Restrictive Covid policies, a tech testing positive, not enough rehearsal time, some new gear, and a constantly shifting touring schedule. Yet none of that mattered when Imagine Dragons took the stage at the Enterprise Center in St. Louis to a crowd of joyful people. The show sounded superb in every corner of that hockey arena, embracing every audience member from the littlest kids (there were a lot) to the oldest seniors (there were quite a few) and everyone else in between (it was sold out).
“A little rusty? Oh, yeah!” FOH engineer Scott Eisenberg says with a laugh. “No matter how many webinars you participate in, there’s nothing like the real thing.” As he’s now based in a New York City apartment, setting up a console there was not possible, but he kept his chops up with Pro Tools. “In the beginning of getting back out starting with a couple of one-offs, everyone was getting their sea legs back,” he says.
The sea legs are indeed back. “It’s a pretty well-oiled machine,” adds monitor engineer Jared Swetnam. “Even after being away from the road for almost three years, the crew has been with them so long that we’re used to any live setting. It’s all going smooth and is really a good run.”
Of particular note is that this is the Dragons’ first tour using the Adamson CS7p and IS7p speakers. “I’ve been pleased with them as front fills for us,” says system engineer/crew chief Cameron Whaley. “It’s nice having point-source boxes that have high output and match the tonal characteristics of Adamson’s E and S series boxes. Point-source horn coverage is much better for fill boxes, as line sources tend to be beamy with their narrow vertical coverage.”
The show starts with frontman Dan Reynolds on the small center B stage with just him and a piano on “My Life” before exploding with high-end distortion, pyro and confetti. It was an emotional night for the band and the audio crew saw that that emotion was transmitted to the audience.
The audio vendor is Sound Image. “We’ve been working with Imagine Dragons for close to 10 years now,” says Sound Image’s Jesse Adamson. “Scott has been mixing FOH the whole time we’ve been involved with the band, and he is a fantastic engineer and a great person. We love working with his team.”
Imagine This
Eisenberg grew up in Baltimore where he became a more-than-solid drummer. After high school, he played full-time in regional cover/party bands throughout the mid-Atlantic. At 21, he decided he should “up his game” and got into the Berklee College of Music. While studying drums there, he was often recruited to play on other student’s recordings. A desire to have his own drums sound better led him into getting interested in recording. Then he had the epiphany that maybe knowing his way around a console could be a great skill to develop and, “who knows — maybe make some money at it.” Eisenberg accepted an offer to sit behind a console in Boston’s small but prestigious Lizard Lounge. That led to a job at T.T. the Bear’s Place, a popular 250-person live music venue. Meanwhile, he got a day gig working handling all the A/V needs of Harvard Law School, gaining additional valuable experience there.
In 2005, the post-punk rock band The Bravery came through Boston and the band’s manager Pete Galli asked Eisenberg if he’d like to tour with the band. “It was a fantastic experience,” Eisenberg says. “I had never thought I would get a chance to do something like that. And I learned a ton.” Part of his road education was working on whatever “console du jour” was in whatever place they were playing. Then as the band grew, there was a switch in tour managers and that one went to FOH and Eisenberg then got monitor engineer experience. Another shift from analog to digital consoles happened, and by asking a lot of questions, he kept up. Then the heavy-touring rock band Motion City Soundtrack asked him to come over and mix FOH for them. “I loved that band and got more experience.” In December of 2012, he got the call to work with Imagine Dragons, who were then skyrocketing to rock star status.
Eisenberg’s console of choice is the Solid State Logic L550, which he first started using in 2016. “It honestly sounds great, but also, it definitely has faders that feel so good,” he says. “I don’t think I’ve heard other people talk about that aspect, but it’s the first thing I noticed when I started using it. It’s a real console, not a toy.” He says while developing a file on this board, he also had to develop files on another console he knew he’d have to use for a tour, and “the fader cap flew off the other console right off the bat. That’s the kind of thing that would never happen on an SSL.”
His journey to the Adamson E Series system was a leisurely one. “It’s funny because when we started doing bigger places, I didn’t have that much of a preference or even knowledge of what P.A. I would want to carry,” Eisenberg explains. “Whatever House of Blues type place we were playing had a good-sounding P.A., and it was a different system every day.” Then they made the jump to carrying their own system and by happenstance, the default was to an Adamson. “Over the first year of touring, I had so much experience playing bigger places, I started developing an opinion about it. And I realized that compared to what else was out there, I actually like the Adamson system better.”
B Stage
The approach to staging this show affected how Eisenberg and the rest of the audio team approached their jobs. “Some of the staging elements we had done before, like the acoustic B stage,” Eisenberg says. “It used to sit behind FOH, but because of Covid, the band wanted it to connect to the main stage.” And now that it’s there, lead singer Dan Reynolds uses it throughout the show to great effect. However, when the band takes the B stage for those four acoustic numbers, they are now closer to the line array, which causes Eisenberg to get creative to keep feedback at bay. “Some of it has been EQ, and some of it has been working the dynamic gaining on the vocal mic.”
This has led to re-thinking the mics in general. Vocalist Reynolds and bass player Ben McKee have long preferred a Telefunken M81 dynamic vocal mic, and “years ago, we were talking about switching the other guys to that as well.” They are considering that switch again now, partially in response to controlling feedback. (Touring keyboards Elliot Schwartzman also uses that mic, with guitarist Wayne Sermon going with a Shure KSM9 and drummer Daniel Platzman using a Shure SM58).
Swetnam says he must stay on top of the wireless frequencies on the B stage, as sometimes that puts the band 200 or even 300 yards away from him. “You have to check that during the day, and make sure they can stay on the same frequency when they are out there. So far we’ve had no frequency issues.” There are about 30 frequencies to coordinate. There are three hard-wired inputs on the B stage. Swetnam says all the wireless is run on Shure PSM1000s and the band members are all on JH Audio Layla IEMs. “They are easy units to coordinate.”
A Different Approach
Eisenberg says the pandemic gave him the time to do small projects with friends, and rethink some things. “Now I think about what’s driving my mix, and I’m questioning in general what works and what doesn’t; and what is helping me and what isn’t.” An example is the approach to the drums. “I realized I was doing all these ‘tricks’ and a lot weren’t working,” he says, laughing. “Then it became just about literally adjusting the faders. Sometimes it’s about going back to basics.” Related, though, drummer Platzman decided to put up a plexiglass drum shield on this tour for the first time, and that has helped Eisenberg and Swetnam a lot. “Not sure why we hadn’t tried it before, but we’re glad it’s there now,” Eisenberg says. “He’s a pretty heavy hitter, especially on the cymbals and hi-hat, and that Plexiglas has definitely cleared up problems in the downstage circles.”
“That’s probably the best gift you can give to a monitor engineer!” Swetnam adds. “Of course, I was all for it.” There’s a small price for this gift — he found himself in charge of it, from crating and uncrating it to “taking on the role of plexi cleaner.” But it’s all worth it. Otherwise, despite the notable size of the stage, the band likes to be pretty compact downstage. That all five performers sing quite a bit, it means the vocals are pretty high up in the mix, and now drummer’s bleed is almost eliminated completely. As “80 percent of the show is out in front of the P.A., anything you can do to limit cymbal bleed is great.”
It is an exceptionally clean stage. Guitarist and bassist are on Kemper Profiler amps going direct. First used on the band’s 2016 tour, they get a thumbs-up from Eisenberg. “They really keep the stage volume down and they sound great.”
The Process
System engineer Cameron Whaley hails from San Diego and graduated from Full Sail in 2001. “As I interned at studios, I became attracted to the live sound side of things and found myself at Sound Image in 2004,” he says. “I became fascinated by sound system design and tuning after a Meyer Sound class.” He’s been out with Backstreet Boys, The Lumineers, Los Bukis, and Five Finger Death Punch, and has been with Dragons since 2014. In 2019, he took home the Parnelli Award for Best System Tech.
“The system design process for this tour was quite interesting,” he says. “Having worked with Scott (Eisenberg) for so many years, I really appreciate his drive to get the best possible results. This often leads us down unconventional P.A. design routes. We started off considering immersive sound designs, but concluded that for this particular tour it wasn’t going to be practical. Looking at the subs in the immersive design though, we realized we could adopt that idea into our more conventional left/right system. This led us to looking at putting all our subs in one location in the center.” They hung 32 Adamson E219s and stashed another four under the stage. “After a lot of modeling and discussions, we ended up with our current design with two long columns of flown subs upstage center.” He’s bullish on Adamson’s Blueprint software. “It’s an invaluable tool to walk into rehearsals with an unconventional P.A. design, knowing it will work as you expect. Particularly helpful this time, were the sub modeling tools and the delta delay tools.”
Whaley says the main idea they are trying to accomplish is getting even sub coverage without power alleys or cancellations, and the long array length allowed them to accomplish secondary goals. “By narrowing the vertical coverage, we can shoot the sub energy over the stage and tune the vertical coverage area as needed. An ancillary benefit is that this a great place to put the subs in a large pop show design that doesn’t impact sightlines or take up space on the ground. The clarity of the sub energy is much better.” Then he adds: “Of course, there are tradeoffs in any design choices. This positioning adds quite a bit of latency to the system, but that has been manageable.”
The new tool of the tour is the DirectOut Prodigy MP, Whaley noted. “It’s a bit of a Swiss army knife of a device that does things not many other devices can,” he says. “We’re using it as a console switcher, SMAART interface, and a production mixer in one. It takes about any input and outputs you can think of — digital and analog.” For example, they are using Dante as the SMAART Interface, P.A. sends, and sends to and from video world. Then there is MADI for various console sends/returns and mic/line I/O plus AES as well. “This has solved many problems for us. Previously we had to use many different devices to accomplish console switching, matrixing record feeds, mixing opening music from different sources including ducking for ads, and our SMAART mics and reference signals. It took me a while to realize the capabilities of the Prodigy MP, but now it’s my go-to for solving routing issues.”
“Just Hit Next”
Monitor mixer Jared Swetnam, who grew up in Dayton, OH, is also a Full Sail grad. From there he moved to Washington D.C., where he mixed at clubs including the esteemed 930 Club. Some bands that came through would leave the club with him mixing on the road, and on one such jaunt with alt rockers Blonde Redhead, he worked alongside of Eisenberg.
With everything “super dialed in,” Swetnam seems to imply the show almost runs itself. His approach is troubleshooting, “waiting for something that could possibly go wrong.” This involves a lot of frequency checking. Otherwise, “the running joke here is if I ever die in the middle of a show, just hit the ‘next’ button on my console,” he says with a laugh. (Context: apparently a few years ago in the middle of a show, he was briefly knocked out by a low hanging bar while running backstage. He returned to the console and finish the show while getting his head stitched up.) Swetnam’s deck of choice is the Avid S6L, as it’s versatile and offers a plethora of channel options. “Almost anything is at your disposal.” This especially helps with the B stage. “We’re kind of running two separate shows with the main stage and the B stage, and it’s nice to page to another completely different page with separate cues. It’s essentially a completely different production, and I am able to basically A and B switch between the two.”
The biggest challenge according to Whaley is a common one: Covid. “The uncertainty pushed the planning stages back and caused a much shorter pre-production time than normal. There have also been cancellations and changes to our schedule as the practicalities of going into and out of Canada have changed. During rehearsals, one of my techs tested positive — with no symptoms thankfully; but we had to adjust. I really appreciate the level of protocols the tour has in place and since beginning the tour, no one has contracted Covid.”
But everyone is getting a really good time.
Imagine Dragons’ Mercury Tour
CREW
- Sound Company: Sound Image
- FOH Engineer: Scott Eisenberg
- Monitor Engineer: Jared Swetnam
- System Engineer/Crew Chief: Cameron Whaley
- Monitor Tech: Emily Arnold
- P.A. Fly Techs: Dana Daniel, Tucker Arbuthnot
- Production Manager: Matt Miley
- Tour Manager: James “JT” Taylor
FOH GEAR
- FOH Console: SSL L550
- Outboard: Rupert Neve Portico II Channel Strip, SPL Mix Dream, Alan Smart C2, (7) Empirical Labs ELI Fatso, DirectOut Prodigy MP
- Near Fields: Adamson CS7p w/Lab.gruppen LM44
MON GEAR
- Monitor Console: Avid S6L-32
- IEM Hardware: Shure PSM1000
- IEM Earpieces: JH Audio Layla
- Wireless Mics: Shure Axient Digital
- Vocal Mics: (3) Telefunken M81, Shure KSM9 and SM58
P.A. GEAR
- Mains: (18) Adamson E15/side
- Sides: (6) Adamson E15 and (9) Adamson E12/side
- Rears: (16) Adamson S10/side
- Flown Subs: (2) Columns of 16 E219
- Ground Subs: (4) Adamson E219 in cardioid array
- Fills: Adamson CS7p and IS7p
- Amps: Lab.gruppen 20k44
