SNL50 Concert Brings It All Back Home

08/04/2025 3

New York, NY (April 8, 2025)—In February, Saturday Night Live celebrated its 50th anniversary with a live, Sunday night primetime special highlighting the hit show’s comedic history. Two days earlier, however, its musical legacy was fêted with SNL50: The Homecoming Concert, an equally epic event held at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, just across the street from SNL’s studios.

Broadcast live on Peacock, the three-and-ahalf- hour show featured a who’s who of former SNL musical guests, likely making it the only non-awards show ever to feature as broad a lineup as Lady Gaga, Snoop Dogg, Bad Bunny, Jack White, Backstreet Boys, David Byrne, Eddie Vedder, Lauryn Hill, Bonnie Raitt, Wyclef Jean, St. Vincent, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Jelly Roll, Chris Martin, Arcade Fire, The B-52’s, Brittany Howard, Mumford & Sons, Robyn, Brandi Carlile, Cher, Devo, Miley Cyrus, Nirvana with Post Malone, and The Roots.

The M3 trucks and team had to endure rain and snow for much of the week that they were parked outside Radio City Music Hall. Photo: M3.

Keeping the musical audio flowing for broadcast was no simple task, and that duty was entrusted to Music Mix Mobile (M3), which had its Eclipse and Phoenix mobile audio trucks parked outside, each outfitted with a Lawo mixing system. “There were a lot of moving parts,” confirmed M3 co-founder Joel Singer. “Planning, we had meetings and emails back and forth with Tom Holmes, the A1 on the show. We were both working a week-and-a-half earlier at the Grammys, so we had additional conversations there, and it became an ongoing discussion.”

For M3, the SNL concert was part of a much bigger picture—the event was the final stop in a mad, three-week dash that also saw the company provide broadcast audio trucks for the Grammy Awards telecast in Los Angeles (16 years and counting), NBA All-Star Game events in San Francisco, and the Super Bowl LIX YouTube Tailgate Concert in New Orleans. “We own 10 full preamp racks for Lawos—that’s 560 channels—and they were all in use,” said Singer.

After the Grammys ended on Sunday, February 2, within hours, M3’s Eclipse truck was on the road, making the four-and-a-half-day journey back to the company’s homebase in New Jersey. “We were waiting for 336 channels of our preamps to come back from across the country,” said Singer. “I had to pre-build configurations on my flights going back and forth to L.A., so I knew it was all going to work; I just had to load it all up. We also had to reconfigure the Lawos in advance, because you just can’t add a preamp rack, bring it to a gig, throw it on a piece of fiber and go, ‘Oh, there it is.’”

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More importantly, doing that wouldn’t fit with M3’s meticulous methods. “We pre-test everything that goes out the door, 100 percent,” said Singer. “The trucks came back on Friday, and we unloaded everything, hooked up all our preamp racks, tested every single signal source and went through the whole system. When you’re dealing with high-profile, once-in-a-lifetime broadcast events—which is the core of our business—there’s no room for equipment failures. We loaded the preamp racks into our Sprinter, sent them to New York for delivery on Saturday, and loaded the rest of the trucks to arrive onsite Monday.”

M3 delivered its preamps to Radio City on Saturday due to load-in order, which was dictated in part by space constraints within the venue. Once inside, the preamps were placed on a 30-foot-by-20-foot deck at stage right and hoisted 10 feet up so that the space below would be available for other uses. “The planning that went into this was intense, hence why we had to bring gear in early,” said Singer. “The only real egress to Radio City for bringing equipment inside is a set of doors that go onto a ramp, and at its end, a forklift comes and brings it all down two floors—so it’s quite a feat to load a big show in and out of there.”

Two days later, on Monday, the trucks arrived and parked along 70 feet of 51st Street. “Monday morning, we got the trucks up and running, got the start of builds done, started to find out any last-minute changes as far as input lists or structure of the show, and sat down with the engineers,” recalled Singer.