and say what he doesn’t like. We don’t hold any punches.”
Fresh Faces
As it happens, the management wanted some fresh faces and approaches for this tour, and that included PM Reeves. This is his first tour with Disturbed, and he was brought in by the band’s management, by Q Prime. So while there are quite a few crew members on their first Disturbed tour, you wouldn’t know it from how smooth things are going. “There are some people I’ve brought in with me, but the vendors have all given us great crew guys across the board,” Reeves concludes. “We have some real heavy-hitters, and right from the start, so it’s a great team.”
CREW
- Sound Company: Clair Global
- Production Manager: George Reeves
- FOH Engineer: Brad Divens
- Monitor Engineer: Blair Bondy
- System Engineer: Scott Jarecki
- Audio Crew Chief/Monitor Tech: Liam Tucker
- Wireless/Comms Tech: Kevin Leas
- PA Tech: Sevrin Huette
Gear
FOH
- Console: Avid S6L-32D
- Speakers: Mains: (16) Cohesion CO12 (per side); Outfills: (14) CO10 (per side); Flown subs: (6) CP218 (per side); Ground subs: (3) CP218 (per side); Front fills: (10) CF28
- Amps: Lab Gruppen
- Processing: Lake; RME Audio M-32 Pro II D/A and A/D converters; Rupert Neve Designs MBT Master Bus Transformer, 5059 Summing Mixer, (2) Shelford Channels, 5045 Primary Source Expander, Portico II Master Buss Processor, (2) 542 Tape Emulator, (2) 535 Diode Bridge Compressor; Stam Audio MEQP-1AS+, SA-78T+, SA-4000 MK3 w/Neve Mod; Sonic Farm Creamliner III; SSL Bus+; SPL Audio BiG; (2) Empirical Labs Pumps & Distressors; (2) Maag Audio EQ4’s; (2) Waves Titan SoundGrid servers
MON
- Console: Avid S6L-32D
- IEMs: Jerry Harvey Audio JH16 Pro V1 (David Draiman), JH13 V1
- Mics: DPA d:facto 4018VL (David Draiman), plus Earthworks, AKG 414 and Neumann KM 184 mics — plus a couple of Shure 91s thrown in for good measure
