Opening for Jelly Roll Takes No Toll

New York, NY (October 30, 2024)—Opening on an arena tour for a breakout star like Jelly Roll is no simple thing, but Warren Zeiders spent the last two months making it look easy. Taking the stage each night on the journey, which wrapped up at Charlotte’s Spectrum Center on October 27, Zeiders played songs from his two studio albums, and was mixed by FOH engineer Ben Ivey and monitor engineer Adam Snyder, both using gear provided by Sound Image.

Ivey and Snyder both manned DiGiCo Quantum225 mixing consoles throughout the run; the mic pres were housed in an SD-Rack that he and Snyder shared on an Optocore network loop.

“There’s zero coloration to anything to do with the input, which means that everything that I do in front of house as far as the microphone we pick, the vocal chain we pick, the sound gets colored the way it needs to be,” Ivey opined. “The onboard processing gives me a ton of tonal and dynamic options.”  As an example, he noted the Chilli 6 six-band, dynamic, multiband compressor/expander on the desk, which he applied often to Zeiders’ vocal.

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Over in monitor world, Snyder was likewise making the most of onboard processing, noting, “I switched my artist off of auxes and onto groups, so his mix goes through groups before it hits his ears, and I’m using the Chilli 6 and Naga 6 dynamic EQ the Spice Rack processing now has onboard. Putting that across the groups has really helped me help Warren’s vocal cut through in the mix as the band gets louder. It’s more robust having it all in the box than having a separate software rack, because sometimes even hardware can fail on the road, so having it all built-in is really nice.”

That vocal was captured nightly through a DPA VL4018 vocal mic, and the singer’s dynamic delivery was directed where it needed to be through other parts of the Quantum desk at monitors. “His vocal shifts tonally a lot the louder he gets, and I’m using a lot of the onboard processing to help smooth that out,” he says. “Also, for the band—who are all on ears—I love how neutral the pre-amps are for monitors. I’m trying to let the band hear what they’re giving me so that they can make choices onstage in tone or in how they play, and having a really neutral pre-amp helps in that. But I also love that if I need to, there is stuff onboard that I can color the sound with and help them. But from a starting point, it’s nice and neutral and true to what the source is.”