This summer, Train hit the road for Drops of Jupiter: 25 Years in the Atmosphere, a coast-to-coast run marking a quarter century of the Diamond-certified title track. LMG Touring delivered the full production package for the tour, audio included, and that package became the proving ground for one of the most talked-about tools in live sound right now: L-Acoustics Source Intelligence. At front of house, engineer Jason “J-Mo” Moore put it to work on Pat Monahan’s lead vocal night after night with stellar results.
Moore is no newcomer to a demanding vocal. He has run front of house for Train for more than 13 years, part of a touring career that began in 1997 and has since taken in Sister Hazel, Seven Mary Three, Collective Soul, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, and Selena Gomez. When an engineer with that kind of mileage says a tool changed the way he works, it is worth paying attention.
Every live engineer knows the two things that fight a vocal mic: bleed from the rest of the stage, and what happens when a singer walks toward the PA. Most just learn to live with them. For Moore, the chance to leave them behind was the whole reason to try it.
“Mic bleed and speaker proximity have been issues since the dawn of time in the live music industry, says Moore. “I jumped at the chance to tour without those two factors haunting the recesses of my mind.”
Source Intelligence is L-Acoustics’ real-time vocal enhancement engine. It pulls stage bleed and room off the mic while leaving the voice itself intact, and it runs with low enough latency to sit inside a live mix. Moore’s first encounter with it in rehearsal was not subtle. “Honestly, disbelief,” he says. “I was so used to hearing my virtual playback vocals with stage bleed. To hear the same tracks with no bleed was insanity.”
Dropping it into the FOH setup was straightforward. Routing was no different from any outboard gear through the console, and it came with a bonus Moore did not expect: he could leave the vocals unmuted through line check, which made communicating with the stage techs far easier. Downstream, the cleaner input tightened everything. His EQ and compression moves got more precise, and his reverb and delay returns cleaned up.
Where Source Intelligence Earns its Keep
The payoff showed up in exactly the moments that usually make an engineer flinch: a loud stage, an open mic, a singer drifting into the PA. In those situations, Moore says, it performed perfectly. “This is where it becomes a game changer for the industry. It allows you to focus more without having to watch out for your singer’s movements around the stage.”
He can point to the exact moment it clicked, when Pat Monahan stepped in front of the right main hang and reflex took over before reason could catch up. “I scrambled for his fader and pan, and then I thought to myself, ‘Hey, you don’t have to do that anymore.’”
The result at the mix position was a rock-solid vocal with room to spare: almost endless gain before feedback on the main vocal, and enough headroom to push the background vocals without losing clarity. As for whether the band ever noticed the tech doing the work? “Nothing,” he says. “They don’t even know I exist.”
Dialing in Exactly the Right Amount
What makes Moore's endorsement land is that Source Intelligence gave him choices, not just a switch. For a musician who grabs a tambourine or harmonica on the same vocal mic, he built a bypass macro to swap it out on cue. On the drum vocal, he used the software’s high/low mix feature to feed exactly as much bleed back in as the mix wanted, dialing it down at his own pace. Even the call to save it for full-band shows and let an intimate acoustic set breathe on its own is his to make. The tool bends to the mix, not the other way around.
“Imagine listening to a live vocal mic that’s set up on the side of an interstate highway at rush hour, and then listening to one that’s set up in a vocal booth. From chaos to clarity,” says Moore.
LMG Touring’s K Series Solution
LMG Touring’s speaker deployment for the North American run was comprised of 12 L-Acoustics K1 over six K2 per side as the main arrays, complemented by out-fill arrays of 12 K2 per side. Twenty KS28 subs were flown in two hangs of 10 enclosures behind each main, in a cardioid configuration, with eight more KS28 end-stacked in two groups of four positioned on the left and right sides of the deck. Six Kara II were spread out across the stage lip for front-fill, with frontal coverage expanded via two ARCS cabinets deployed on the far sides of the stage. Side-fill for the band was achieved with three Kara II over one SB18 sub flanking each side of the performance area, complemented by X15 HiQ wedges on the main stage. Power and processing for the full setup was provided via 51 LA12X amplified controllers housed in 17 LA-RAK II AVB racks, with an L-ISA Core utilized to provide Source Intelligence.
Train’s Drops of Jupiter: 25 Years in the Atmosphere trek kicked off on July 8 at West Palm Beach, Florida's iTHINK Financial Amphitheatre and wrapped up with its 36th and final show on August 30 at Auburn, Washington’s White River Amphitheatre. For more details on the tour, visit www.savemesanfrancisco.com. LMG Touring can be found online at www.lmgtouring.net.
Please visit L-Acoustics at www.l-acoustics.com.