Noah Kahan: Singer, Songwriter, Stadium Filler

New York, NY (July 16, 2024)—As a folk-focused singer/songwriter, Noah Kahan is one of those “overnight sensations” whose success was actually years in the making, and all of it due to hard work, ranging from endlessly touring to writing new material on the regular and posting rough drafts on TikTok for his fans. The results of that work, however, have been hard to miss for his audio team.

“I jumped on in September, 2022,” says monitor engineer Clark Wright. “We’ve been going non-stop since then, and it’s been an interesting growth. Back then, we were doing a House of Blues tour—a lot of venues 1,000 to 2,000 capacity, all the way down to 800 in some places. Now, last night was 24,000.”

Providing audio for the tour is Clair Global, which in turn has drawn on many of its subsidiary audio companies to handle the production’s needs. FOH engineer Joel Livesey laughs, “It’s Clair, but it’s an Eighth Day Sound P.A. system, I have a console from Sound Image with outboard racks from Britannia Row, and Clark has a Clair console. It’s a lot of different logos on the cases, but the end of the day, it’s all Clair and they treat us really well.”

The musicians are all multi-instrumentalists, so the two engineers deal with more than 100 inputs coming from the stage. Livesey mixes on an Avid S6L-32D with “quite a lot of outboard gear; I come from a studio background.” Indeed; as a second-generation audio pro (his father is noted producer Warne Livesey), he has a fair amount of analog gear at the mix position and uses a DirectOut Prodigy for MADI/outboard conversion out and back into the desk. In addition to digital units like a Bricasti M7 and t.c. electronic System 6000 reverb unit, there’s a pair of Tube-Tech CL 1B compressors for vocals; IGS Audio compressors; Rupert Neve Designs 5045s, Shelford Channels and a 542 tape emulator; and more.

While plug-ins like oeksound Soothe Live and Empirical Labs Arouser are put to use in the desk, Livesey’s favorite piece of hardware on-hand is a Tube-Tech SMC 2BM: “In the live world, it almost acts as a system processor for me, allowing me to sculpt between low, mid and high with variable crossover frequencies. Rather than asking our system engineer to, say, brighten up the P.A., I have control right next to me to boost the low end or top end and keep those dynamic ranges where I want them.”

Kahan’s albums are stripped back compared to the live sound generated by the many musicians onstage, so Livesey can’t merely replicate album mixes live: “There’s a lot of interesting, nuanced instrumentation—mandolins, banjos, mandocellos, fiddles—so my philosophy is to provide as much detail and separation as possible so that you can hear what everyone is playing very clearly, and then have that incredible vocal sit exactly where it should be.”

Tracking The Tour Sound of Sam Hunt

Figuring out how to best mix the musicians is particularly crucial when it comes to the unreleased songs that have been debuting onstage. “Noah and the band are very talented, so they’ll do songs that he wrote two days before sometimes,” says Wright. Livesey adds, “And the audience will know them! It’s so wild—they pick up these new songs from TikTok videos, they know all the words and it’s amazing.”

Helping capture song debuts for posterity is a DPA 5100 mobile 5.1 surround mic at front of house, used to record each show. Livesey records 120 channels every night, specifically adding the DPA because “with Ambisonics and spatial audio becoming so much more prevalent, it’s prudent to have that archived as well, especially in the arenas where you want to feel like you’re in the middle of the crowd.”

That crowd hears the show thanks to a sizable Adamson Systems Engineering E Series P.A. system that Livesey specifically chose, noting, “I’ve always loved the tonality of their speakers. We’re running an Adamson E15 rig with E12s used as underhang, just to get a little bit wider coverage down below for the audience. It’s the same on the outhangs, and then we carry 270-degree hangs, which are Adamson S10s. We also fly nine Adamson E119 subs in a cardioid configuration—that’s to minimize a bit of it going back onto the stage and also to get more directionality from the flown subs. On the ground, we have E119s in a cardioid configuration, some S10s as frontfills and a few S10s for some outfill. All Adamson, all Lab.gruppen amps, all provided by Eighth Day. It’s just a fantastic P.A. system for what we’re trying to achieve with the tonal quality of the show.”

Further ensuring that low frequencies coming back to the stage won’t be an issue, the acoustic guitars sport L.R. Baggs Anthem pickup systems, based around a blend between a mic and pickup; associated wireless systems for all the acoustic instruments are Shure Axients. Vocals onstage are captured with DPA d:facto 4018VL vocal mics, except for the drummer who belts into a Shure Beta56. The drum kit itself is surrounded by a variety of mics, with a Beta 91A and an Audix D6 both on the kick, while the snare is heard via a Shure 57 on top and a Beyerdynamic M201 on bottom. For the three toms, two have Earthworks DM20s on them, while another D6 grabs the third, and Neumann KM184s are positioned on the ride and hi-hat. “We have Beyerdynamic M160 double-ribbon mics on overheads,” says Wright. “With a lot of drum mics, you get out of hand fast with cymbal noise, so having those darker ribbons on overheads is huge.”

At stageside, Clark oversees a DiGiCo Quantum7 desk with a few RND 5045s and two Bricasti M7s nearby, where he sends mixes to the musicians’ FiR Audio Krypton 5 in-ear monitors via Wisycom systems. “When I upgraded to Wisycom, I expected the RF to clean up and it did, but I was not prepared for how much better they sound. It is crazy how much more dynamic range there is, and the stereo image is huge compared to what it used to be; our guitarist, after the first day of rehearsal, said, ‘It sounds like I’m hearing in 4-D!’”

The result of all that gear is a solid-sounding show that may center on folk music but which roams far afield when it needs to. “It’s a challenge,” admits Livesey, “but it’s a good challenge because I’m essentially mixing multiple genres every night and doing so very dynamically. The setlist is beautiful how it flows and the musicians are amazing, so it’s been an incredible experience to me, making me push myself beyond what I’ve ever done before to try and give the best show possible to the audience.” There will be plenty of opportunities to keep doing that throughout the summer ahead, as Kahan and company will be on the road through late September.