Mixing Madison Square Garden for Vulfpeck’s Biggest Show

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I'm Dallas Taylor.

I recently went to a concert at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles.

This venue has seen it all, from iconic singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra to raw high-energy bands like the Ramones and Nirvana.

On this particular night, it was sold out and buzzing.

You could feel the spark in the air just waiting for ignition.

The band was Volfpek.

They've been my favorite band for a while now.

They're also currently my kids' favorite band, which, as a parent, makes me kind of emotional.

Musically, Volfpek sits somewhere between Indie Funk and Vintage Soul.

Each member is a world-class musician with their own unique projects, almost like a Volfpeck cinematic universe.

So when they come together, it feels a lot like a supergroup of incredible talent.

But to me, what really makes them special is the connection they have with each other, with the audience, and with their fans online.

In every interaction, they're always joyful, clever, and a little off-kilter in the best way.

The show I heard was the 10th and final stop on a short California tour.

But this wasn't just a concert.

It was their last attempt at recording their next quote-unquote studio album, but doing it live for an audience of super fans.

Every song was brand new.

There were no retakes and no safety net.

And yet, they pulled it off.

The music, the energy, the sound, it all just clicked.

But while it may have felt effortless to the crowd, crafting that kind of experience takes a ton of work behind the scenes, especially for a band where every performer is at the top top of their game and playing their instrument like their life depended on it.

That level of musicality demands the same level of skill behind the mixing board.

And that's where Jake Hartsfield comes in.

For Volfpek, everything is so live and spontaneous.

That's Jake, Wolfpeck's front-of-house engineer.

So a front-of-house engineer is essentially mixing the audio for the audience for a live concert.

So everything the audience hears coming out of the PA is controlled or mixed by the front-of-house engineer.

Jake has toured with a variety of artists, but these days, the main acts he mixes are Ben Rector and Volfpeck.

And it was actually Jake who got me VIP seats to the Volfpeck show I saw in LA.

Thanks, Jake.

I've seen a lot of concerts, and that was number one.

It was the best one I've ever seen.

It was incredible.

That's awesome.

But one of Jake's biggest and most high-pressure shows was Volfpeck's performance at Madison Square Garden.

It's a legendary venue in the heart of Manhattan.

Now, Volfpek isn't really a touring band.

They started as a YouTube band.

But as their fanbase grew, so did the demand for live shows.

So they started doing occasional one-off shows, and the one at Madison Square Garden was their biggest concert yet.

For Jake, the preparation started months in advance, and that's because Jake is also the band's production manager.

Basically, he's in charge of planning and executing every aspect of the performance.

For Madison Square Garden, it was probably eight months to a year before the show that I found out we were going to do it.

Once the show is booked, Jake puts on his production manager hat and gets to work.

When I'm hired to do a tour, I immediately start asking questions and building a writer or a stage plot and input list to try to get all the production questions out of the way.

How am I going to tackle the audio problem that is this tour?

You know, it's a problem-solving job.

A writer in this case refers to a technical writer, which acts like a contract with the venue.

Could be one page, it could be 10 pages, and it just is one document that outlines everything you need for your tour to be successful at that venue.

The most notorious writer in music history might be Van Halens, which famously asked for M ⁇ Ms in the green room, but with all of the brown ones removed.

It sounds ridiculous on the surface, but there was actually a good reason for it.

Their show was really technically challenging, and someone could get hurt if their instructions weren't followed down to the letter.

So the M ⁇ Ms were just their way of confirming if the staff had really read the writer in detail.

So a writer is about much more than just drinks and snacks.

It also includes critical technical and logistical details.

Here's what we need on stage.

Here's what time we want to do things.

The input list, the stage plot, a list of any backline gear that we need to rent, any other local production that needs to be rented, whether it's stage, craft, risers, that kind of thing.

Jake likes to have everything arranged way in advance.

That way, when he walks into the venue the morning of the show, he can roll right into his setup.

And that's how things started for Volfpec's show in New York City.

Right around 8 a.m., I arrive at Madison Square Garden.

That's 12 hours before showtime.

Right when 8 o'clock hits, that's when the truck doors open and the trailer doors open and all of the equipment starts moving into the venue from the loading dock and staging inside the venue to be set up.

Some venues will already have the main element set up like the stage and the lights but Madison Square Garden is different.

When you go into arenas you have to bring everything because they have hockey games in arenas.

30 first goal here at Madison Square Garden for the Grade 8.

They have monster truck rallies and arenas.

I want to get to Madison Square Garden the Saturday and Sunday.

I

So every event they have, you start with a total blank slate on the floor.

So in arena you've got to bring in not only the entire PA and the lighting package and all the truss and rigging for that, but also the stage and all the power and all the seats too.

Usually, Jake has a dedicated team with him who takes care of all of these details.

Normally there's a huge team of people with the tour for a show this size, like a dozen at least, if not 30 or 40 or 50 people.

And in this case, it was literally just three of us.

So me, front of house, a monitor engineer, and a lighting designer.

And so we can't do much by ourselves.

For Madison Square Garden, the rest of the crew comes from the local stage employees union.

We're heavily reliant on all of the local union heads, the audio head, the lighting head, the set carpenters to make this show happen in a timely fashion.

Fortunately, these are industry experts who know the venue inside and out.

But of course, working with an elite, tight-knit crew of complete strangers can be an intimidating experience.

And with any show of this size, every minute of setup costs thousands of dollars.

So they have to get moving as soon as they're in the door.

The first thing you do is you call it walk and chalk.

So So walk the venue and usually you're chalking the rigging points.

So whatever needs to be hung in the air, that's the first thing that happens.

And so you'll have people climb up into the venue hanging from the ceiling and they'll drop a rope down.

This is done by special stage hands called riggers.

Their job requires hoisting the PA speakers and hanging them securely 70 feet in the air.

8.30 to 9.30 is when that happens.

And ideally, it's done at 9.30 and we're ready to move on to the next phase which would be lighting in the air.

Once the speakers and lights have been hung up it's time to prep the stage.

So 11 a.m.

we start building on stage and that can be a little bit of everything.

In this case it was building the set and it was building the risers and probably starting to get some of the audio on stage as well.

Some mic stands, cables, that kind of thing and getting power on stage.

And then 12 p.m.

backline setup.

So that's getting the drum kit and the amps and the keyboards on stage.

When bands go on tour, they sometimes leave the heaviest equipment like drums and amps behind.

This is especially true if they're traveling by plane rather than bus.

If it's a fly date, so you're flying to a show and flying home, you can't carry a lot of production or a lot of instruments.

Usually guitarists bring their own guitars at the very least.

And then they may need to rent amplifiers and a drum kit and that kind of stuff locally.

Now, Volfpec's lineup is pretty fluid.

It can be as few as four people and as many as 15 or more, including guest artists.

The MSG show included 17 musicians, some of them playing multiple instruments.

That means a ton of gear to set up on stage.

So we had a B3 organ,

a clavinet on top of that.

And then we had a Yamaha CB70 piano.

And we have bass amps,

guitar amps.

And for this show, we did want to have some kind of visual interest going on on stage.

So we had a set designed.

The set requires building risers, installing carpeting and lighting fixtures, and hanging large rugs.

And right in the center was their big lit up Wolf logo.

Once the stage is all set up, everything goes dark.

So in a union venue, you're required to sometimes have what you call a dark stage, which is for lunch or for dinner, or just a break during the day.

And it's sometimes an hour long.

So no work can be done on the stage when that's happening.

So you just call call it a dark stage.

After an hour, the concert gods say, let there be light.

And work resumes.

So at 2 p.m., ideally, we will be having a line check, which means we're going through and tapping on all of the microphones and making sure that they're plugged in where they're supposed to be plugged in.

making sure that we see all of the inputs, all of the signals, and making sure they show up in the console.

So the front of house console and the monitor console.

The monitor console is typically set up by the side of the stage.

It's a big mixing board that's controlled by the band's monitor engineer, Austin.

He adjusts the mix that the band members hear on stage through both their in-ear monitors and the wedges.

A wedge is a floor monitor that allows the musician to hear themselves and to hear the rest of the band.

So it's usually a speaker on the floor in front of them on the stage.

Some artists prefer wedges, while others prefer in-ear monitors.

Wolfbeck is using wedges and in-ears.

So the wedges are a backup and for feel, so you can feel more of the low end.

And then the in-ears allow them to hear more detail and more of a finished mix.

As the line check is happening, Jake is usually doing one of the most crucial parts of his job, tuning the PA system.

So I'm listening to the PA playing maybe some pink noise and getting some measurements

and playing some music through it so I know how to tweak the EQ on the PA to make it sound more pleasing or so that my mix translates better in the room.

So I'm going to walk to the front of the venue, to the sides, probably walk up into the seats.

and just listen to what it sounds like farther up in the venue because I'm going to spend the show right in the middle of the floor and I'm only going to hear what it sounds like from one position.

But I want to know what it is also sounding like for the rest of the audience.

So if I walk up to part of the room and it just sounds weird or sounds bad, or maybe I don't hear anything at all, or if it's too quiet, then that's where I'll go and figure out if something's wrong with one of the speakers and fix it or turn a speaker on that's turned off or something like that.

Jake's goal is for every audience member to hear the band clearly no matter where they're sitting.

To do that, they use a setup called a line array.

It involves groups of speakers all connected together vertically.

A line array lets you target specific depths throughout the room.

Each speaker is aimed at a specific row or series of rows and as you tip upward you're hitting the seats that are farther away.

That allows you to make those speakers louder so at the seats at every seat in the venue you're trying to get within maybe 3 dB of level.

So everyone in the room experiences approximately the same volume during the show.

But the sound of an empty arena is very different than a full one.

When you don't have any people in the room, you usually are hearing a lot more reflections and more reverberation in the venue.

And when people get in the room, usually it tightens up a little bit so there's less echo, less reverb.

We lovingly refer to audience members as meat bags because they absorb sound really well.

After the line check comes the sound check.

Three o'clock hits, the band walks on stage for the first time.

The very first thing is everyone is making sure that their in-ears and their wedges are working and they can hear themselves properly.

And usually it's the monitor engineer or the band leader on stage that is sort of conducting that sound check.

And so they'll call out, hey, kick drum for everybody.

Raise your hand if you need more kick drum or less kick drum.

Snare drum.

Raise your hand if you need more snare drum or point down if you want less snare drum.

And that's one way to do it, to go through the entire impolis.

So kick, snare, hat, tom, floor tom, overheads, bass, guitar, keys.

that's the traditional sound check method but with high-end digital mixing boards these days they can store all of those settings and effects into something called a show file

so my show file is basically just a file on a thumb drive that i stick into the audio console and it loads all of my settings and the input list and everything is named and all the processing that i like to use is in that show file and in this case we already had a show file built from a previous previous show, so we're just loading that.

And we're already 80% to 90% there with everyone's in your mixes already and the wedge mixes.

As the sound check goes on, Jake runs through his mental checklist, making slight adjustments to the sound.

Is the vocal on top of the mix enough?

Does the kick drum sound good?

Does the guitar sound good?

Those are the things I'm thinking of while I'm sound checking.

During a regular sound check, Jake likes to give himself plenty of time to tweak these details.

But unfortunately...

Today, I had about 20 minutes to listen to the band actually play, when normally I would like to give myself an hour or two.

That's because Jake is still busy with one of his other hats for the show, being a tour manager.

Normally, I should only have to worry about audio and production, But because I'm a glutton for punishment, I am tour managing and I'm also responsible for the entire guest list.

And in New York City, we have a lot of guests.

The guests are the people with special backstage passes and other perks.

So 300 guests total that I need to take care of and pack their envelopes with their tickets.

So I use some software to help me with this, but the tickets still need to physically be stuffed into envelopes and each person gets a specific type of pass.

So we have backstage passes and we have post-show party passes and we have all access passes.

So there are three pass types that can be put into any envelope and so those all have to be correct.

But early that afternoon, Jake gets a call that makes his heart stop.

40 tickets are missing.

What?

We've lost 40 physical tickets and they can't be reprinted easily.

I am so stressed out right now.

I knew I was going to have 40 guests showing up at seven o'clock and they weren't going to be able to get in to see the show.

Any one of those guests could have been an important person to the band, like the singer's mom or the drummer's partner.

I spent two hours fretting around trying to figure out where these went and what we needed to do to get them reprinted if we couldn't find them, which is a whole ordeal.

So I want to say 2.30 p.m.

I am in my production office and I move a piece of paper from the desk and under the piece of paper, there is a stack of 40 tickets.

We found them.

By now, it's 3.30 and Jake is already running late.

But then, he checks some of the envelopes and realizes that the passes inside don't match what's shown on the guest list.

It's looking like every single one will have to be redone.

And at this point, I'm freaking out.

And I'm like, I don't have time to stuff 150 envelopes.

So I just grabbed everything, put it in a box, and handed it to the venue production manager and said, can you please just bring this to the box office and have them fix it for me?

I'm sorry.

With the ticket kerfuffle out of the way, Jake would usually be able to break for dinner.

Everyone else gets to have dinner at five, but Austin and I have to stay on.

The lighting guy stays on, too.

And Corey and Joe also stay because they're in Fearless Flyers.

The Fearless Flyers are the opening band, and they're more or less an offshoot of Wolfpack.

Corey Wong is the guitarist, and Joe Dart is the bassist.

Normally the headliner engineer is not mixing the opener, but because they're sort of the same band, Austin and I are also mixing the Fearless Flyers.

So we spend five o'clock to six o'clock getting them set up and sound checked.

Fortunately, it's this part of the job that Jake is really passionate about.

Audio for me is what I love.

I love mixing.

That is the entire reason I tour because that's the fun part.

And thankfully, I've done it long enough and I'm confident enough in my mix that I can just walk up and get a mix together in 10 minutes and be fine.

So that's what I was banking on this whole time.

But with all of his extra responsibilities, Jake can't just focus on the mixing.

Again, I'm tour managing and I'm helping with all the little things.

So does somebody need an extra towel to shower with?

Do they need soap for the bathroom?

Is there a trash bag that's missing?

Does someone wanted a vegan meal for dinner, but that didn't get ordered?

So how can I get them the food that they need?

It's really a lot.

It's a lot that a tour manager has to do.

And normally, it's all very smooth.

Everyone is happy and I'm not stressed because I've done my due diligence and planned ahead for all of this.

In this case, today,

I was so stressed about the tickets.

I think that's what really threw me.

I didn't have time to eat dinner properly, but I was getting so many text messages about the guest list stuff and about other little tour manager items that I was starting to feel very overwhelmed and overstimulated.

At one point, I had to go into an empty dressing room and lock the door, turn the lights off, and lay on the floor and close my eyes.

He remembered he had a free trial for a meditation app on his phone, so he loaded it up.

I literally locked myself in the room with the lights off,

put my phone on airplane mode,

and laid there for five minutes to try to calm down.

I've never had to do that before.

This was just

a unique scenario.

But his moment of Zen can't last long because showtime is looming, and Jake still hasn't had a solid meal.

I'm packing a couple waters, a Gatorade, and raiding the catering room for any snacks I want to bring with me because I'm not moving from that position once I get there.

Before he can settle at the mixing board, he also needs to make one more crucial stop.

I got to go to the bathroom.

I might not be able to go to the bathroom for the next two and a half hours.

So if I forget that one detail, I can be in a tough spot during the show.

Luckily, Jake remembered to go to the bathroom.

But little did he know, there was a much more serious problem on the horizon.

He's not answering radio.

He's not answering calm.

I don't know what's going on.

And then I'm alone at front of house.

That's coming up after the break.

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Jake Hartsfield is at the mixing board with Volfpeck for their landmark show at Madison Square Garden.

It's the biggest concert of their career, which means a lot of excitement and a lot of pressure.

After the Fearless Flyers finish their opening set, Volfpeck takes the stage.

Once the music starts, Jake's in his element.

He's mixed hundreds of shows, and at this point, it's second nature.

So there are some background processes that are going on in my head that are sort of natural, and one of them is feedback.

I'm always on alert for any hint of feedback I hear, so that could be an indication that someone is standing out in front of the stage and their microphone is a little too hot, or there's a specific frequency that I need to duck out of the PA tuning so it doesn't take off.

So, I'm trying to catch anything I hear like that before it actually happens.

If I need to hear something more clearly, I can solo it and hear, oh, this microphone sounds weird.

Why does it sound weird?

I'm gonna throw my headphones on and listen with one ear to the headphone and continue listening to the show with my other ear and try to diagnose the problem.

Yes!

The goal of live mixing is a lot like the goal of sound designing.

Most of the time, you don't want the audience to notice what you're doing.

You want to be completely transparent and allow the story, or in this case, the band, to shine.

Of course, it helps if the band is incredibly adept at what they do.

The band plays really well together and, for the most part, controls their own dynamics.

So if I left all the faders at Unity, meaning he didn't adjust their mix at all during the show, it would still sound pretty good.

But all of that musical talent also means that Jake has his hands full during every show.

The entire show for me for Wolfbeck is very active because almost every instrument can and will solo at some point during the show.

And there are eight open vocal mics.

And everyone on stage is running around switching positions, switching instruments, and switching vocal mics.

And so I've got to have my head up watching the stage to see where the vocalists are and who's on what instrument and riding those instrument faders up and down for solos.

These days, a lot of live bands play along to a click track

or to pre-recorded music in their in-ear monitors.

This helps them stay in time and perform their music consistently.

But Wolfmeck doesn't use any of that.

It's all live.

They just count it off and they're just playing with each other.

So there's fluctuations in tempo, but it also gives them the freedom to do whatever they want.

So they could stop mid-song.

They could play one section over and over.

They could skip around parts in the song.

With all of that movement and spontaneity, it's inevitable that things get jostled on stage.

And if if something important gets thrown off, Jake and the crew have to scramble to fix it.

Which is exactly what happened toward the end of Volfpec's MSG set.

At some point during Christmas in LA, the microphone on the snare top gets bumped and it falls off the snare.

And if you've, you know, listen to music, you know the snare is generally a fairly important instrument.

And a mix will sound usually pretty strange if you don't have the snare mic'd properly and so i'm radioing austin hitting him on calm saying austin can you fix that snare mic so it takes him a minute to answer he gets on the phone hey what's up uh snare mic it fell off can you fix it please like oh yeah yeah i'll handle that so he leaves his console and again for better or for worse we don't have a second engineer to mix monitors when he's gone so he is momentarily leaving his position to fix this microphone So he leaves, he goes on stage to fix the mic.

And Theo is just getting into this moment during Christmas in LA where there's a crowd sing-along part.

Theo Katzman is one of the band members and is a multi-instrumentalist.

On this track, he's the singer.

So he's directing the crowd.

And it's this call and response moment.

This is crazy.

This is the dream come true.

We got 14,000 of us here, okay?

And he's teaching the the crowd a three-part harmony.

And so, right when he starts this moment,

everything at front of the house goes black and all the sound goes away.

My console has just died.

This means there's no audio coming through the PA system for the entire venue.

In other words, there are now 14,000 people at a concert and the only working speakers are the small wedge monitors on stage facing the band.

Oh no, what do I do?

We don't have a show right now.

I am looking around thinking, what do I do in this situation?

I just need to get the console back up and running.

My lighting guy still has power, so his power is fine.

It wasn't a building power fault.

It was just the console.

Meanwhile, the band has no idea this is happening.

Everyone on stage still has their in-ear mix and still has their wedge mixes.

So they can hear everything.

They actually don't know anything is wrong.

Everyone else in the arena, nothing.

They're not hearing anything.

It's just Theo singing along and teaching the audience these harmony parts.

I feel like you can do better than that.

I'm not just saying that.

So Theo is singing, and I talked to him about this afterwards.

He just thought, the audience just isn't really singing along that much tonight.

They're just not that into it.

So he was pushing even harder, trying to get them to sing more.

But in reality, nobody could hear what he was saying.

No one could hear him singing.

But the audience knows the song well enough.

They were still singing a little bit, and they could see Theo, and they could see him leading the crowd.

Some of the audience members didn't know anything was wrong, they just thought, oh, he's just singing off-mic, teaching the crowd the parts.

And so, it's maybe a minute and a half, which felt like an eternity.

But suddenly, another minor miracle happens.

My console at front of house magically just turns back on and starts rebooting.

I get audio back, just audio magically starts playing again through the PA right before the band starts building and coming back in at the end of Christmas in LA for that final chorus.

So I got audio back and it's Theo singing the very last bit leading into that final chorus.

And then the band comes in and I am praising praising the Lord that I have audio.

So I have audio, but I have no effects.

And we have four songs left.

And so I had to mix the rest of the show with no reverb.

Which on some level is great because Volftech doesn't use reverb on anything except vocals live for the most part.

I have to finish the show with a leg and an arm tied behind my back, but we made it.

We made it through.

And for the most part, nobody knew in the audience that anything had gone wrong just because of this miraculous timing.

The console could not have crashed at a better moment.

So we just lucked out.

The band takes a bow, walks off the stage.

I can finally breathe a sigh of relief.

We got through it.

The audience is happy.

The band is happy.

We've had a great show.

Once the show is finished, Jake takes a few minutes to decompress.

Then it's time for him to tear down his rig and pack up, alongside the rest of the crew.

The venue crew and all the local stage hands in that crew is tearing down the stage and packing up all the backline equipment, the audio equipment, the lights, bringing all the rigging down, taking the risers down, packing it up and loading the trucks and sending everything back to the rental houses.

For the band and their friends and family, the after-show party has started in one of the venue's bars, which was another one of Jake's duties before the show.

It's basically a whole event planner situation.

You know, I have booked the bartenders and we have some snacks and food available and drinks and that kind of thing.

And this vibey bar location in MSG.

And so we have about 200 people that are all migrating over there for this after-show party that's going to be an hour, two hours.

And everyone has reason to celebrate.

The show was a rousing success.

For the configuration of the seating, it was a sold-out show, which was a huge deal.

The entire show was also recorded and filmed.

You can watch the whole thing on YouTube or listen to it in your favorite music app.

Now, you won't hear the board dropping out because there was also a backup recording happening simultaneously.

So they were able to fix it in post.

Since then, Jake has switched to a different type of mixing console and hasn't had any more issues.

For him, this show was another important step in his lifelong journey with music and sound.

I got excited about music as a young kid playing guitar and then singing and writing songs, playing in a band.

And I figured out how to record on our family desktop computer in the most rudimentary way.

And I found out that I really enjoyed the technical aspect of that.

And I read a book called The Master Handbook of Acoustics.

And it was about the physics of sound and how sound moves through the air and through different mediums.

It just fascinated me.

I've always loved physics and geometry.

That was kind of the spark.

So there's the musical spark and then there's this fascination with the physics of sound.

And eventually I was lucky enough to make some friends in college that were starting to tour and wanted to know if I would tag along and run live sound.

And so I just jumped right in and started this journey into live sound.

It's just this beautiful blend of art and science.

And it's fun.

It keeps things lively.

It's fun to be able to be a part of these concert experiences and know that like, hey, I'm an integral part of this and bringing this exciting experience to everybody's ears.

20,000 Hertz is produced out of my sound agency DeFacto Sound.

To hear more, follow De Facto Sound on Instagram or visit de facto sound.com.

This episode was written and produced by Daniel Seema and Casey Emmerling.

With help from Grace East, it was sound design and mixed by Jade Dickey and Justin Hollis.

Thanks to our guest, Jake Hartsfield.

Not only is Jake a front-of-house engineer, he's also an accomplished studio mixing engineer who's worked on a bunch of great albums.

To learn more about his work, visit jakehartsfield.com or follow the link in the show notes.

I'm Dallas Taylor.

Thanks for listening.