I was up at 5:30am last Friday to make my flight home from the first leg of Superchunk’s first tour in 9 years. Their drummer, Jon Wurster and I met last year on the A.C. Newman tour and quickly bonded over our mutual love/hate/confusion of the lesser stars of the SST Records universe. Superchunk’s former tour manager/sound guy, Jason Ward now stays home to tend to the Chicago Mastering Service, so Jon recommended me as his replacement.
(I can’t stress enough how much of a dream-come-true this is for me. In high school, my favorite bands were Bedhead, Superchunk, and Minutemen — I’ve been working with The New Year for 8 years now, so unless they reanimate D. Boon, all my teenage daydreams have been realized.)
For once, I felt almost totally prepared for a tour. Typically, the night before is a scramble, tying up loose ends and looking for that fucking GPS, but I’ve been on tour so much this year that I have a system down. I make a pack list a few days before we leave, and I mentally go through each day of the tour, checking it against my itinerary to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything. Backpack (for to-do lists and reference info), Google Docs (guest lists, tour budgets, other spreadsheet-ish info), and Dropbox (for all my other files) also play a big part in keeping things organized.
Sound-wise, Superchunk is straightforward rock band, a welcome change from the other bands I’ve mixed this year. Midlake had 7 members, 4 singers, and wide variety of instrumentation that made for a challenging, yet fun mix. The New Pornographers were an uphill battle most nights: 7 singers, a really loud (and excellent) drummer, tons of dynamic shifts, and lots of layered instruments to cram in there.
Mixing the The New Pornographers was more like mixing a record than any band I’ve worked for previously. Live sound is usually about sound reinforcement, supplementing the band’s natural stage sound with the PA system to achieve a nice balance. For the most part, you shouldn’t have to fiddle with a mix too much after the 2nd or 3rd songs, but with so many different singers and so much instrumentation, I was constantly bringing channels up and down to achieve the proper balance and keep the audience happy.
Superchunk, on the other hand is pretty simple: drums, bass, two guitars, and one main singer. Once the basic balance was dialed in, it was just a matter of riding individual elements: bring the vocal up here, a little delay there, etc. I spent a lot more time tweaking the overall balance instead of fiddling with individual instruments on a per-song basis.
Anyhoo! I’m flying to Las Vegas on Friday for the big Matador 21 party. I’ll be doing monitors for Superchunk, and mixing front-of-house for Come and Chavez, while not plugging away at the Limit Hold ‘Em tables or communing with my fellow audio nerds.