Genuine Teamwork Starts at the Top
Frontman Dave Grohl was standing downstage on the thrust, in the middle of a sold-out (50,000+), end-stage Denver stadium, when he informed the house that this night of the band’s current “Everything or Nothing at All” tour comprised the largest Foo Fighters audience ever ticketed in North America.
I heard this while watching veteran house engineer Antony King work through his mix on a Solid State Logic L550 digital console, driving a large L-Acoustics K1 system during the acoustic portion of the show. I quickly recognized one factor that allowed this artist to announce such a significant, career-high milestone. Throughout his career, Mr. Grohl, his management and staff, have leveraged the benefits of maintaining a long-term relationship with a world-class audio service provider providing audio personnel that pride themselves on supporting one another, their client, and the entire production team. With this band, teamwork really does start from the top.
Having heard some great stadium audio and watching how this crew interacted, I realized that in addition to deploying industry-leading technology, a key ingredient in their success was how tightly this group worked with, and backed-up, one another.
The Foo Fighters’ touring enterprise features one of the calmest, most non-hierarchical, mutually-supportive audio teams I’ve seen in a long time. Not much drama to be found here. From what I’ve learned, much of this calmness derives from the performer’s appreciation for how significantly a committed audio crew impacts an artist’s audience development. The box office record associated with that evening’s performance reflects that contribution, and it is proof that the great sound the audio team delivers as normal course is a major contributing factor in the band’s commercial success. Both artist and crew understand this is a business, understand their respective roles in it, and maintain a healthy mutual appreciation for one another in its execution. They understand why they are here and genuinely act like a team.
PM Eric “Ski” Piontkowski
Production Manager Eric “Ski” Piontkowski has been with the Foo Fighters since 2002. Despite his recently joining the organization, Eric was able to clearly describe what made this organization different from the majority of touring organizations he’s been with that operate in a conventional pyramid-shaped organizational structure.
After observing their changeover from opening act The Pretenders into Foo Fighters, I commented to Piontkowski that it seemed he was running a very flat, non-hierarchical crew structure, resulting in a remarkably efficient and calm set change. He confidently observed that “not many touring camps are like this — [a hierarchical] structure wouldn’t work here. And to be fair, that was already happening long before I joined. That has always been a part of the vibe of this artist. With Dave Grohl, what you see as a fan out in the audience is the same thing I see. Dave is that way, management is that way. They are very supportive of their crew. And that makes it much easier for me to keep everything calm and sensible.”
Piontkowski continued, “one reason I enjoy this camp so much is that it’s homegrown. Everyone is a doer. Just watch a changeover. Everyone is getting involved. The audio guys are laying out carpet. Riggers are setting monitor wedges. The main act front of house guy is helping to get the opening act off the stage. Everyone looks out for each other.”
Along with King and monitor engineer Ian Beveridge, Adam Smith serves as system designer and crew chief. Antoine Batailard, Alex McCormack, Dave Poynter, Johhny Santonja, Richard Trow and Chuck Wells complete the nine-person audio team.
Monitor Engineer Ian Beveridge
Now in his 35th year with Grohl, Ian Beveridge might just be the longest-tenured-with-the-same-act monitor engineer on the planet. In commenting on this impressive achievement, Piontkowski’s comments helped put Mr. Beveridge’s remarkable history into perspective. “Thirty-five years is a long time. You got to understand, I’m only 38 years old. So I can’t even think about doing something for that long,” he stated.
“When I started [with Nirvana], we shared two hotel rooms a night, one for the band and one for the crew. And all seven of us traveled in a single Transit van,” noted Beveridge. “Dave had only just recently joined the band, and I split my work between drum tech and monitors. I worked that first run with them, stayed on, and that lasted almost five years. Months after Nirvana ended, I received a call from Dave asking, ‘I’m starting a new band, want to come and work for us?’ That was 30 years ago. It’s been an amazing time.” Between Foo Fighters’ runs, his journey has included stints with the Lemonheads, Beck and The Cure. He also did three tours with Green Day, up through the American Idiot tour, when they were among the biggest-selling acts on the planet.
Beveridge satisfied his earliest curiosity for audio by buying a Fostex 4-channel cassette recorder and recording bands around his hometown of Edenborough, Scotland. He funded his passion by using the £57 a week wages he made digging graves for his grandfather’s mortuary business.
His career straddled the industry’s transition from analog to digital, and he appreciates the shortcomings and leverages of the benefits that digital brings his touring clients. “I grew up entirely analog, and digital didn’t always sound right to me. With earlier digital consoles, like the (Yamaha) PM-1 and PM-5D, I hated how the front-edge transients sounded on a super-loud stage — they were hard and abrupt. They were tiring on your ears after a long night. To overcome this, I would insert a dbx 160 comp on Dave’s voice just to cut down on the sharpness of the attack,” he explained.
“I’m kind of skeptical of plug-ins, although I do use them quite liberally. I prefer to stick with dynamics that are native to the console. I run a Yamaha Rivage PM-5 desk with plenty of plug-ins. The Neve-modeled compressors on this console are fantastic, they are second-to-none, so I tend to use them on just about everything — particularly with the Silk feature engaged, and the transformer emulation in-line. Now we have much more of an analog sound coming off the console. I do use a lot of plug-ins, because of the convenience and reliability. I even compress the hi-hat; that’s how crazy I am.”
On the stage, drummer Josh Freese, guitarist Chris Shiflett, and bassist Nate Mendel are on JH Audio Roxanne earpieces. Guitarists Grohl and Pat Smear are using d&b audiotechnik M2 wedges as is keyboardist Rami Jaffee. Beveridge also sends mixes to systems that support two upstage VIP areas covered by d&b M4’s on poles.
“Philosophically, I believe in being a proactive engineer, and I am grateful to this band for giving me the opportunity to become a better mixer,” Beveridge continued. “An artist has to let an engineer improve. If an artist is always telling the mixer what to change, then the mixer is principally reactive and isn’t able to learn much. An artist might sense that something is wrong, but they may not be able to express it. It often becomes difficult for them to vocalize it. In my opinion as a mixer, the need to get them [artists] from where they are, to where they want to be, shouldn’t be for them to figure out. We need to be proactive in our craft and provide the artists with what they need without them having to tell us what that is.”
His mix philosophy is straightforward, yet effective. “My preference is not to make typical mixes like ‘you louder and then everything else.’ I come from a studio background, and I try to get more of a studio feel in the mixes. Everything gets panned, everything has a little light dynamic on it. I’ll use compressors to manufacture transients where there typically aren’t enough, like a snare top. As long as it’s done tastefully.”
Beveridge also offered a bit of wisdom to younger engineers. “Keeping spill out of your mix is critical, and mic selection is key to controlling spill. If you have too much spill in your mixes, you are just screwed. Spill affects every single thing. In many ways, the art of miking is the art of not miking what you don’t want. Controlling spill is critical, and if you apply that thought process to mic selection and placement, it changes your world. Selecting microphones based on what they don’t pick up is as important as what they do pick up. That unwanted spill affects everything, including the clarity, the stereo image, phase and tonality of your entire mix. It’s paramount.”
After 35 years, there is no doubt this artist is reliant on this engineer. As the world transitioned out of Covid, Foo Fighters desired to perform eight comeback shows as the entertainment world came out of hiding. Unfortunately, Beveridge was living in Canada and unable to be there, as the border was closed. Having no interest in performing without Ian at the monitor desk, they instead elected to have Ian monitor and adjust the console remotely from his basement in Toronto on a laptop running Yamaha’s Rivage PM Editor. Despite the distance, he was at the gigs in spirit because the band put up a large video display in monitor world with Ian’s picture facing across the stage.
FOH Engineer Antony King
“This band is 100% real, it’s all wood, tubes and sweat,” noted front of house mixer Antony King. “It’s so much fun when six humans connect like that and take the audience with them on a journey; every night is different. “Everything up there sounds really good, so I just have to turn it on.”
King got his start mixing bands at student events at Royal Holloway University in Surrey, UK. One day, he and his fellow audio enthusiasts decided they needed a better P.A., as their legacy JBL cabinets were distorting and well past their prime. Their dream was to replace their old rig with a system just like Pink Floyd used. So they punched above their weight and summoned the courage to call Britannia Row Productions. “Bryan and Mike were amazing,” he noted. “They didn’t care that we were spotty kids, they wanted to help us sound better.” Amazingly, Brit Row sold them Turbosound Flashlight and Floodlight cabinets that — in fact — had previously been used by the Floyd. Suddenly, the sound quality of the student-promoted shows improved significantly, and King and his friends began a career-long engagement mixing for the UK’s top sound reinforcement service company.
The newest member of the audio crew, King joined the Foo Fighters in January of 2023. Previously, he’s mixed for Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails, The Cure and many others.
King brought with him a simplicity that seems to serve the band’s guitar-forward high-energy catalog quite well. “I’m still very new compared to some of the folks around here. Thankfully, this band is very open-minded and there wasn’t anything that I was expected to maintain. It really gave me a chance to put together what I thought was best for them.”
His console preference is Solid State Logic’s SSL Live L550 platform. “The SSL will always be my first choice; it just sounds so good to me. It has been 100% reliable since I started on it. Reliability is my #1 criteria. I don’t want Ski, our production manager, sweating bullets in the office because I decided to take out a science project.”
In terms of his mixes, King keeps it all with a focus on the artist. “I like to have the music drive my mix strategy. I always prefer to set things at ‘zero’ and sit back and have a listen before I start changing things. I’m not one to use every button or knob simply because it’s there. There has to be a purpose for everything you do on a mix console. I have to justify what I am doing to myself. If there is no reason for something, I prefer to just not do it. I know there are people who feel the need to touch every button because it is in front of them, but that’s not me. When you have a great band like this, stay out of the way.”
King prefers to have the majority of his dynamic controls analog, and opts for plug-ins for reverbs. “I want to be able to make dynamic adjustments on the fly, and I can get to the analog stuff quickly. I love running my compressors analog, as it helps me to get a much more coherent result that sounds believable to me.”
King uses a Manley VoxBox on Grohl’s vocal. “It’s a great compressor, de-esser and EQ all in one beautifully built box. It helps me keep Dave’s vocal on top at all times. We use a Sennheiser MD 431 for vocals, which really works well. It’s a supercardioid, so we get a lot of off-axis rejection, yet its smooth and not too hyped up. I also use a Chandler TG 1 Limiter across my drum sub, which I find enormously helpful.”
Perhaps most interesting is King’s use of the Phoenix Mastering Plus from Thermionic Culture, deployed as his overall master bus compressor. An entirely all-tube, hand wired device, the Phoenix is used to deliver an all-valve warm finish to what is a high-level, hard-driven program as it enters the speaker drive train.
King’s effects plug-ins include Apogee’s Clearmountain’s Domain for reverbs, and Clearmountain’s Phases on acoustic guitars.
The System
The tour is driven by an all-L-Acoustics K-Series loudspeaker system powered by LA 12X amplifiers running on an AVB network with analog redundancy. The Main / Side / Rear array inventory consists of 72 K1 and 32 K2 Elements, with 30 KS28 flown subs complemented by 36 KS28 on the ground. Some 48 K1s and eight K2 Elements provide delay coverage, while 12 A15 Wide, 12 Kara II, and six A10 Focus handle front-in-out and thrust fills.
“I think the K1 system is the best outdoor system you can get,” King states. Nothing throws outdoors like a K1 system. For these types of distances, I think the K1 does it best.”
Great sounding gear is important, yet the human element is critical. Beveridge nicely summarized why the members of this touring audio and production team seem to function so effectively. “I think the band trusts us, that’s the thing. Dave’s leadership from up top has that effect on everybody.”
The Foo Fighters’ 31-date 2024 “Everything or Nothing at All” tour started with a U.S. leg in May and a run through UK/Europe in June and July before returning for more shows in the U.S. from mid-July through late September, 2024.
Foo Fighters “Everything or Nothing at All” Tour
AUDIO CREW
- Sound Company: Britannia Row Productions / Clair Global
- FOH Engineer: Antony King
- Monitor Engineer: Ian Beveridge
- System Designer / Crew Chief: Adam Smith
- Production Manager: Eric “Ski” Piontkowski
- Production Coordinator: Amber Merritt
- Audio Tech: Alex McCormack
- Monitor Tech: Dave Poynter
- P.A. Techs: Antoine Bataillard, Jonny Santonja, Richard Trow, Chuck Wells
P.A. GEAR
- Main / Side /Rear Arrays: L-Acoustics K1
- Subs: (32) L-Acoustics KS28 flown, (36) KS28 ground
- Delays: (48) K1, (8) K2
- Front & Thrust Fills: (12) L-Acoustics A115, (12) KARA II, (6) A10 Focus
- Amps: L-Acoustics LA12X
FOH GEAR
- FOH Console: Solid State Logic Live L550 with ML3232 MADI stage boxes
- Outboard Gear: Thermionic Culture Mastering Plus, Manley VoxBox, SSL The Bus+, SPL Transient Designer, Smart Research C2, API 2500, Chandler TG1, Teletronix LA-2A, SSL Fusion
- Mics: Austrian Audio, beyerdynamic, Lauten, Sennheiser, Shure
MON GEAR
- Monitor Console: Yamaha Rivage PM5
- Wedge Monitors: d&b audiotechnik M2
- Side Fills: L-Acoustics A15/KS28
- Wireless Mics: Sennheiser 6000 with 9235 capsules
- IEM Hardware: Lectrosonics M2T, M2C, M2Ra
- IEMs: JH Audio Roxanne
