The Frontman Who Also Mixes Monitors

New York, NY (January 9, 2025)—There are lead singers who play a mean guitar, and others whose dancing could make Prince break into a nervous sweat—but how many mix their band’s ear monitors live? Alt rockers Beartooth have been on the road for months, and tackling the IEMs is none other than frontman Caleb Shomo.

Intimately familiar with creating the band’s sound, having engineered and mixed Beartooth’s studio recordings, Shomo spent the band’s most recent US tour mixing the group’s IEMs on a low-profile Allen & Heath C1500 Surface, which fits a 12” touchscreen and a dozen faders into a 19” rack-mountable frame. From the stage, Shomo handled five stereo in-ear monitor mixes, side fills and two pairs of center monitors.

The arrangement was created for the band by audio visual company V2 Productions, and was based around Allen & Heath dLive DM48 MixRacks at both FOH and monitor positions with an analog split deployed between them. The DM48 offers 48 mic/line inputs, 24 line outputs and 3 I/O ports and is built on a XCVI mix engine to provide 128 input channels and 64 mix outputs with a configurable 64-bus architecture

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At FOH, engineer Danny Harvey oversaw an S5000 Surface, featuring dual 12” touchscreens and 28 faders, as well as a MixRack equipped with a Waves card. Harvey offered, “Before this tour, I was on the C1500 at FOH, but having the extra faders and control of the S5000 has been a game changer. The built-in processing lets me achieve the power and punch Beartooth demands.”

For Shomo, wearing frontman and monitor man hats at the same time was all in a night’s work. “After mixing the Beartooth albums on some of the world’s best consoles, my requirements and expectations for mixing in-ears have become almost impossibly high,” he admitted, but also said that the unusual arrangement worked for both him and the band. “I’ve never felt so confident creating mixes that make everyone on stage want to melt face night after night.”