On the Move with Jason Mraz

New York, NY (December 10, 2024)—Modern-day troubadour Jason Mraz spent much of the summer on the road on his Mystical Magical Rhythmical Radical Ride tour, playing venues as diverse as Red Rocks, Tanglewood and San Diego’s Rady Shell. Along for the proverbial Ride, much as he has been since 2005, was Mraz’s longtime FOH engineer and production manager, Ettore “ET” Dedivitiis. A longtime believer in focusing on interplay between performers and their instruments’ natural acoustics, ET brought along a Yamaha Rivage PM7 console for the trek, as did monitor engineer Matt Cornick.

The FOH mix was built out of the 60-plus inputs coming off the stage, and ET stayed on top of all of them, using the Rivage’s capabilities to project the band’s sound clearly to the audience while maintaining the subtle intricacies that made each performance special. His mix philosophy is deceivingly simple: “I want to hear the dynamics. I work hard on playing loud and soft, so I don’t want to take that away.”

Mraz eschews using loops or playback during shows, but that doesn’t mean ET oversees a simple mix that stays the same from show to show. Mraz’s tours vary from solo performances to full band setups and everything in-between, requiring the mix—and engineer—to be as flexible and in-the-moment as possible. With that in mind, ET made use of the Rivage PM’s onboard processing as well as outboard gear to be ready to respond in real-time to the show as it changed: “I’m using the Manley outboard processing; I’m using a Manley on Jason’s vocals, and we also have a couple of Bricasti M7s to put in the rack,” he mentions.

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Helping capture each performance were a selection of Shure microphones, including KSM 11s and KSM 9s for vocals, depending on the situation. “We always use Shure; if things go bad, 57s and 58s are brilliant, they always work great,” ET noted. He singled out the Yamaha RPio head amp’s ability to be sonically matched via transformer emulation and SILK to each unique microphone/sound source combination, helping him achieve the desired sound for each performance.

With European dates already lined up for 2025, Mraz has ambitious plans for the coming year—and that’s fine with ET: “I love the people I travel with. My resume’s very short. Everybody I’ve worked with, I’ve stayed with for a long time. You gotta have fun, you gotta enjoy it. You only get to do this thing once, so you might as well enjoy it and have fun.”