Enough Color
As noted earlier, the tour also welcomes Chris Rabold as front of house engineer, and he’s melded nicely with the veteran sound team. He’s mixing on a Midas PRO9 console, his first experience with that particular digital platform.
“It really sounds good,” he notes. “The EQ isn’t like any other digital EQ I’ve used, very smooth and very musical. This desk has just enough color to have some personality, which is nice. I’m happy to say it’s a personality that I get along very well with.”
Rabold got his start at the age of 19 when he hooked up with Widespread Panic, working a few tours with no specific role. “I did everything from sell T-shirts to load the truck. I was in heaven,” he notes, and it spurred him to focus on a career in audio. He attended Middle Tennessee State University and also took any mixing gig available, served as a stagehand, and worked at Soundcheck rehearsal studios in Nashville. His path eventually led back to Widespread Panic, who he mixed for more than a decade.
“I spent 11 incredible years with them, and also mixed whatever else I could during their downtime,” he says. “At a certain point I found myself in the pop world and have been doing mainly that for the past few years.” This includes stints with Beyonce and Lady Gaga, and when the latter’s latest tour was unexpectedly cut short, he got a call from Chesney production manager Ed Wannebo.
“I was told coming into this gig that Kenny wanted a big sound, a rockin’ sound with big guitars and what-not,” Rabold says. “Even if I hadn’t been told that, the musical design of the show just begs for it. There’s a whole lot more of a rock feel then I would have expected, as well as some down-tempo stuff and a few songs that flirt with traditional country arrangements, but for the most parts its just a fairly sizeable band going at it with Kenny running around right there with them all night.
“I just went whichever way I thought the music wanted to go, and it worked out really well,” he continues. “Kenny gives me all the vocal I need too, so fitting his vocal on top was pretty easy from the beginning. I really believe that whatever the gig, whatever the genre, if you just focus and listen to what you’re being given, the music will let you know how it needs to be mixed.”
His outboard rack is relatively sparse, chosen for select purposes to augment what he’s able to do with the console’s onboard dynamics and effects. Mainstays are an Empirical Labs Distressor, Fatso, and Derresser, as well as API 2500 stereo compressors, and an SPL Transient Designer. “By far, the coolest piece of gear I’ve stumbled upon lately is the Sonic Farm Creamliner,” he adds. “It’s a tube-based processor that gives some extra weight and muscle to my stereo bus. It’s one of those ‘you have to use it to understand’ pieces.”
Also in the rack is a Neve Designs 5045 primary source enhancer from Yamaha that’s impressed both Mills and Rabold. Essentially, the unit is designed to reduce stray noise that can compromise vocals.
“It stays parked on Wyatt’s vocal, Kenny’s primary backing vocal, and I’ll use it when needed on Kenny himself,” Rabold states. “It’s just a useful problem-solver of a unit. It takes the input signal and splits it into parallel paths. Those paths sum at the output. The trick is that the two paths are out of phase with one another until the signal level crosses a user determined threshold. Think of it like a gate with a really cool way of achieving the gating!
“A vocal mic can sit there amidst all kinds of stage volume and crowd noise and you’ll never hear it open until the vocalists give you the input you want, assuming, of course, their singing creates a level great enough. It’s a threshold dependant process, and it’s not a magic box by any means, but it’s a damn witty way of achieving what it sets out to do.”