“In an industry full of Instagram content, video walls and all sorts of gags — lots of tertiary distractions — it’s really refreshing to work with a band that’s just full of good musicians,” says system engineer Andy Fitton. “From a P.A. design perspective, I’m trying to give them the most neutral clear sound I can, because each one of those performers are so incredible that they deserve at least that. It’s really just a transmission of what they are hearing on the stage.”
The current Vampire Weekend is truly all about the music, principally its latest album, Only God Was Above Us. It’s in four acts: The core trio opens, and it’s purposely raw; then comes an additional four musicians for songs from the new album plus a few hits; a jam act follows that is more colorful and fun; and then a fourth act, featuring more songs from their hit list. The last song, “Hope,” is a powerful one that also ends their new album. Yet the audio crew says there are changes to the set list every night — and halfway through the tour, one big change: Jay Rigby took over the FOH position.
The Changeover Artist
Rigby hails from Flemington, NJ, where he started playing in bands. Needing gear led him to doing some work with two regional sound companies, Skyland Pro Audio and Designatronix. While living in New York City, he became the in-house audio engineer at Terminal 5 while earning a Business Administration degree at Hofstra University on Long Island. From there he started touring with As Tall As Lions, which led to working with Cage The Elephant. There he met Owen Orzack with Eighth Day Sound, and since then, Eighth Day has been his vendor of choice. Other bands he’s worked with include Queens of The Stone Age, The 1975, Prince and St. Vincent.
Rigby recently got the call to take over for this current Vampire Weekend tour midway through, and conveniently the band had a month scheduled off, providing Rigby time to prepare. He sat in that chair knowing that getting as close as possible the dynamics of the recent record was key, which is why he’s out with the Solid State Logic L550. “It’s the most analog-sounding console out there right now,” he says. Rigby is pleased that the band is carrying the L-Acoustics K1s. “I have normally carried d&b, but I also love L-Acoustics.” He adds that the key to any P.A. is a solid systems engineer. “Having Andy Fitton out as my SE has been fantastic. He is hands down the best L-Acoustics SE I have worked with, second to none.”
Research included a lot of listening to the album and watching YouTube videos of the previous shows. He took notes and started to build his files. “I started with broad strokes and worked a little with the multi-track recordings from the previous engineer, but those can be difficult because they are from a different console with someone else’s gain levels. Luckily, I was in good shape for that first day of rehearsal.”
The SSL L550 has been his preferred board for the last couple of years. “Then I have a couple of outboard pieces, most importantly a Yamaha SPX 990 [digital multi-effects processor], which I use gated reverb for the snare. If I was marooned on a desert island mixing for a calypso band, that would be the one piece of gear I’d want with me. I’ve used that for as long as I’ve been mixing.”
Other pieces he relies on include: the dbx 160 compressor into a SPL Transient Designer on the kick group and snare group; API 2500 Stereo Bus Compressor (on the drum bus); Empirical Labs Distressor (on lead vocal); and GML 8200 Parametric EQ on the master bus. “I came up on mixing on analog consoles, and I still like to the tactile feel touching the compressor, of being able to glance at a meter and see what is going on without scrolling through a bunch of bright computer screens. Also, when everything is on your digital board, you end up staring down the whole time instead of watching the band.”
Once the tour was back in full swing, Rigby’s prep work paid off and he very much has his eyes — and ears — on the band, helping them sound great in every venue.
A Wide Range of Venues
From the modest 4,500-seat St. Louis Music Park amphitheater to two sold-out nights at Madison Square Garden, the audio crew is deftly handling the variety of venues well. “It’s a flexible production,” says Fitton. Growing up in Westport, CT, “I found sound systems and thought, this is awesome.”
Fitton says sure, he picked up “the cheapest Yamaha sound system” while attending Penn State as an electrical engineer major and started DJ’ing parties. But it “really happened” for him when he went to an underground warehouse rave party with “old school minimal techno.” It was dark. It was loud. And when he made his way to the front through the haze, he saw it was wall-to-wall subwoofers. “It had a visceral impact on me and I just knew that this is what I have to do for the rest of my life.” He made it to Minneapolis, where he worked with Allied Productions and there he met Jacob Feinberg, who was mixing Modest Mouse. That led him to Eighth Day, and he started working as a freelancer for them in summer of 2022.
This is quite different from Fitton’s last outing — Madonna’s Celebration world tour. “That was total celebrity worship — she is the queen, and everything she does is epic.” This “a quite pleasant decompression year.” Also refreshing for the music-first crew is the lack of video. “I come from the underground nightclubs, old-school EM where it was always just dark with pops and flashes of lights, and you found yourself focusing on the music.”
He approaches setting up the P.A. on several levels. “It’s almost like color balancing in a way,” he says. “You try to give the artist a white canvas to paint on. But then the question becomes, what is the right shade of white? Warm? True?” In that manner, especially for Vampire Weekend, he says, “it’s hard to imagine them with anything other than L-Acoustics — those K1 boxes just wrap everything together in a nice, warm package. It really accentuates their sound.”
At Saint Louis Music Park, he says, “the one challenge that I had from a system tuning perspective was that half the venue was covered and half of it wasn’t, so in those situations you have to work extra hard to get the sub balanced out because of the difference in room reflections.”
From that relatively modest venue they made their way to Madison Square Garden, which meant additional P.A. “It was still all L-Acoustics,” he says, with K1 for the mains and K2s for the side hangs, plus an additional 48 K2s among four arrays across the back. He is quick to give credit to his P.A. techs Jimmy Steinke and Evan Zierk, who “fly the rig every day and keep the cases rolling.”
Monitor World
Ryan Doordan has been a freelance audio engineer (both monitors and FOH) since 2003 and started working with Vampire Weekend last year. Today he is based in Santa Barbara, but grew up further north in Mountain View, CA. He played sax and then bass guitar growing up, and he went to Humboldt State University (now Cal Poly Humboldt) in Arcata where he got involved with college radio station and ended up running it. As program director, he and the others there threw together some concerts, and since no one knew anything about sound, he started working those Mackie 1604 faders. “I knew what the gain knob did, and knew what EQ was, so I just stepped in.”
He later took a job managing the pro audio department at San Francisco’s Guitar Center. After about six months, one of his first customers “took a liking to me because I was honest about what I did not know,” something of an aberration. That customer, Chris Tabarez, would offer him a job at a recording studio. Turns out the studio belonged to Boz Scaggs.
Doordan would go out on the road with Scaggs, first as an audio tech. But then after “watching about 10 monitor guys go in and out of that seat,” decided that he had learned enough to take the chair himself. He has worked with some other bands including Spoon, Bright Eyes, The Shins and My Morning Jacket. He arrived at Vampire via tour manager Michael Schoenbeck, who had worked along Doordan with several bands over the last 15 years.
He is prepared for the constant tweaking of the set list the band has been doing as he has long worked with Logic Pro’s Snapshot on his console. “When a band has a lot of songs to choose from, you start calling up snapshots of those that they haven’t used in a while, but sometimes that can be a jerky movement,” he explains. “On old analog consoles, it was smooth because you touched all the faders a little bit; but on digital, it sounds out of context. So, you have to manipulate some things on the fly; it’s challenging when you’re trying to listen to seven mixes simultaneously.”
Then there are the wide variety of rooms. “It’s always a struggle to plan on the variable sizes of rooms on a tour,” he says. “I’ve grown up working with smaller bands where you really have to find ways and solutions to be as small as possible or to be as spread out as possible in order to accommodate a small size.” He pushes his technical ability to cater to the drastic change that can happen from place to place. “I really love the challenge of going from a small theater to a big theater to an arena back to an outdoor field.”
He’s mixing on an Avid Venue S6L-32D. He has two 64-input stage racks and then he also does a recording for virtual playback on Pro Tools. “I’m not using too much outboard.” The Shure PM1000 is the in-ear hardware system of choice, and all musicians are on Ultimate Ears. “They made a switch this year from JH Audio. I have been working with Ultimate for a long time, and so I was excited to bring them the business for this band.”
There have been some fun surprises along the way — as when actress/comedian Maya Rudolph guested with the band in Chicago. “She was nervous about using in-ears, and so at the last minute I threw out wedges for her. Finding solutions on the fly to make for a more comfortable artist or guest, makes for a special moment for me.”
Having concluded its North American Leg with a final show at The Moody Center in Austin, TX on Oct. 17, the band takes a short breather before starting its European leg in Dublin, Ireland later this month.
Vampire Weekend Only God Was Above Us Tour
AUDIO CREW
- Sound Company: Eighth Day Sound
- FOH Engineer: Jay Rigby
- Monitor Engineer: Ryan Doordan
- System Engineer / Crew Chief: Andy Fitton
- Monitor Tech: Fabio Jorge
- P.A. Techs: Jimmy Steinke, Evan Zierk
- Production Manager: Patrick Dickinson
- Eighth Day Account Executive: Owen Orzack
- Eighth Day Project Manager: Andy Turner
- Clair Operations Coordinator: Rob Gurton
P.A. GEAR
- Mains: (24) L-Acoustics K1, (24) K2
- Subwoofers: (18) L-Acoustics KS-28
- Fills: (6) A10 front fills, (6) A15 outfills
- Amplifiers: (36) LA12X, (2) P1 Processors
FOH GEAR
- FOH Console: Solid State Logic L550
- FOH Outboard: Yamaha SPX 990 digital multi-effects, dbx 160 compressor, SPL Transient Designer, API 2500 stereo bus compressor, Empirical Labs DerrEsser, GML 8200 Parametric EQ.
MON GEAR
- Monitor Console: Avid Venue S6L-32D
- IEM Hardware: Shure PM1000
- IEM Earpieces: Ultimate Ears
