Finessing The Sound of The Funeral Portrait

Atlanta, GA (April 14, 2025)—Live sound engineer Jesse Stojanovski has toured with Atlanta, GA rockers The Funeral Portrait for the last seven years, and for the last two, he’s carried his own mixing console to ensure consistency, regardless of the venue. Currently on the road to promote its latest long-player, Greetings from Suffocate City, The Funeral Portrait tends to leave it all on the stage, so Stojanovski aims to create a house mix that matches that manic energy, and monitor mixes that give the band everything it needs.

The mix is handled on an Allen & Heath CTi1500 control surface tied into a DM32 MixRack equipped with a RackUltra FX card and a DX168 Expander; the CTi1500 sports a Waves V3 SoundGrid network card for virtual soundcheck and multi-track recording.

Stojanovski’s gear is set up as a fully self-contained FOH and monitor system, handling 53 inputs between the MixRack, expander and control surface. Each input is double-patched, ensuring that both the FOH and monitors receive the same signal.

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“Being able to insert the Dyn8 multiband compressor and dynamic EQ on any input, group, aux, bus, output—literally anywhere—has been a game changer in my workflow,” Stojanovski adds. “All of this without requiring any outboard servers or computers to bulk up and complicate my rig.”

That said, he hits the existing system pretty hard, making use of the onboard DEEP processing, which emulates hardware compressors, EQ, preamps and source expanders. Stojanovski noted that he also makes the most of the new RackUltra FX card which added 10 new algorithms—vocal tools, reverberation designers, harmonizers, a saturator and distortion—which he says “took adding flavor to a mix to a whole new level.”