Nashville, TN (May 14, 2024)—In the 10 years since Sam Hunt first burst on to the charts, the country star has rolled out hit after hit, making for both an enviable track record and legions of fans who can sing along to every word. But while he might have a setlist of smashes in his back pocket, for many years, Hunt typically only played a few dozen shows at best. All that changed in 2023, however, when the singer hit the road to headline his Summer on the Outskirts tour. Carrying his own P.A. for the first time, provided by Nashville’s Spectrum Sound, Hunt’s show was a smash—enough so that the tour kept going with a winter arena run that just wrapped up in April.
That kind of busy schedule is fine with his steadfast crew, comprised of production manager Nate Smith; FOH engineer Phil Bledsoe; monitor engineer Jared Green; system engineer and audio crew chief Joe Henson; stage patch/utility Shawn Eacott; lead PA tech and P.A. fly tech Matt Potesta; and fellow P.A. fly tech Connor Cross.
While the touring pace may have kicked up a notch in 2023, for Bledsoe, the year before may have been a bigger change: “When I started with Sam in 2018, I inherited a console that was already there. I wanted to shift over to something that had a few more tools in the box, so in 2022, I went over to a Yamaha Rivage PM5 console and I’ve been on that ever since. I have a fly file for an SD10 if I need it, but I’m traveling around the country with my Rivage all the time.”
Bledsoe makes the most of it, too, using onboard DSP for everything. “They have so much incredible stuff on that console and yet I know a lot of guys are using them with tons of outboard,” said Bledsoe. “I don’t have a single outboard piece—but I’ll throw an asterisk in there. Sam loves to feature the other players in the band, so the asterisk is, last year, the bass player was doing a cover of the Justin Bieber song ‘Peaches’ and the guitar player was doing a Dua Lipa song. They sing great, but I really wanted to ’tune them out to make ’em extra poppy, so I grabbed Live Professor for 100 bucks and threw the Waves Tune plug-in in there. That’s the only ‘special’ thing I do—BGV tuning!”
That house mix is heard via a sizable d&b audiotechnik KSL P.A. overseen by Henson, and when last year’s tour moved indoors for the arena run, the system stayed the same regardless. “One thing that we love about it is that everything in the air is cardioid,” said Henson. “If we’re in a hockey arena where they tend to want their rooms to be louder rather than quieter, having something like the KSL is great. Before we even turn the system on, we’re setting ourselves up for as much success as possible. Same thing with amphitheaters, dealing with roofs and stuff like that—having cardioid P.A. in the air cleans things up a lot.”
To be fair, there’s a lot of firepower on hand, with main hangs of 16 KSLs a side (12 KSL8s over four KSL12s) and outhangs of 16 XSL8 boxes per side, while the stage gets eight Y10P frontfills used as needed. Bolstering the low end are eight flown KSL-Subs per side and 14 ground subs in total—a dozen SL-Subs and a stack of two KSL-Subs.
Up at stageside, Green uses a DiGiCo Quantum 338 desk to look after 14 mixes on Shure PSM 1000 RF systems; they’re all heard via JH Audio earpieces, with the musicians and Green opting for Roxannes. “Ever since I began touring with Sam in 2015, we’ve always been on DiGiCo,” he explained. “That’s been the most comfortable workflow for me, being able to lay out the console exactly as I want, plus it sounds great with the 32-bit preamps and all of the new Quantum processing I’m using.”
The stage is relatively quiet, too, as the guitars go through Fractals, while the bass player additionally has a Moog and a drum rack of virtual instruments all running through Radial JDIs. The background vocals are heard via DPA 2028 mics with Optigates on them, while Hunt’s voice is captured with a DPA d:facto 4018V capsule. “All of our wireless guitars and wireless vocals are going through a Shure ADX system that I’m monitoring and managing with Wireless Workbench in monitorworld,” Green added.“Everything has backup frequencies, ready to deploy at any time in the event that there’s an issue.”
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The drums are captured with a variety of mics, but many of those choices came down to the drummer himself. “We have things like Earthworks DM20s on toms, an Audio-Technica AE2300 on snare top, the AKG D12 VR on the kick out and so on,” said Bledsoe. “A couple of years ago, we did a drum shoot out where we grabbed some mics, put them on, had the monitor engineer gain-match everything and did a blind test where we told the drummer to choose what he liked in his ears. He looked at me and said, ‘Don’t you wanna hear them out front?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t. I want you to choose what you’re happy with—because if you’re happy, you’re going to play well, and I’ll get to turn you up playing well.”
There will be plenty of opportunities for all the musicians to play well this summer. Taking its name from Hunt’s latest EP, the Locked Up tour will ironically do anything except stay in one place, as the singer heads to the sheds again in June to careen across the country for 30-plus shows through October.
