This isn’t the first time Porter Robinson has appeared in the pages of TPi, having covered his tour back in 2021 [see TPi #266]. One of the main things that struck us at the time was that although Robinson originally came from the world of EDM, he is an artist who is now very much a ‘live performer’ – playing multiple instruments as well as singing during his live performances. However, for this to work seamlessly, the artist’s audio team had to devise a way to network this complex hybrid model of playback and live instrumentation.
Speaking to TPi during their day-off, Tour Director, Robert Dugan; Production Manager Alex Feld; FOH Engineer, Chad Byrd; Playback Engineer, Jason Bentch and Backline Technician, Atticus Mulkey reflected on the innerworkings of Porter Robinson’s latest SMILE! 😀 tour.
“Earlier this year, we got a first glimpse of the new record and the first thing we recognised was that we’d be bringing a band out with us,” said Dugan, highlighting the presence of multiple live instruments on the new record.
It was then up to Bentch and the wider team to create a way for both the electronic and live elements to work alongside each other. “I call Jason the ‘architect’,” chuckled Dugan. “He came up with the structure of the whole rig that revolves around a cutting-edge Dante setup. He knows how everything is routed and has figured out a way to do it with incredibly low latency with this sophisticated Dante network.”
With networking becoming an ever-present conversation within the live events space, TPi was keen to hear how Bentch had tackled this problem. “It was a no-brainier to reach for Dante when I was beginning to create this system,” he explained.
“It’s important to remember with this show, that Jason is not just a playback engineer who hits the space bar at the start of the song, and everyone plays on top of the track,” Byrd stated, explaining the workflow. “Everything on this rig goes through Ableton – from guitars, bass, and keys to drums. This creates a dilemma as you must do a lot of maths in the FOH and Monitor consoles to calculate the latency of a track versus a playable drum trigger versus a live vocal going through a lot of processing and ensure everything lines up perfectly with the live sidechaining inside of Ableton. It’s been a challenge that I have yet to encounter on any other show.”
Bentch pointed at his approach to drums as an example of how the camp workshopped multiple options to help bring the latency down. “Porter’s drums are very electronic sounding, so the way we approached this was to have drum triggers go straight into Ableton, which then triggered the note,” he explained. My predecessor and I pushed Ableton to the limit in the past, but we found that we were not able to bring the latency low enough without crashing the system.”
However, after testing different options, the team deployed a Roland TD-50X drum module to host samples, which brought down the collective latency. “Sometimes it can be tempting to overcomplicate things, but this was a simple solution, which has brought down the latency by three milliseconds.”
The system’s Dante skeleton provided a great deal of reassurance for Bentch, specifically when it came to redundancy. He elaborated: “When I inherited this show, everything was run on MADI although I didn’t have a redundant switcher, instead having to run everything through a DiGiCo SD12 and using a macro to switch outputs. The other issue with the previous iterations was the sheer amount of channel counts,” he commented. “Traditionally, you would bring elements from stage into Ableton, which required receiving everything on a console, creating channels and processing them in Ableton to send back to the console. When adding in a band, we found we’d quickly run into channel count issue.”
He underlined how Dante simplified this entire process as everyone could “just pick what they need.” He detailed: “FOH doesn’t need to see everything that Monitors sees. I can take whatever I need from the stage without bothering them. We’ve fully utilised multicast flows to give greater flexibility.”
Bentch further stated how elements such as the acoustic guitar didn’t need to be processed through Ableton, and therefore, did not need to go through the same chain as other elements.
The way the team discussed the Dante system raised the discussion of increased ‘networking knowledge’ being required to make a show like Porter Robinson’s possible. “My Dante Level Three Certification has certainly helped out with this project,” joked Bentch.
“This Dante system has enabled us to do something very complex and create a simple solution,” added Backline Technician, Atticus Mulkey. “The connections are so simple it’s just like running a couple of snakes on stage.”
The ‘tourability’ of the system was also a benefit utilised by Byrd at FOH: “At FOH, I am also providing timecode, talkbacks and in-ear mixes for our LD and VJ, which is all done via CAT5 compared to the traditional method of having very heavy cables,” he explained. “Not only is the CAT5 much lighter, it’s also easily replaceable throughout the world – an obvious benefit when going to new territories.”
ADDING AN ANALOGUE TOUCH
In addition to supplying the infrastructure for the tour’s networking requirements, Clair Global provided at Cohesion PA system, DiGiCo 225 Quantum console for FOH and a 338 Quantum for monitors.
“Clair has been supportive throughout, especially during production rehearsals when we were building up the system at Rock Lititz,” stated Dugan. “I think they were naturally hesitant when we explained how we were looking to have a completely interconnected system as people are not always the best prepared for what it means to run a whole system on Dante,” stated Bentch.
In closing, Byrd shared his thoughts on the Cohesion system: “It has all the horsepower in the world as long as you know how to tame it,” he commented. “It’s a fantastic box and the subs are almost unmatched.” Dugan concurred: “It’s designed to fit in one truck, and when it comes down to the pricing of touring, which has risen significantly in recent years, saving on truck space is very beneficial.”
Byrd also includes additional outboard elements at FOH: “I run everything through a network of Rupert Neve Designs, Shadow Hills, Chandler Limited, MAAG, Bettermaker, SPL and Empirical Labs, mainly for saturation and compression to provide an analogue feel to a predominantly digital mix,” he explained.
“The main thing for me is that I’m not trying to ‘fix’ anything at FOH but more tonally shape which I would rather use outboard gear for. Plug-ins have their place, but I’ve just not felt the need to use them on this run with the availability of the Quantum features on the DiGiCo 225 such as the Spice Rack.”
Bentch added: “Porter will often go out to FOH during soundcheck and work on the mix with Bryd and might say one stem needs to be 5dB higher for example. Often, we then go into Ableton and make that exact change.”
Following his North America run, the Porter Robinson team set their sights on a tour of Asia to round out the year before setting sail for Japan, Australia, and Europe in 2025.
Words: Stew Hume
Photos: Chris Lavado
