Billie Eilish - Drew Thornton FOH and monitors set up

In this video, we go backstage and get a ‘rig rundown’ with Billie Eilish FOH and monitor engineers during SXSW 2019.

Vocal production for Billie Eilish by Finneas

Billie Eilish – Drew Thornton FOH and monitors set up:

Video Text:

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[Music] seventeen-year-old global pop phenom Billy Eilish is on the fast track to becoming one of the biggest stars of the business she’s amassed more than 1.5 billion combined streams worldwide earned multiple platinum and gold certifications a Brit breakthrough award and she’s the youngest artist to ever get listed in the BBC Radio 1 sound holes she’s set to release when we all fall asleep where do we go later this month and then kick off her fourth sold-out and lining North American tour we catch up with her front of house and monitor engineers about their compact D live fly rigs and white has been their choice for gigs around the world hey we’re here with Drew Thornton front of house for Billy Eilish what’s up drew how you doing good you’ve been super bored lately right you haven’t been anywhere to sit at home not

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doing a whole lot right so these guys just got back from a whirlwind through Europe sold-out tour and now we’re here at South by Southwest where Billy’s playing tonight at LCR so we just want to get a quick rig rundown with Drew and I got the dm0 I’m running Giga ace card and I’m also running the waves card as well connected to my monitor world doing gain sharing via the qug ace and tie lines and trying to keep it as light and tight as possible we did a lot of slide 8 so it makes it a little bit easier on us when you’re doing a 50 plus input list with the fly board and all this stuff goes with you everywhere right everywhere sweet yeah can we see how you have your C 1500 setup totally totally sweet so basically I run most of my show off the DC a main layer I’m running automation most of my scenes are song related so

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they automate effects changes and I’ve started doing a last tour automating strip design so that way I could pull whatever faders I need so that way I’m literally running my entire show off the 12 faders whether I need it or not I’m a firm believer in the small format and usually most of the time you stay on your twelve faders and if you do it right to worry about I have my macro setup nothing too crazy I have you you know meet all good outputs we have a shout line and a talkback line which is run into my pfl that way I can hear going onstage have the ability to mute it so have effects I have a dumb button for the next record to dump some effects and delays I have a store button at my next my new my go I also have a couple DCA spills for my tech and for my effects ends I’d like to do some cueing into reverb into the reverbs I also have

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a quick key to get to my mains just to do any EQ and I have quick keys to get to Bill’s vocal and Finn’s vocal a guest vocal and my keyboard it’s a lot going on for such a small surface man it seems like you got it dialed yeah I mean it’s really if you could bring all your the beautiful thing about this is if you think about what you need to get to during a show and if you can’t bring it to the surface to the base layer you’re working off of because that way you can just select the channel to do any processing adjustments but anything that doesn’t end up on the base layer if you’re doing any TCS or groupings you can always just add a soft key to selective suite thanks man yeah hey and we’re here with Saleem who does monitors for Billy Eilish I was going for him it’s going down at South by Southwest 2019 I haven’t been here several years but it was on the band performance ass this is my first time here is like anything right you’re a big-time guitar player aren’t you big Chinese relative all

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right well we want to check out your rig man can you show us what you got going on yeah so right now we are working with the D live see 1500 on the DM zero thousands in the ulx-d s I’m running think six gems of PSM 1008 for Steve with a CB seven capsules on each one so pretty much it’s a pretty I guess basic standard monitor rig but the cool thing about this particular set is you can see my footprints were pretty small yeah and kind of I want to say Jimmy brink but at the same time it’s just a quarter packet a bunch of pelicans and that’s a my role for the entire show which get essentially when you’re running in festivals or situations like this not having a big footprint it’s critical and I can still keep my workflow and not be figuring out where stuff goes and kind of keep the daily daily flow which for me as a creature of habit stuff needs to be where it is every day otherwise my brain

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can’t just weave my brain I mean sure the this footprint worked out pretty well for you when you guys were flying around Europe last week yeah flying around Europe we took it to Japan with us we had to do a little small festival in DC where we worked the headline we showed up when they very much a very well who’s your world and it was literally just big enough for this and the other two inches they would have been falling off the stage but in retrospect thinking if I had anything else I wouldn’t have had anywhere to go right so it’s funny walking into a situation and somebody’s a guy where’s your console like here it is I just need a monitor Casey you’re not using in power and never off and run it you know so I have the surface setup basically a cool to maximize with the DCA’s I think actually speaking to you how do I get this workflow to be so particularly to be efficient with not as much finish as you traditionally used to having the 51 inputs in monitor roll so for me I have all my stuff basically customized on

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soft peace or my main mixes for the people I need to get to and then everything else is essentially built into a DC a spill so I haven’t got Billy all which is all the stuff that I would ever need to her mix quickly have pretty much all which is all of my show inputs everything I would actually need to get to through the show for anyone else my effects DCA lair my outputs DCA lair the vocals my shout which is like all the communication for the show for these in a talkback situation we have and then her brother does an opening support a kiss both to you so I just happy to see a spill with all of his stuff on it as well right so instead of you chasing inputs around you just push the soft key and it brings what you want to see directly to the surface for you absolutely awesome and we’re running how many inputs 5151 inputs a pretty small mixer for 51 inputs right yeah this thing does a ton of legwork more than I for but I was surprised as I’ve built more than puts into the workflow and how

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easy it is around the actual surface we just talk faders coming from the profile world where everything is literally laid out in front of you or a situation where you have the luxury of faders I think when we’re speaking on the phone the other day kind of taught me like it’s one maximize efficiency but also to know what you need to get to quickly and then just having the muscle memory and this is so customizable then I can access that and gets ready to present it which is awesome it has the buttons on the side gears and the stuff that didn’t put your only need all the time I can still be caught on an encoder here to get to like my drums over there be verbs and stuff they don’t need to necessarily sacrifice over an actual soft keyboard suite yeah how many mixes you got going on us I have I have six going on right now including the drum mix sorry the drum sub we have more outputs I think we’re gonna be going from six to twelve cool all right

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and all your inputs are coming in off of remote stage boxes right you got DX 16 eights peppered around the stage yep so there’s one here in front of me which basically runs all of the playback and actually have all the shouts in local my coming into the local inputs on the back of the desk there’s one behind the drum world which drives all the analog drums his shout is wiring their pack in the drum sub or the bucket here in this instance with a quarter of Davies now and there’s another one on the other side of the keyboard world which just has at the moment just doing inputs in it but it’s essentially the link to which is in the guitar world there’s a fourth box that has all the keyboards the guitars in our techs outs and all that stuff on the other side of the stage let’s so no analog sub snakes almost no analog sub sinks everything is pretty much just painted with four cat five lines that starts here and jumps to each one of the two separate boxes and their festivals and situations like this

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I can’t even explain how insane it is to have 51 inputs passionate about 10 minutes live chat and joking around on the headsets 15 minutes later with a time to spare and there’s no stress energy of stuffing out the word English I think in that situation it’s it’s a very you ticket for granted that’s a luxury to have awesome thanks a lot man [Music]