Two of Australia’s most captivating vocalists, Josh Teskey and Ash Grunwald, came together to deliver an exclusive run of shows across Australia late last year.
FOH Engineer Chris Braun received a call from Al Parkinson, one of the management team from Applejack Music who look after Josh Teskey’s side of the fence, to see if he’d be interested in working on the project.
“I’d worked with Ash on and off over the years but had not even met Josh however I knew his work from The Teskey Brothers,” commented Chris. “Al ran me through the idea and it was refreshingly simple. Two guys, a bunch of guitars and the blues … it didn’t take me long to say yes!”
Chris added that they like their sound to be raw and real. There aren’t any fancy tricks going on up on stage, no clicks, no computers, it is just the guys, some instruments and great songs. Both of the boys have monster voices and the guitar sounds were straight from tone-town so it was a case of representing what they were doing on stage as faithfully as possible, just on a larger scale.
PA
In house PA’s were used on the tour as the rooms they were doing, or the rooms they were eventually allowed to do thanks to Covid, all had fairly nice in house rigs.
“For the Forum, we were possibly the first act to use the newly installed d&b J system that JPJ had recently put in,” added Chris. “The Forum had previously been an L-Acoustics K2 which had always done a great job but for whatever reason, the d&b J had replaced it which made me a happy chappy as I prefer to mix on d&b systems. It was still pretty fresh on the tuning side of things but it didn’t take much to get it into shape and we had a great sounding night.”
At the Melbourne Recital Centre, they used the in house d&b system, which comprised of a flown T10 array covering the balcony levels, J-Subs on the deck with V8/ 12 and Y7P covering the stalls and T10 for front fill. According to Chris, the PA was in pretty good shape concerning alignment and EQ. He had to spend a small amount of time balancing the various system levels to get the voicing of the system as a whole to work as one.
“Once we’d balanced the different levels and rechecked all the handover points for time, it became pretty seamless moving between each of the systems areas of coverage and the overall tone of the system throughout the auditorium was very consistent,” he said.
In Sydney at the Sydney Recital Hall, the in house system was an L-Acoustics Kiva system however they supplemented the house rig with some additional L-Acoustics SB118 Subs as Chris says the house PA is a little under spec’d given the size of the space.
JPJ look after the L-Acoustics PA so they had already put the extra subs in place and included them in the system by the time they arrived so again it was just a case of balancing the several elements that make up the entire system.
“Balancing those elements was a bit of a challenge as the SRH when empty is fairly acoustically challenging to say the least,” Chris noted. “The seating within the venue extends past 180 degrees on the balcony levels so there are additional fill speakers flown behind the main arrays to cover these seats. However, when the room is empty and you turn each system up, you end up with so many arrival times at almost any position in the room, that it’s hard to tell which system you’re listening to, even as far back as FOH. The first thing I did was check if the venue was sold out to see if I could simply turn those outfill boxes off but Josh and Ash had gone and written a great record that lots of people wanted to hear so those seats we all taken … thanks guys!”
Chris reports that the Systems timing across each supplemental system was fine but he did have to play with system levels for a while to try and find a happy medium between intelligibility in each of the areas of coverage while also trying to ensure that one system didn’t ruin the next. They ended up in a place that was as good as it was going to get in the empty room and they put a walk around the room at the top of the list for the System Tech once they started the show so they could revaluate those decisions quickly.
“Once we were underway and things were sitting nicely at FOH, the System Tech did a walk and reported all was well, vocals were clear and no system was impeding the next so no changes were needed … win!” said Chris.
Control
After looking over all the in house production riders, more venues had in house DiGiCo consoles than not so given they were trying to do a tour during a pandemic and budgets were tight, Chris decided to go with DiGiCo and bring in consoles for the couple shows that had something else on the house spec.
Because the show was relatively simple and all the venues were so acoustically different and for the most part, designed for amplifying acoustic performances, Chris pretty much started from scratch each day and mixed to the room rather than try and bring a show file in and make it work within the space.
“That said, I did have my Waves and UAD Live Rack system with me which was across each of the guy’s vocals, stems and main Left-Right,” he revealed. “I also had my reverbs coming from UAD, it’s hard to go past their version of the EMT250 and Lexicon 224.
“However in Melbourne at the MRC, they have a few nice toys in their FOH rack so I ditched most of the plugins and went with real-world Distressors and TCM4000 reverbs and just ran UAD for stems and Left-Right.”
Mixing the Act
The guys just wanted it to sound real. Chris spent time talking about tones and different ideas and ways of doing things over email leading up to the first show. Ash has a pretty distinct sound from his solo show which he kept relatively untouched for this project but he was also open to suggestions each day once we were underway in soundcheck and they started hearing how the room was reacting.
Ash does A LOT of recording of his own music so he is well aware that fixing sounds at the source is far more powerful than anywhere else in the chain so they always managed to find that happy place between the right tone and volume with the amps and the house sound.
Ash played a split guitar set up with a Mesa Lone Star and Fender Hot Rod Deluxe with each amp on all the time, which gave Chris some pretty cool options for blending the two to achieve the overall tone.
Ash also played a couple of different resonator guitars, which Chris received via his two amps as well as a Shure Beta 57 mic to pick up the distinct acoustic sound of these awesome sounding instruments. Ash was very particular about how these guitars sounded and given the real tone of the instruments comes from the acoustic resonator, rather than the amps, they spent time each day getting that Beta57 just right. The result each night was well worth the time spent because when those guitars were being used, the tone shift from the electrics to resonators brought those songs to life.
Ash also had an Octave pedal providing to the low-end element of the show, which he turned on and off and played as required. His ability to be able to play the guitar parts and separate the bass parts was pretty impressive and meant that Chris didn’t just have a mess of bass being sent to him as he strummed away.
On top of all the guitars that Ash played, he was also providing the percussive element to the show via a Cajon with attached Kick and Snare pedals for each of his feet … Ash was busy!
Josh had a much more simple set-up, an amp for electric guitar, a DI + amp for his acoustic and a swag of harmonicas. In conversations leading up to the tour, Josh wanted to look at ways of making the acoustic sound a little more interesting than just DI’ing it, so they added an amp to be able to blend the two tones.
“I lent on the amp sound that he’d pulled and brought the DI signal in to reinforce the low end as I wanted to acoustic to be as extended as possible,” added Chris. “The result was an older sounding acoustic that was still full-bodied and rich down to 80Hz … much lower than I’d normally allow an acoustic guitar to go on nearly any other show.
“The only real “special” things I did in the mix, that we hadn’t already sorted out on stage by creating those different tones, was to make what was a pretty straightforward, simple show, sound big.”
As much as the guys had written great songs, worked on their tones and played each night well, making that all sound big when a lot of the time, there was one guitar and two vocals playing is where the main challenge lay. To do this, Chris started with the vocals which was a case of utilizing parallel vocal channels for each of the guys to ensure their vocals were always full-bodied and larger than life no matter how loud or quiet they were singing.
Some of the songs were extremely stripped back and intimate so ensuring they translated while still feeling full was the challenge, especially in some of the acoustic environments they found themselves in.
“For guitars, I blended each of the amps down the centre of a stereo group, one for each of the different guitars on stage and from there, shifted their image using time to match the guy’s positions on stage,” explained Chris. “A little bit left for Josh and a little bit right for Ash while also keeping an eye on the tone of the given I was using time to manipulate the sound rather than panning.
“I wanted to ensure that no matter where you were sitting in the audience, you got all the same tone and level as anyone else in the auditorium. It also meant that if you were somewhere between the main arrays, you got a full, wide stereo image.
“If I were to approach this using pan, then some people’s listening experience would be sacrificed thanks to the level changes associated with panning which would mean some people would get less guitar because of where they were sitting and given the show itself was fairly stripped back with so few instruments, there was no wiggle room for people to lose anything. Using time tastefully means everyone got even levels regardless of where they were sitting.”
Due to the simplicity of the show and the fact they had ample time each day from bump-in to the end of soundcheck, they opted to use in house operators and gear for monitors, which worked a treat.
Mic Setup
For vocals Chris had each of the guys on Telefunken M80s which worked well and tonally, suited each of the guys. The power that each of the guys can put down the mic is pretty substantial which played as an advantage to one of the M80’s downsides.
“As much as I love the M80, it isn’t normally a mic I’d put on someone with so much power as it’s one thing they don’t handle as well as other vocal mics but what happens when you break through the M80 is a subtle, almost soft distortion which was something I was chasing for this project. I had considered using older Beyer M69s for this very effect, as they are a mic that breaks up nicely when you reach that point but it can happen a little too early, making it a little less versatile.”
“The M80 would only break up softly when the guys went for it and the shift in sound was something that worked well given the material. It was also something I would have struggled to create digitally while having it sound as natural so it was a nice little by-product appropriate to the music.”
All the electric guitar amps were mic’d with SeElectronic VR-1 ribbon mics and the acoustic amp had a Shure KSM44 on it. The resonator guitars used Ash’s amps as well as having a Shure Beta57 blended in which picked up the tone of the resonators themselves.
On the Cajon, the rear mic was a Beyer M88 for the “kick” sound and Shure SM57 on the front for the “snare”. Radial DIs for the acoustic and Octave bass pedal and that’s it … nice and simple.
Steaming the Gig
In Sydney, the gig was streamed live to TWITCH as Ash has partnered with them and does a bunch of streaming from his home studio in NSW.
The legends at Gigpiglet were engaged to take care of all things TWITCH for the night and brought in gear and crew to cover video, audio and the stream itself.
“I’m not one for video so all I can say with regards to that is that we had several cameras both static and roaming and the guys killed it,” said Chris. “The stream went live about 30-45min ahead of the show start via a remote camera in the greenroom to capture the guys warming up, chatting and answering questions that came in over the stream chat, it was pretty cool.”
For audio, Chris had two DiGiCo SD11i consoles sharing a single DiGiCo D2 io rack and he had the head amp control at FOH.
“Nick from Gigpiglets mixed the broadcast audio which was great for me because I didn’t have to think about it too much,” he added. “Normally I’d be happy to sort out a broadcast mix from my FOH console during production rehearsals time but because we didn’t have much in the way of any rehearsals and the fact the SRH acoustics meant anything I did to make the FOH mix sound the way I wanted it to within the auditorium, meant it probably wasn’t going to translate to a broadcast mix.
“I sent a matrix of my main bus to Nick as a reference which given the acoustics of the room, Nicks only comment on it was “I was surprised how dry you had the mix” however in the room … you couldn’t turn the reverb down any more than it was, haha. This mix was also the fallback option in the event something went wrong with Nick’s feed to the stream.”
Chris remarked that Nick and the rest of the Gigpiglet team were a pleasure to work with as usual and produced a great result that was viewed by around 750k people.
