Marco Gill
Marco Gill is never home. We conducted this interview from five different locales, during a 25 city run with Petey USA. In the past few years, Gill’s toured as a technician across four continents, getting to work with Bruce Hornsby, Julian Casablancas, Meghan Trainor, Noga Erez, Sasha Alex Sloan, Dayglow, Chloe Moriondo, Cavetown, Joy Oladokun, and Jake Wesley Rogers. We originally know each other from New York, where we briefly played together in the band SkyMagik, but recently, we’ve hung out mainly in New Orleans, when bands he was touring with performed at the Joy Theater, The Parish at House of Blues, and the Civic Theatre.
This conversation began on North Rampart Street at GrandPre’s, dissolved somewhere between visits to the Gold Mine Saloon and The Dungeon, picked back up in New York at Webster Hall and the Sultan Room (pictured above), then rounded out with a series of voice memos left from various states across the Midwest. While much of the off-the-record conversation was about tour shenanigans (one call ended early so Gill and the rest of the Petey crew could get to the go-kart raceway), the parts of the journey that we kept shaped up into a useful primer for anyone getting serious about portable sound production.
You must be somewhere around Chicago by now?
I’m in Detroit, currently. Yesterday we were in Indianapolis, the day before that was Cleveland, tomorrow we have an off day in Chicago before a big show the day after. We’re pretty much halfway through the 25-show run. It’s a lot.
The musician you’re touring with, Petey, is from Michigan. You’re currently living in Seattle. We got back in touch when you let me know you were setting up a sound board at the House of Blues in New Orleans—so how did this whole wild adventure start?
I moved to Seattle about three years ago from the Bronx, where I grew up. I had been on tour with an artist called Joy Oladokun. When we came through [Seattle] to the Showbox, I talked to all the staff there, we got along really well, and they were like, “You should be on the audio team here.” In May of 2024, Pete came through. I was a fan of his comedy but I didn’t even know he had a band. I randomly got assigned to work his show. It was my first time doing monitors at the venue by myself, after a few shadowing shifts. During the show—this has never happened before or since—he was just like, “Shout out to my monitors guy. My ears sound amazing.” That was fucking wild. A couple weeks go by and I get a text from one of my managers saying, “The tour manager for Petey wanted to know who you were and if you were interested in going on tour with them.”
And then you were thrown straight in?
Right away, we toured with Hippo Campus, Rainbow Kitten Surprise, Two Door Cinema Club, we opened for Zach Bryan at some stadium [Joan C. Edwards] in West Virginia… and now, this is [Petey]’s first headlining tour where he has his own engineer and I’m his production manager as well and it’s been going pretty swimmingly. We’ve been selling out a lot of spots. New Orleans can be a tough town for touring bands, so we were supposed to play the House of Blues mainstage but they moved us to the Parish room and then it immediately sold out.
I’d rather play the right size room and pack it out any day.
Oh fuck yeah. Petey’s opener, Alex Cameron, who I’ve also been mixing on this tour, sold out the Sultan Room the day after Petey packed Webster Hall.
That was a really cool show (they both were) but the Sultan Room felt insane, from a mixing stand point, with that massive shiny glass-looking stage backdrop.
It was. The house board there was a[n Allen & Heath] dLive C2500 [Surface] console. More and more, a lot of touring engineers are flying with those. There’s a compact version that’s basically half the size of it and has all the same processing power. For Alex’s set, it’s really simple: It’s four inputs, a left-right, which is a sum of keyboards, an SP-404 from Roland, a guitar amp that I have a [Shure SM]57 on, and Alex’s vocals. I used a little compression, plenty of EQ, a little bit of plate reverb, and that’s it. It sounds great through [the club’s] d&b [audiotechnik] speakers but because of how small this space is and because of the entire upstage wall being a very reflective surface that is so close to where the performers are and where the wedges are, there’s a whole bunch of shit ringing back, so my EQ is a little bit nuts. It’s a really good sounding room if you know how to work around it.
Are there any consoles you’d have to spend hours learning or are there enough underlying principals to help you operate them all?
I’ve never mixed on a Yamaha board. The Yamaha RIVAGE consoles are really cool, from what I’ve heard. A lot of bands use them, like Slipknot. DiGiCo, I’m comfortable with. It’s what we use in Seattle, at the Showbox—the DiGiCo Quantum 225. I love seeing those. If I see one of those I think, “Cool. I know everything about these. I can put anything wherever I want it.” Midas M32s are what I’ve been using forever. I have one at home and one I tour with. The Avid [VENUE] S6L, every single part of that board has, like, 17 knobs and buttons and looking at it [for the first time] made me want to cry. I had to mix Pete’s first show, on the tour where we opened for Two Door Cinema Club, on that desk, and thankfully the audio guy who was there at the venue set up the scene for me and made it really simple. But if I were to jump on one brand new, that would freak me out. I’d probably need a couple of hours.
You were saying, in New Orleans, at the House of Blues, you chose to just completely set up the room with your own equipment.
On tour, I prefer to bring most of my own stuff, to eliminate as many variables as possible, so we’ll still use mic stands, XLRs, and power from the venues, but I bring my console, a stage box, all my microphones, all my DIs, and we have a playback rig that’s where all our vocals go through, a vocal chain processing system. I bring everything so we can have as close to the same show at every venue. Every PA is different, every room sounds different. I want to be able to show up, plug in, make as many adjustments as I need to make, and then go on.
So what’s the console you tour with?
Our front of house console is the Midas M32R [LIVE]. There’s nothing really fancy about it. It doesn’t require outboard gear. EQs, compression, gates, it’s all in the box. On stage, I have the Midas DL32 stage box. That’s where everything is going in and out of. It’s all connected with a line of [Neutrik] etherCON. It connects everything digitally so that everything I’m doing on stage gets to the board, everything I’m doing at the board gets to the stage, and I’m splitting out of that DL32 to hit the [band’s] in-ear system, which is Sennheiser [EK IEM] G4-A1 band wireless in-ears. That’s the big stuff.
I want details on all the little stuff too. Give me every single piece of gear you use!
For the microphones, I can go in order of our input list. There’s a couple of things I like better than others but everything is pretty much standard. We’ve got a kick in, which is a Shure BETA 91A; a kick out, which is a Shure BETA 52A. The snare top is just an SM57, old classic. I’ve used other mics before, swapped things in and out but I’m getting a really nice sound with just that. Underneath, I have a Telefunken M80[-SH] short. On high hat, I have a Shure SM81, that’s going underneath the high hat for aesthetic reasons but also to save on mic stands that I have to move around because I’m the only audio guy on the tour. As many stands as I can eliminate, the better. All my cymbal mics, instead of overheads, are underheads. For the rest, I use sE8s. If this was a jazz gig, doing underhead cymbals wouldn’t make sense. Overhead cymbals get a good, broad capture of the kit. It’s nice for having a lot of width in your drum mix but for this particular band [Petey USA], since it’s a lot of rock stuff, I don’t need a lot of spread going on, I just need the cymbals isolated from the rest of the kit, so it really works. He’s smashing away on them, so I don’t even have them super hot in the mix, they’re just there to provide the little bit of shimmer that I need. For the most part, drums are coming through in the lead vocal mic pretty well, so that’s honestly a big part of the drum sound as well. My rack and floor toms are Sennheiser MD 421 K[ompakt]s. The classic version came out decades ago and has been a staple studio mic for toms, bass cabs, saxophones, things that have a lot of low-mid information, but just last year they came out with a more modern version that has a clip for drums… I bought these about a month after they came out, tested them on a festival stage. They sound fuckin’ awesome. They’re the only thing I use now. I love ’em to death.
I have a talkback mic, which can be whatever thing with a switch but I have an sE V2 SWITCH mic on the drummer’s talkback so, during the show, if something goes wrong or someone needs something more in their mix, they’ll look at Cam, who’s the drummer, and say, “Tell Marco I need more of blah blah blah” and then I take care of it.
This band lets the drummer speak?! Absolutely wild.
I was a drummer for 15 years. I can vouch for drummers. Plus, because he’s positioned so far in the back and stationary, when he speaks to me, it’s not something that the audience would really notice, so it doesn’t distract from the show.
The next input is a bass DI. Neve has made incredible DIs. They put them out a couple years ago. They were about $400 each. They were super nice, really fancy, and had this speaker output that you could use for I-don’t-even-know-what, but recently they came out with a newer version that’s, like, 200 bucks and simple and I am in love with it.
For my bass cab, there’s a company called Heil Sound. They make a microphone called a PR 31 [BW]. It’s really good on guitar cabs, bass cabs, you can even use them for cymbals—the front of house engineer for Coheed and Cambria uses them for cymbal mics but I like it on Drew [Bruchs]’s bass cab. He uses a lot of effects on his bass rig. I get all the low end I need from the bass DI but it captures all the mid and high-end details.
I have an Oberheim synth left-right on just a normal radial stereo DI, nothing fancy. Another one on the Nord left and right. I have a [Roland] Juno, which I really want in stereo, but I don’t have enough inputs right now so that’s unfortunately a mono radial. The acoustic guitar is another Neve DI because it’s amazing, and then for electric guitars, I think I like the sound of a[n SM]57 on these cabs most but because I don’t want to use stands or another weird clip, I use Sennheiser e 906s, which I have hanging via XLR in front of the guitar amps. They loop through the strap and just hang in the perfect place and are flat up against the amp. They just work and they’re great. I initially thought I’d be missing low-end information from them but I find I’m actually getting all of it.
Photo by Marco Gill
That’s so much. Did we cover everything?
The rest of my inputs are all coming from playback, so there’s a music left-right, a background vocal left-right, background vocals left-right, a bass left-right, a percussion left-right, about nine channels of playback, and then the last two things I have are two vocal mics which are what I’m using on the underside of the snare, a Telefunken M80. That’s what I’m using on Pete’s lead vocal and on Drew’s bass vocal.
The equipment is all yours? How do you afford so much gear?
It costs a lot of money to build it up initially but once I started renting the gear out to the bands I tour with, I basically made most of the money back already, and then I use that to buy more shit!
What’s the big difference between running sound in indoor and outdoor venues?
In an indoor venue, you’re fighting the reflections in the room and you have to usually take out a lot of things so they’re not feeding back or ringing in your microphones. The thing with outdoor venues is that the sound goes everywhere, so you lose a lot of information and also, depending on how far you are from the speakers, the wind moves the sound more than you would think, so sometimes you’ll be hearing something and all of a sudden it goes away because it’s literally the wind moving the sound, so your goal is to basically send more information than you would even need so everyone can hear everything from anywhere. I got to mix at Red Rocks and that shit’s crazy. You have to send information to what feels like a mile away behind you, because it’s so tall. That venue has a PA system that’s set up in a certain way so everything can reach but you’re also just sending a lot of information.
The most important thing that I carry when I’m doing outdoor shows is a space blanket. If my console or laptop is out in the sun, it’ll start overheating and could damage the equipment. It looks like aluminum and is almost as thin as a piece of paper so I always keep it in my console bag. It’s also really useful for playback systems, to put that over the computers. Really, you want to protect anything that can overheat.
Let’s talk about the show I saw you mix at the Civic. Thank you so much for letting me stand at the sound booth with you for that one, by the way. The view was amazing from there but it was also, obviously, the best sonic balance in the whole venue.
That tour was interesting. It was in 2023. I was hired super last minute because they had someone bail and needed a replacement immediately. I actually had to jump off of the Joy Oladokun tour briefly so I could do front of house for Kesha’s opener, Jake Wesley Rogers. I didn’t have a lot of my own gear, at that point, so Kesha’s front of house guy let me use his whole set up. Initially, we were told that Kesha was going to do a stripped-down tour and make it really simple, so we designed a chill show around a piano, and then we showed up to the first show and it was a full pop production, with backup dancers, so we had to scramble and create a whole ‘nother show and hire a drummer to meet us in Atlanta… Somehow we made it all work.
Top photo by Sabrina Stone
