American five-piece metalcore band Beartooth stand out from the touring norm with vocalist Caleb Shomo mixing the band’s monitors himself from the stage, as well as having taken the role of recording and mix engineer for the band’s four studio albums, including 2021’s Below.

For their late summer The Below tour, the band were joined by FOH engineer Danny Harvey for a six-week run of dates across the US. With both audio quality and portability in mind, Shomo (who founded the band in 2012) and Harvey opted for a dual dLive system, supplied by Illinois-based V2 Productions, to meet the requirements of the tour. Harvey, who travelled from the UK to work on the tour, plumped for a 28-fader dLive S5000 Surface and DM48 MixRack, complemented with a Waves V3 card, to handle FOH.

‘All the dLive systems sound great – before this tour I was on the C1500 at FOH, but having extra faders and control feels particularly great,’ Harvey explains. ‘With the inbuilt processing, I can control it how I like and achieve the power and punch I’m looking for. Beartooth are a loud rock’n’roll band, so need to be mixed loud and heavy, and the dLive makes this easy.’

For the onstage monitor system, controlled by Shomo, a compact 12-fader dLive C1500 Surface and DM48 MixRack were chosen for both the quality of audio and the diminutive footprint. In between delivering his vocal lines, Shomo controls five stereo IEM mixes, side fills and two pairs of centre monitors from his position on the centre of the stage.

‘After mixing the Beartooth albums on some of the world’s best consoles, my requirements and expectations for mixing in-ears have become almost impossibly high,’ adds Shomo. ‘The dLive system has been a game-changer. The preamps are completely transparent and the built-in components give me all the analogue feel I need without the hassle of outboard. I’ve never felt so confident creating mixes that make everyone on stage want to melt face night after night.’