Noah Kahan: Singer, songwriter, stadium filler

New York, NY (July 16, 2024) – As a folk-oriented singer/songwriter, Noah Kahan is one of those “overnight sensations” whose success actually took years, and it’s all thanks to hard work, from endless touring to regularly writing new material and posting rough drafts on TikTok for his fans. But the results of that work were hard to miss for his audio team.

“I joined in September 2022,” says monitor engineer Clark Wright. “We’ve been on the road non-stop since then and it’s been an interesting growth. At the time we did a House of Blues tour – a lot of venues had a capacity of 1,000 to 2,000, some places as low as 800. Last night it was 24,000.”

Sound for the tour is provided by Clair Global, which in turn uses many of its subsidiaries for production. FOH engineer Joel Livesey laughs: “It’s Clair, but it’s an Eighth Day Sound PA system, I’ve got a Sound Image console with Britannia Row outboard racks and Clark has a Clair console. There are lots of different logos on the cabinets, but ultimately 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 from the stage. Livesey mixes on an Avid S6L-32D with “quite a lot of outboard gear; I come from a studio background.” In fact, as a second-generation audio professional (his father is noted producer Warne Livesey), he has quite a lot of analogue gear on the mixer, and uses a DirectOut Prodigy for MADI/outboard conversion back and forth to the desk. In addition to digital units such as a Bricasti M7 and a tc electronic System 6000 reverb unit, there are 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 used in the console, Livesey’s favorite hardware is a Tube-Tech SMC 2BM: “In the live world, it almost acts as a system processor for me, allowing me to model with variable crossover frequencies between low, mid and high frequencies. Instead of asking our system engineer to brighten up the PA, for example, I have the control right next to me to boost the low or high frequencies and keep those dynamic ranges where I want them.”

Kahan’s albums are stripped down to the essentials compared to the live sound created by the many musicians on stage, so Livesey can’t simply reproduce album mixes live: “There are a lot of interesting, nuanced instruments – mandolins, banjos, mandolin, violins – so my philosophy is to provide as much detail and separation as possible so you can hear very clearly what everyone is playing and then have these incredible vocals exactly where they should be.”

Following in the footsteps of Sam Hunt’s tour sound

Figuring out how to best mix the musicians is especially important when it comes to the unreleased songs debuted on stage. “Noah and the band are very talented, so sometimes they’ll play songs he wrote two days before,” Wright says. Livesey adds, “And the audience will know them! It’s so crazy – they’re grabbing these new songs from TikTok videos, they know all the lyrics and it’s incredible.”

To capture song premieres for posterity, a DPA 5100 mobile 5.1 surround microphone is used in the foyer and is used to record each show. Livesey records 120 channels every night and adds the DPA because “with the increasing prevalence of ambisonics and spatial audio, it’s wise to archive those too, especially in the arenas where you want to feel like you’re in the middle of the audience.”

The audience hears the show thanks to a large E-Series PA system from Adamson Systems Engineering, which Livesey specifically chose. “I’ve always loved the sound quality of their speakers. We use an Adamson E15 rig with E12s as the underhang to get a little bit of wider coverage down below for the audience. Same with the outhangs, and then we have 270-degree hangs with us, which are Adamson S10s. We also fly nine Adamson E119 subwoofers in a cardioid configuration – that’s to minimize the return path to the stage a little bit 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 couple of S10s as outfills. All Adamson, all Lab.gruppen amps, all Eighth Day. It’s just a fantastic PA system for what we’re trying to achieve with the sound quality of the show.”

To further ensure that the low frequencies coming back to the stage are not a problem, the acoustic guitars are fitted with LR Baggs Anthem pickup systems based on a mix of microphone and pickup; the associated wireless systems for all acoustic instruments are Shure Axients. On-stage vocals are captured using DPA d:facto 4018VL vocal microphones, with the exception of the drummer who sings into a Shure Beta56. The drum kit itself is surrounded by a variety of microphones, with a Beta 91A and an Audix D6 both on the kick drum, while the snare is heard via a Shure 57 above and a Beyerdynamic M201 below. Two of the three toms are fitted with Earthworks DM20s, while another D6 handles the third and Neumann KM184s are positioned on the ride and hi-hat. “We have Beyerdynamic M160 double ribbon mics on the overheads,” says Wright. “With a lot of drum mics, the cymbal noise quickly gets out of control, so having those darker ribbons on the overhead mics is hugely important.”

Onstage, Clark monitors a DiGiCo Quantum7 console with a couple of RND 5045s and two Bricasti M7s nearby, from where he sends mixes through Wisycom systems to the musicians’ FiR Audio Krypton 5 in-ear monitors. “When I switched to Wisycom, I expected the HF to be cleaner, and it has, but I wasn’t prepared for how much better they sound. It’s crazy how much more dynamic range there is, and the stereo image is huge compared to before; our guitarist said after the first day of rehearsal, ‘It sounds like I’m listening in 4-D!'”

The result of all that gear is a solid-sounding show that, while based on folk music, can stray far off the beaten track when necessary. “It’s a challenge,” Livesey admits, “but it’s a good challenge because I’m basically mixing multiple genres every night and doing it very dynamically. The setlist is beautiful the way it flows and the musicians are fantastic, so for me it’s been an incredible experience that’s pushed me to go above and beyond what I’ve ever done before to give the audience the best show possible.” There will be plenty of opportunities to keep doing that next summer, as Kahan and his troupe will be on tour until the end of September.