From April 18-21, 2024, renowned jam band Phish performed a four-day residency at the Las Vegas Sphere, joining an elite list of artists (U2, 40 shows from October 2023-March 2024; and Dead & Company, which began a 24-date run in mid-May, wrapping up July 24) that have so far graced this unique immersive venue.
Mixing Phish in the Sphere posed many challenges for the audio team, and one was that by design there was no place for the monitor engineers on the side of the stage — they were put behind in the back, relying on video screens to read the band’s needs. Another was those 1,600 Holoplot X1 matrix array speakers encased behind the massive video screen that encircles the venue with the band placed firmly in front of them.
Finally, there are the Phish fans themselves. Robert “VOiD” Capiro, monitor mixer for Trey Anastasio, speaks for all their engineers when he says, “Phish fans are very, very particular about what they hear. And the band on stage is very particular about what they hear — Trey [Anastasio] has amazing ears and he can hear the tiny differences in pitch, modulation and EQ.” So, from visiting the venue when U2 was playing, to building a “mini” Sphere in the rehearsal space of Rock Lititz, the audio team went into the giant golf ball-like space totally prepared, delivering epic sound for the four sold-out nights.
The Mini Sphere
Phish FOH engineer Garry Brown was born in Northern Ireland, and after serving in the military, he got into this business just by showing up. “I went to a concert at the town hall in Birmingham, and after it was over, I asked if they needed any help,” he says. In 1998, Brown moved to Nashville where he first worked for local bands, then worked with Cyndi Lauper, Gnarls Barkley and Blondie.
In 2005, he had the opportunity to work for Anastasio, when he was opening for the Rolling Stones. “They brought me in to be the tech for the monitor guy,” he says. But they had hired a new FOH who couldn’t make the rehearsals, so Brown stood in at FOH and did such a good job that it caused Anastasio to wonder out loud, “why are we hiring someone else?” Brown has been working for Anastasio ever since.
They all went to the U2 show at the Sphere and found the sound quality of the Holoplot system amazing, but Phish’s audio crew would soon learn that the reverberations caused by the Sphere’s shape made it challenging to get a true stereo sound while avoiding bounces and delays. Brown had a mini-Sphere built in Rock Lititz. There he experimented with the sound placement of the instruments and was, to an extent, able to replicate what would be heard in sections of the far left and right of the Sphere.
It’s About Section 201
The mini-Sphere system was a ground-supported 20’x20’ truss grid with 44 Cohesion CP6+ speakers hanging on a circular rigging system. For three weeks Brown toiled. “In addition to figuring out how it all worked, I wanted to see how far we could push it, what we could achieve, and how crazy we could get with it.” It prepared him for the Sphere.
“I had 64 drive lines to the Sphere P.A. system, 44 for array drive and 20 for moving objects,” Brown recalls. The proscenium array is the main system, and it consists of seven arrays of 40 boxes measuring 120’ across. “All of the additional immersive arrays consist of 20 boxes per array. With the immersive nature of the Sphere, all of the 20,000 people in the audience can hear all the arrays.” The challenge was rethinking the workflow. For example, where is the snare drum going to? “If you put a left and right drum mix into the first and seventh column of the proscenium array, that’s basically the outside edges of the proscenium array — but then there’s approximately 100 milliseconds of time between them.” Through experimentation at the Mini-Sphere, Brown was able to move himself around 13 different positions in the room virtually. “Mix position was dead center and there, the sound was fine; but back in Section 201, I realized it wasn’t working because the sound was flaming all over the place. I had to rethink the process and ended up having to direct assign instruments to arrays. The stereo channels had to go.”
Another challenge with the Sphere comes from your listening position in that ball-shaped 20,000-capacity room, where the response is ±5 dB. “That’s a huge difference,” Brown explains. “There are some places that were aggressive, and some places that sounded great. But in the end, it all sounded great and didn’t fall apart. Some people had a slightly different experience, depending on where they are sitting, but it’s an immersive experience.”
Brown’s current console of choice is a Lawo mc² 56, and he asked Lawo to write some custom code. In the end, he had 16 user buttons for each channel. “What was clever with the code Lawo created, was that each channel knew it’s home auxiliary bus; the user buttons removed the channel from its home auxiliary and assigned it to a moving object, which had the sound circling the room. Pressing the user button again, the channel was removed from the moving object and assigned back to its home auxiliary.”
Mic-wise, Brown’s selections are “pretty generic” except for a few. “We have a Royer Labs SF-24 Stereo Ribbon that is a beautiful overhead. You don’t need anything else but that. On Trey’s guitar we have a Royer R-122V ribbon mic with a Shure 57.”
Dispensing of the Wedges
Anastasio’s monitor engineer Robert “VOiD” Caprio grew up in New York’s Long Island, and “right out of high school I got a job at a studio,” he says. “But I was always doing live work on the weekends and the occasional short tour.” In 2007 he recorded and produced the band Push Play, and when they went out on tour, he went with them. His reputation for live engineering spread and his phone started ringing.
Last year, Caprio was asked if he’d like to do some monitor work with Trey Anastasio. “I was told he needed his own guy,” he says. The band was moving away from wedges and into IEMs, and Capiro specializes in that. “I got a call on a Tuesday and mixed a show on Wednesday.” The transition of going to IEMs went well, though there were some growing pains. “Bands that have been around a long time are used to wedges and used to that dynamic. While it’s been almost a year that I’ve been working with them, we’re still working on things that make it feel more like a live stage.” The band went with a combination of JH Audio, Sensaphonics, and Ultimate Ears earpieces.
Caprio is also on a Lawo mc² 56, and his outboard rack includes two Bricasti reverbs for drums and vocals, and a Waves Titan server for extra effects and minimal processing. “I am using two reverbs, three PSEs (Primary Source Expanders) and two dynamic EQs. That’s it for outboard gear. The one thing I really love about the Lawo is that it integrates Pro Tools and Waves well. It’s all very minimal — you know, Phish.”
By design, The Sphere relegates the monitor engineers to a deck behind the stage, “watching our artists on big TVs,” Capiro explains. The band is also set up with talkback mics, though they weren’t used a lot. And as if Anastasio doesn’t have enough pedals to operate (generally up to a dozen), there was an added box with five switches custom built by System Engineer Simon Bauer. Switch one sends a light to Capiro’s console, and he then knows he must address the drums. “I’ll generally know instantly that they’re probably a little too loud, and I’ll back those down.” Bass, guitar, keys, and vocals are the other switches.
But there’s no setting the levels and forgetting it. “It’s a moving target,” Capiro says. “The music is very dynamic, so what we give the band has to be purposeful. But it’s turned out to be one of the most enjoyable aspects of working with Phish — it’s never boring!”
The IEM Factor
Handling monitors for the rest of the band is Mark Bradley, who’s been mixing monitor for Phish “for forever.” He started his career at Maryland Sound, where he worked for 16 years, and then went freelance. He worked with many other groups including George Benson and the B-52s, mostly as a monitor engineer. He’s been with Phish since 1996.
Bradley confirms that the move to IEMs made mixing initially more complicated. For him, going to IEM just meant that there was more attention to detail, but his long history with the band members translated to him having a solid understanding of what was needed. The added complexity of the Sphere made for some additional adjustments. “Having no amplifiers on stage was different — for Mike [Gordon, the bass player], it was the first time without his amplifier directly behind him.” He had already adopted to a “rumble pad” — an approximately 5’x5’ haptic floor covering that transmits the physical feel of sound without an amp, something Anastasio adopted for this show as well.
Wrestling with that 80-millisecond delay caused by the P.A. was another new experience. “I responded by keeping the vocal mics tightly gated as the snare and hi-hat would come down and bleed if it wasn’t. Sometimes I just shut off every microphone I could.” He mixed the three members on a Yamaha Rivage PM 10 console, which he’s been using for a long time. No outboard effects were needed as he finds the board has everything he needs internally.
Otherwise, “I had to get used to looking at a big TV screen instead of sitting 10 feet from them. There are times during this show that they were in complete blackness.” But the talk back microphones they used made the path clearer. “It’s all just something you have to figure out. It was a whole new experience. In the end, it was great.”
ON BOARD WITH LAWO
In late 2022, Phish FOH engineer Garry Brown found himself in Burbank with fellow engineers Brian Ruggles (Billy Joel), Brandon Blackwell (Drake, Kendrick Lamar), and Jim Warren (Radiohead). They were all there to listen to the Holoplot demo for the Sphere, but also got the opportunity to listen to the Lawo mc256. “It blew me away,” Brown says. “It’s a wider image and is more open-sounding, and I got to the point where I wanted to try it on a gig.”
Brown took the console to a Trey Anastasio Band gig at the Chicago Theatre. “It was fat, clear, and the depth of field was amazing. The tonality on this was completely natural.” He does admit a learning curve was involved but assures it’s worth it. “I have a lot more flexibility than what I’ve been used to,” Brown says. He credits system engineer Simon Bauer for working with him. “The correct routing, the creating of streams — he has done a big lift,” Brown notes.
The Lawo is clean indeed — it has no internal effects, although Lawo’s mc2 series consoles now integrate with Waves SuperRack plug-in host and can sync the storage of SoundGrid plug-in parameters in snapshots and production data. Brown uses two Bricasti Design M7s for drums and vocal reverb. “When I first put this together, my plan was to have a rack’s worth of old outboard gear, but I ended up getting rid of it and just using Waves. I use that purely for delays and choruses.” He does use Rupert Neve Designs Shelford Channel along with an Empirical Labs Distressor on the bass, plus he has a Rupert Neve Designs Master Buss Processor on the drums, and another Master Buss Processor and a Kush Audio Clariphonic on the stereo bus insert.
Phish frontman Trey Anastasio’s monitor engineer, Robert “VOiD” Capiro, adopted the Lawo console as well. “The Lawo is one of the coolest things that I’ve come across in a long time,” Capiro says. Well-known in Europe as a broadcasting console, especially in symphonic halls, he notes it’s unusual to see on the road, especially in the monitor position. “I’m one of the first, if not the first monitor engineer to be touring with the Lawo console.” Brown did in fact turn him on it, and “we both agreed that sonically, it was a game changer. I was blown away by the depth and clarity.” So was Anastasio. When trying it out, Capiro says Anastasio turned to him with a big smile and said, ‘yeah, that’s it, man.”
Within a few hours after Caprio took the Lawo home, he thought he could mix a show on it that night if he had to. “It does have a different workflow than most consoles, so some of the functionality for monitors is such you must dig around a little bit to get to different places to make things work the way you want. But for me, it was a simple transition. I love mixing on it.”
AUDIO CREW
- Sound Company: Clair Global
- FOH Engineer: Garry Brown
- Monitor Engineer, band: Mark Bradley
- Monitor Engineer, Trey Anastasio: Robert “VOiD” Caprio
- Broadcast Mixer: Vance Powell
- System Engineer: Simon Bauer
- Crew Chief/Stage: Rich Burke
- Monitor Tech: Dakota Leaman
FOH GEAR
- P.A. System: 1,600 Holoplot X1 speakers in 360° array (house installed)
- FOH Console: Lawo mc2 56
- Outboard: (2) Bricasti Reverbs; Waves Titan server; Rupert Neve Designs Shelford Series Channel and Master Buss Processor; Empirical Lab Distressor; Kush Audio Clariphonic.
MON GEAR
- Monitor Consoles: Lawo mc2 56; Yamaha RIVAGE PM10
- Outboard: (2) Bricasti reverbs; Waves Titan server
- IEMs: JH Audio, Sensaphonics, and Ultimate Ears
