New York indie rocker Yeah Yeah Yeahs are on the road in the US and internationally is support of their current album, Cool it Down. The tour package for the US outings is being provided by Worley Sound, a boutique rental company based in Nashville.

‘We did two shows at the Ace Hotel in Los Angeles [in 2019] and the band performed one more show in New York,’ recalls FOH engineer Daniel Good who, with Nahuel Gutierrez on monitors, is manning the FOH mixing desk. ‘At that point we weren’t sure if Yeah Yeah Yeahs would ever be performing again, so it was cool to get contacted again after their album came out.’

Both engineers use Allen & Heath dLive S5000 surfaces with DM0 MixRacks, handling 128 channels of 96kHz input processing and served by DX168 I/O expanders on stage. A SuperMadi card provides a simplified multichannel broadcast feed, and a 128-channel Waves card supports multitrack recording and playback.

Good had limited experience on Allen & Heath’s dLive platform prior to this tour (mixing Todd Terje & the Olsons), but the console had made a good impression: ‘I remembered that it sounded great, and five or six years later it kicked into my mind again.’

Good explains that the production team wanted to use the same gear throughout the tour to minimise prep time locating rental equipment at each stop. ‘The way you can lay out Allen & Heath consoles and configure the hardware any way you want – we knew that it could accomplish what we needed quickly and easily.’

‘I liked that the console was really easy to understand,’ offer Gutierrez. ‘It fit the budget, and it was great to have the shared stageboxes for Dan and myself. It saved us a lot of space and weight in the touring package. The more we used the consoles, the more we liked them.’

Gutierrez notes that the suite of plug-ins built-in to dLive also simplifiers the mixing set-up. ‘We mix everything in the box,’ he says. ‘The DYN8 dynamic EQ is fantastic, as well as all the onboard FX and parallel compression options. ‘Dan has also been getting amazing reviews because the shows have been sounding fantastic.

‘The dLive’s new Source Expander plug-in is becoming a really good tool to clean mixes,’ he adds. ‘I have it inserted on cymbals, vocals, and a couple of the open mics that are not used frequently to eliminate background noise.’

For the distorted vocals used on certain songs, Gutierrez employs the Dual Stage Valve preamp emulation: ‘It’s probably one of the best vocal distortions I’ve heard,’ he says. ‘We’ve tried pedals and a few other solutions, but nothing sounded right until we found this emulation.’

Good also uses various preamp models at front of house to add colour to his mix. ‘I was blown away when I first discovered those,’ he says. ‘They’re so versatile, you can pretty much get anything you want out of a channel.’

Both engineers rely on dLive’s Scenes feature to recall preset mixes for each song in the band’s set. ‘At first I just started by muting or pulling faders for channels I knew weren’t used on that song,’ Good says. ‘As the tour progressed, I picked up on little things I wanted to tweak, adding in EQ changes, fader movements, and panning. It’s pretty awesome that dLive allows you to scope the dynamic EQ separately from the rest of the channel processing, that’s something I’ve always wanted to do.’

Deviating from many current performances, Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ shows do not make heavy use backing tracks. ‘The guitarist has a loop pedal with some pre-recorded loops, but he has to trigger them in time, there is no computer running a click track or keeping things in sync,’ Gutierrez says.

For on-stage monitoring, Yeah Yeah Yeahs rely almost entirely on IEMs for their current tour. ‘Everyone uses in-ears except for the drummer, who receives stems into a small mixer and does his own headphone mix,’ Gutierrez says. ‘It’s the first full tour for the band on in-ears but, once they got used to them, they were really happy.’

‘The engineers seem to really be enjoying the consoles and having great results,’ says Worley Sound founder, Tom Worley. ‘Even the band was telling me how the sound is improved and how happy they are.’

Yeah Yeah Yeahs' tour is ongoing, with forthcoming shows in Brazil.