Danny Elfman Live: From Batman to Boingo to Big Mess and Beyond

Los Angeles, CA (February 18, 2025)—Danny Elfman hasn’t really “toured” much since the breakup of Oingo Boingo 30 years ago, though he has put on some spectacular shows. Most of them have been one-offs, and for a large majority of them, he has been backed by an orchestra performing some variation of his film scores, sometimes live-to-screen. These can be complex shows to stage, sync and mix, and they typically take place outdoors.

In late 2024, Elfman may have pulled off his biggest run of shows yet, starting on Halloween night in Monterrey, Mexico with a performance of The Nightmare Before Christmas, followed by back-to-back nights at the Hollywood Bowl on Nov. 2 and Shoreline Amphitheater, near San Francisco, on Nov. 3, where he brought his entire career to the stage for a nonstop, two-hour, adrenaline-fueled mashup titled “From Batman to Boingo to Big Mess and Beyond.”

“This covers a lot of genres in one go,” says Ryan John, Elfman’s front-of-house engineer for the past five years. “Big Mess is kind of industrial metal. Oingo Boingo, we’ve got some old school rock and roll. The film scores, obviously, are orchestral. And when the show actually happens, it goes straight from industrial metal to a film score, and straight from the last note of a film score into an Oingo Boingo track. And sometimes they’re all playing together, with a choir! The sonic signature changes significantly from song to song, and there’s no downtime in between.”

Adding to the challenge of mixing such disparate and wide-ranging styles of music was the simple fact that the stage was packed. Besides the 40-piece orchestra and five-piece band—Danny Elfman on guitar and vocals, Robin Finck and Nili Brosh also on guitar, Ilan Rubin on drums and Stu Brooks playing bass—there was a 15-voice choir at stage right. Not to mention the highly choreographed and precision-timed video playback and lighting design. And the large LED wall.

“We’re at 170 inputs from the stage,” John states. “Every single orchestra player has a closemic, and some play multiple instruments, all with individual microphones. There’s four guitars on stage when Steve Bartek, the conductor, joins them, and at certain points, it’s all of them at the same time. And the whole orchestra. And the choir. There are also clicks and counts and talkbacks for playback and conductor, so not every input is going out to the house, but it is well into the hundreds.

“And there’s something like 300 snapshots in this show,” John continues. “It’s a lot of motion. It’s a lot of keeping up with what’s going on. We have video content and lighting, and the entire ecosystem as a whole is effectively tied together through time code. A playback system on stage feeds click tracks to everybody, plus cues. It all works beautifully.”

A big show with this many moving parts that relies on precision sync is not easy to pull off, especially if it’s for one or two nights only and there’s no time to get the kinks out. Black Ink Presents, a production company that handles a wide range of creative and management services for tours, concerts and specialty events, has become something of a specialist in this admittedly niche market. If you’ve seen a live orchestra-to-film-playback performance, it was likely produced by Black Ink.

For the Hollywood Bowl and Shoreline shows, Black Ink worked with audio provider Delicate Productions on a package that included, for front of house, an Avid S6L-32D Surface, three Avid MADI 64 Channel Interface Cards and three Avid Stage 64 I/O Racks. John brought along two racks of his own outboard gear and a few particular external plug-ins, including Universal Audio for all the reverbs, and iZotope Neutron 4 to dial in a bit of the Trash module on Elfman’s vocal.

For the two monitor positions—band and orchestra plus choir—Delicate provided two DiGiCo SD7 Quantum consoles and three SD Ultimate Racks, as well as, notably, two Bricasti M7 reverbs, an Avalon VT-737sp mic preamp and two Empirical Labs Distressors. A Shure Axient Digital wireless system covered the stage, along with four PSM-1000 IEM setups and four KSM9 condenser mics. Four d&b audiotechnick M4 stage monitors were set up for Elfman and anyone else who cared to listen in.

Danny Elfman: Making Music, Part 1—Creating a ‘Big Mess’

For the P.A., Delicate supplied an L-Acoustics system that included 12 KARA II line array cabinets per side, eight X8 front-fills, and 16 KS28 flown subwoofers and 16 SB28 ground subs. The main hang, however—featuring the new flagship L Series line array system, with a mere three L2 cabinets plus a single L2D per side powered by the new LA7.16 amplifier package—came direct from L-Acoustics, working in partnership with Black Ink, Delicate and Elfman’s team.

It takes time for a new high-performance, flagship-level loudspeaker to make its way into the touring market. Rental houses need to hear it and see it both in use and in demand before they’ll commit to buying. While the L Series made its U.S. debut on the Mojave Stage at Coachella 2023 and has appeared on a number of tours since, the Elfman shows were a prime opportunity to show off the system’s full capability. It wasn’t by accident.

FOH engineer John was one of the mixers on that Coachella stage in 2023. He has also worked on dozens of events with Black Ink Presents over the years, beyond the Elfman shows. He’s toured with other artists, off and on, over his 20-plus years in the industry—and in his day job, his title is Director of Product Management, Software, L-Acoustics.

“My first experience with the system was actually the first time it was pulled out at Coachella,” John says. “I was with the artist Labyrinth, who also does film work, and his show is a horn section, choir and almost hip hop-type music. It is incredibly dynamic, a lot like Danny’s show. The first thing that blew my mind was when I walked from 250 feet away to 10 feet away, and I didn’t hear any shift in the tonality of the system. The frequency response stayed the same across the whole range. To be that consistent from far field to the near field was an eye-opening experience for me.”

While listeners cite the L2’s clarity and mixers rave about its control and steering capabilities, Scott Sugden, who has been with L-Acoustics for 15 years and is now product manager for the L Series, can run off a huge list of improvements over previous line array systems, from its 40% lighter weight, 30% lower power consumption, advanced steering capabilities, fast deployment, flat angles, dispersion, and internal wood bracing to its patented Progressive Ultra-Dense Line Source technology.

“To me, the L Series is by far the best-sounding system we’ve ever built, especially in terms of transient response,” says Sugden, who was onsite to provide support for the Elman shows. “I think a lot of that’s down to some of the core technology choices, and one of those is the way we amplify the speaker. Each L2 cabinet has 20 transducers in it, amplified by 16 amplifiers. Each amp channel is capable of 1,400 watts. Each high-frequency transducer has its own amp channel, and each mid section or low section has its own amp channel, so each amplifier has plenty of headroom, and each has room to share.”

While Sugden admits that improvements in speaker design and performance, being constrained by the laws of electronics, acoustics and physics, don’t often come in huge leaps, they do still come, and will continue to.

“What has changed in these past few years is our ability to control the interaction between multiple speakers, and the ability to control what actually comes out as a result of the interaction between multiple drivers—versus just making one driver better,” he says. “We really pride ourselves on building systems that aren’t just great for a rock band, or Coachella, but also for the Hollywood Bowl and orchestra and everything in between. We don’t ever want to hear it said that ‘this is a great place for this type of music’. It should be great for you.”