New York, NY (September 17, 2025)—Nearly 50 years into his career, country legend Vince Gill is as busy as ever, recording, touring, producing and even playing places like Sphere as a member of the Eagles. Then there’s also his considerable live schedule, which includes jaunts like his recent 30-plus date tour that ranged all over the U.S., closing out in August with a five-night residency at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. They weren’t quick, phone-it-in shows either—a Vince Gill concert runs over three hours, peppered with arch storytelling, familiar favorite songs and impressive musical repartee between the star and his nine-member band.
Onstage, Gill is backed by a trusted team of Nashville session aces cultivated over time, like guitarists Tom Bukovac and Jedd Hughes, but the audio pros that bring those musicians to the crowd have also been part of his camp for years—like monitor engineer Matt Rausch, who has worked with him since 2008. “This is my only live gig,” said Rausch. “I kind of got thrown into it from being a studio engineer at Vince’s home studio—and he’s stretching the words ‘home studio’ because it started in 2008 as, ‘We’re gonna put it in to do guitars and vocals,’ and it turned into, ‘Oh, we could do whole records here.’ We’ve done the last three or four records at his house, full tracking, Nashville-style. One day, he goes, ‘Hey, would you come on the road?’ This is probably 2015, 2016, and I said, ‘I’ve never done that.’ He goes, ‘Aw, you’ll be fine,’ and that’s how I ended up on the bus.”
FOH engineer/production manager Josh Isenberg has been on that bus for years, too, having first come aboard as a 19-year-old production assistant back in 2011, fresh out of SAE Nashville. “They knew I was coming in to learn and that audio was what I planned on doing, so I was like a pseudo audio guy,” he recalled. “I’d get all my production stuff done early, then head to the stage to help patch; that folded me into doing a monitor tech job and then eventually monitor engineering. I basically did two years at each job and worked my way up to production managing and front of house. This is where I’ve always wanted to be from the beginning—before I was doing anything else, I enjoyed mixing out front.”
These days, that mixing is done on a Yamaha Rivage PM5 console, part of a control package provided by Clair Global. Isenberg knew his way around Yamaha desks—he uses a CL5 to mix the veteran western swing band The Time Jumpers at Nashville’s 3rd and Lindsley every Monday night—but he hadn’t tried a Rivage until Gill’s 2025 tour.
“The idea was to find a console on a digital platform that felt analog,” he said. “I’m a younger cat that got raised in a house full of seasoned cats, so I was raised with an analog mentality in a digital world. Having that and then switching to this console really made sense. When I say ‘analog mentality,’ for instance, I use everything on the channel. I don’t have anything external, anything crazy, any weird routing; I want it as analog as it can possibly be without being analog, just to keep everything as simple as we can get it. I did that to prove to myself that I don’t have to have four plug-ins stacked onto a channel strip to make it work, a $10,000 server with external plug-ins and everything else. You don’t need all that stuff to provide the sonic quality of a guy who has 22 Grammys.”
Isenberg applied the desk’s onboard Rupert Neve Designs Portico 5045 to the main and backing vocals, while its Bricasti Design reverb was put to use elsewhere: “I’ve got one reverb—a Bricasti with a live hall preset—that’s doubled, and I stack it on the snare, and I have it on the vocals; the only difference in them is a little bit of time changes of decay. On other consoles over the years, I never got the reverb to sound the way I wanted; it always had a little bit of artifact or artificialness. I had to trim the top end and the bottom end, and try to form the tone with EQ and post effects. With this, I didn’t have to do anything besides send the vocal to the ’verb and return it back on a channel; I found the preset I wanted, and we were off to the races.”
That house mix was heard over a variety of P.A. systems as Gill and Company played through rigs from L-Acoustics, JBL Professional and, for the first time, the Holoplot system installed inside New York City’s Beacon Theatre. “A lot of this tour has been d&b audiotechnik,” said Isenberg. “Some of the best shows I’ve had have been on their J rigs.”
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Beneath those P.A. hangs, the musicians heard themselves through a phalanx of Cohesion CM14 stage monitors, with Gill and monitor engineer Rausch listening through stereo pairs. “This gig is about 90% wedges,” said monitor tech Anderson Hall. “The only guys using in-ears are the guitar techs off-stage. There’s also not a single guitar wireless transmitter. Normally, I have to coordinate upwards of 100 frequencies a day, but on this gig, I calculate three, and realistically, I’ll only use one of them.”
Key to a Vince Gill show is a vocal mic that can handle energetic singing and quiet storytelling with equal aplomb. “Vince is a dynamic performer, and when we’re talking about vocals and his wedge, it’s got to be bright and loud and clear with as much potential gain as possible,” said Rausch. “These days, we’re on the sE V7.”
Much like Isenberg, Rausch mixed on a Rivage PM5, using onboard effects and features. “I run consoles pretty simple, and if they pass signal, I’m usually happy,” he laughed. The band’s mixes were fairly typical, though Gill’s went easy on the guitar: “I don’t feed him any of his amps. He’s got plenty right behind him—big old things—and then maybe a smattering of acoustic. He loves Seymour Duncan D-Tar pickups; they are really good on acoustic for DI stuff.”
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The tour’s focus on simplicity and an analog mentality dovetailed well with the straightforward way that all involved approached their jobs. “I’m very thankful to work with people like Matt and Anderson who care deeply about doing the best work they can,” said Isenberg. “Matt and I have been working side-by-side for several years now, and the trust I have in his ear and ability over in monitorworld gives me confidence to do my job out front every night; I really mean that.
“This tour has been cultivated over the years, and when I can be a part of that, lending a hand and helping make it as good as it can be, then I show Vince respect by continuing to do the best I can, and he shows me respect by continuing to call me—and I like to keep it that way.”
