Sweetwater caught up with mix engineer Burton Ishmael for an exclusive look at the front-of-house gear used on Post Malone’s 2022 Twelve Carat Tour. The tour kicked off in Omaha on September 10 and wrapped in LA on November 16.
Highlights of the tour include a six-figure Avid VENUE mixer, more than 10,000 pounds of PA speakers, and around $9,000 in outboard gear dedicated to Post’s vocals alone.
Burton is quick to shout out Sweetwater Sales Engineer Darius Beatz for his setup and installation help: “Darius’s recommendations have gone a long way in getting us prepped for this tour.”
- “The Heart of It All”: The Mixing Console
- Primed for the Road with Studio Monitors
- Twelve-carat Speaker Setup
- Tuning Rooms the SMAART Way
- Certified Gold: Post Malone’s Vocal Chain
- Gilding the Lily: Parallel Vocal Processing
- Drum Processing with Outboard Gear
- Rear-bus Mix Compression
- Burton’s Master Chain, Continued
- Closing Encouragement from Burton
“The Heart of It All”: The Mixing Console
The hub of Post Malone’s Twelve Carat Tour is an Avid VENUE S6L-32D mixing console/control surface. Driven by Avid’s VENUE software, this next-gen hybrid mixer combines four multi-touch screens and 32 motorized faders to give Burton and his crew a fully customized live-mixing experience.
“It’s seamless,” says Burton. “I’m able to record the show track for track, channel for channel. I can afterward adjust balances and make tweaks.”
Recordings are captured and later reviewed as virtual soundcheck in 96 kHz via AVB with a direct connection between Pro Tools and the S6L.
Vocals and submixes are patched into an outboard chain of choice compressors, EQs, and sweeteners. Signal-path details are included below.
As for in-the-box processing, a pair of Waves SoundGrid servers handles the heavy CPU lifting. Burton’s twin half-rack Extreme Server-C X9s provide up to 512-in/512-out channels of studio-grade processing over Ethernet via SoundGrid AoIP audio packets.
Primed for the Road with Studio Monitors
Ever wonder how acts like Post Malone get their live mixes to sound so consistent from venue to venue? Burton and his crew have built, tuned, and tweaked Post’s Twelve Carat Tour front-of-house mix using a set of Focal Solo6 and ATC SCM20ASL Pro studio monitors — midfields typically reserved for the studio. “The entire show is done on those monitors,” says Burton.
On-demand monitor switching is available via a Dangerous Music D-BOX+ monitor controller.
For spot monitoring, Burton relies on a set of Audeze open-back reference headphones.
Twelve-carat Speaker Setup
“It’s quite a system,” says Burton of this tour’s massive L-Acoustic 192-element line array FOH PA system. “There are four arrays of 16 top boxes on each side of the stage along with 40 subs. It’s a lot of fun.”
Tuning Rooms the SMAART Way
Burton and his assistants tune their sound system to every new venue using SMAART room analysis. Readings are taken with a quartet of Earthworks M30 measurement microphones into four preamps from an Arturia AudioFuse 8P interface.
Certified Gold: Post Malone’s Vocal Chain
Grounding a vocalist as dynamic as Post Malone can take some serious firepower. Burton walks us through a dedicated hardware chain he’s built for the genre-bending superstar.
“On the vocal, I have this 500 Series setup. I start with de-essing [via an Empirical Labs DerrEsser], then I do some filtering [via an SSL 611EQ]. After the filtering, I do some compression to tame the peaks.”
As for which compressor Burton chooses to tame Post’s peaks, one name rises to the top:
“If you follow Post’s live shows, he gets so excited sometimes that he bursts out into this big scream. It’s almost +20dB from where he sings! I’m using the WesAudio [MIMAS NG500] to control those high peaks and balance things out.”
Following the MIMAS’s peak compression is a healthy dose of character compression and saturation, starting with a Shadow Hills Optograph optical compressor.
“Probably my favorite piece in this entire rack is the Shadow Hills Optograph. Those of you who know this piece know what it does. That goes into some additive EQ [courtesy of the Maag] and some saturation using the karacter [500 stereo saturator] from elysia.”
Parallel Vocal Processing
As if $6,000 worth of primary processing weren’t enough, Post’s processed vocals get fed through a secondary chain of parallel processing for additional leveling and sweetening.
“Vocals are paralleled into an 1176-style Purple Audio MC77 limiter, which I crush the life out of,” chuckles Burton. “Mr. Malone gets the meters all the way down to minus 20dB. It’s really impressive. I like what it does when it gets down there.”
Coming out of the MC77, vocals are fed back into another Maag EQ2, through another side of the karacter 500, and into a final DerrEsser.
Drum Processing with Outboard Gear
Making drums punch in the types of arenas the Twelve Carat Tour has taken Burton’s crew — from Madison Square Garden to the Houston Rockets’ Toyota Center — can be a challenge. For this, Burton relies on some help from a live-production secret weapons: an elysia nvelope rackmount transient shaper and an Empirical Labs Fatso7x.
“It helps add back the transients and the punch,” says Burton. “Being in the live environment, you’ve got all this reverberation to deal with. Things get washed out.” The nvelope, he adds, “makes things pronounced while maintaining the original sonic signature of the drums.”
Rear-bus Mix Compression
Next up is a tool Burton picked up from recording legend Andrew Scheps: rear-bus compression. “It’s one of the techniques I really, really love, and I admire Andrew for sharing it with the world.” The name stems from Scheps’s work on quadraphonic mixes of the 1970s, where mixes would have both a front 2-bus and a rear 2-bus.
Here’s how the technique works:
- Burton creates a submix, with the drums removed, on a Rupert Neve Designs 5059 satellite summing mixer that is sent out of stereo bus 2
- The submix is routed to a Neve 33609/N Compressor
- The compressed signal is fed back into channels 15 and 16 on the 5059 and blended in parallel with the master
- The parallel processing creates a mix that is full and energetic without losing drum punch
For his glue compression, Burton relies on the Scheps-prescribed Neve 33609/N compressor/limiter, which is capable of discrete dual-mono processing and excels at transparent signal enlarging.
Burton’s Master Chain, Continued
“These are my favorite toys to use in mixing,” Burton gushes as he walks us through the rest of his studio-grade outboard mastering chain.
Following the 33609/N is a Manley Massive Passive mastering EQ. But, according to Burton, its settings may surprise you.
“I don’t know what Manley does with their tubes, but it’s just magic. I just turn it on,” he titters. “It does something to the chain, naturally, that I can’t explain. There’s no additive or subtractive EQ. It just being there livens up the party.”
Next, the mix gets a hug from another studio mainstay. “Another favorite piece is the [Manley] Vari-Mu [limiter] with the T-Bar mod. Darius talked me into the modded version, saying, ‘If you’re going to do it, do it all the way.’ And I went all the way. No regrets there.”
This factory modification bridges the 5670 tube socket found in modern Vari-Mus to accept two 12BA6 tubes. The result? Compression characteristics much closer to the 6386 tube performance of classic Manley, Fairchild, and Gates compressors. This results in higher headroom and a gentler dynamic tug while offering the dependability and availability of modern tubes.
Next in line is a Maag EQ4M stereo parametric mastering EQ to help shape the mix. “The Maag just does its thing. The subharmonics, the Air Band — it’s beautiful stuff. When you go through compression and you’re trying to build density, sometimes you darken your mix. The Maag brings it back to life.”
The final piece in the mastering puzzle is an analog Bettermaker Mastering Limiter with total digital recall. “It’s an amazing piece of technology. I do the soft clipping in there, and then I’ll add some harmonics in the high end if it gets too harsh.”
The Bettermaker is then fed into a Dangerous ConvertAD+, with the transformer set at 2 o’clock and upsampled to 192 kHz, which feeds the PA System.
Closing Encouragement from Burton
“Darius and I were talking this morning about the things that keep you in this industry,” Burton concludes. “Three great words I love: diligence, consistency, and gratitude. When you’re diligent, you work hard, you pursue, you develop, and you invest. Once you get into a position, being consistent at your work will keep you there. And gratitude — the more thankful you are, that is going to increase where you’re at.”
As for what it takes to make it in this business, Burton says: “Talent will get you in the door. Character will keep you there.”
“I’m thankful to God for this opportunity. I encourage those of you that are watching to keep working hard and keep at it. And, if you need gear, Sweetwater’s the place.”
Conclusion
Huge thanks to mix engineer Burton Ishmael and the rest of the crew behind the Twelve Carat Tour for letting us be a part of the experience. If you’d like to know more about any of the gear on this list, then contact your Sweetwater Sales Engineer at (800) 222-4700. Be sure to follow Burton and Post on their social channels below.
Burton Instagram: @FOHBurton
Post Malone Instagram: @PostMalone