Nashville, TN (July 7, 2025)—Kane Brown has been packing arenas across the U.S. for months, touring in support of his latest hit album, The High Road, and soon he’ll be jumping across the Atlantic for a European/U.K. run in the fall. Along for the ride ensuring every show meets the artist’s exacting standards is veteran FOH engineer David Loy, overseeing a passel of gear.
The U.S. dates have found Brown’s production carrying audio equipment provided by Clair Global including a Cohesion P.A., while the FOH position is outfitted with a Yamaha PM3 console and a rack of Loy’s favorite outboard units, including an SSL Fusion; both a Mastering Limiter and Bus Compressor from Bettermaker; and 500 Series units like WeAudio Dione bus compressors; an Xpressor and Xfilter from Elysia; and dbx 560As.
Loy first opted to try out the PM3 desk during tour rehearsals in 2023, having heard good things about it. Making a call to Yamaha’s pro audio team, he recalls, “I asked if I could come by and program, and if I could learn what the software is like, what the onboard DSP is like.”
What followed was five days of full-band rehearsals where he built a show file from scratch. “We said, ‘Okay, hey, let’s sit down. Let’s play the hits.’ I was really, really happy with the product at the end of the week. It made me realize, ‘Okay, you know what? This actually has some legs. I’m gonna take this for the tour and see how it goes.’”
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It went well enough that two years later, he’s still using it. The current production introduced a particularly tricky stage design: a horseshoe-shaped thrust that wraps the stage around the audience. It makes for intimate performances—but introduces serious sonic challenges. “Those conversations started months in advance,” Loy recalls. “We really wanted to figure out how to get the vocal, which is the most important source of the show, to sound clean and clear without a ton of PSE [primary source enhancer] products on it or having to ring it out so aggressively that there’s no HF left.”
That said, he’s not above using on-board and outboard gear as needed to achieve desired results. “I’m still summing outboard, still doing inserts outboard, but it’s very easily switched with a button press,” he says. That resilience was tested in Mexico, when damaged gear forced a last-minute shift back to in-the-box mixing. “I was able to bypass all of that and continue on with the show without any issues, and everyone remained happy.”
For Brown’s vocal, Loy has dialed in a finely tuned signal path: Shure Axient transmitter with a DPA 4018VL capsule, hitting the RPio with Transformer Emulation enabled and Blue Silk dialed in, then into a Rupert Neve Designs Shelford Channel. “I use a dynamic EQ as my PSE, tailored to Kane’s voice for clarity,” he says.
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Some venues carry a sonic signature all their own. “Using the Silk processing allowed me to adapt the mix to the natural acoustics. A lot of problems can be solved with Silk before you even touch EQ or compression.”
Ultimately, the technology brought to bear on the tour has allowed Loy to forget about it and focus more on the show itself. “I’m watching the stage and watching what’s going on and trying to mix with my head up,” he says. “The PM3 lets me stay connected to the performance.”
