Tyler, The Creator Creates A Pop-Up Show to Remember

Brooklyn, NY (April 14, 2025)—Tyler, The Creator’s Chromakopia album was one of the biggest hits of last fall, and the artist highlighted its instantaneous success by playing a series of pop-up shows in L.A., Atlanta and Boston. While the shows gave fans a taste of what to expect on his world tour which began in February, it was the final pop-up, in Brooklyn, NY, that set the internet aflame. Held on a Brooklyn Army Terminal pier late on a breezy November afternoon, Tyler arrived by boat and leapt on to a barge carrying four double-stacked shipping containers, all painted green to match the album’s graphic design. The containers became the artist’s stage, and inside them? That was mission control.

FOH engineer Paul Wichmann and monitor man Landon Storey tackled audio for the unusual pop-up show, fitting control, monitor world, playback and front of house inside one of the containers in order to send audio to a small line array system set up on the barge, as well as Tyler’s in-ears.

On the current tour, Storey and Wichmann have been using, respectively, a Yamaha Rivage PM5 desk and an old-school Gamble analog console with a Yamaha DM7 for backup, but for the pop-up show, given the tight quarters of a shipping container, they opted to go with a Yamaha DM7C for FOH and a DM7 for monitors so that they had the benefit of a mid-sized footprint while maintaining familiar feature sets. “The DM7’s workflow is so similar to the Rivage PM series, which made the transition seamless,” said Storey. “We were able to quickly get up to speed and deliver the same high-quality audio experience. It was pretty impressive that you could fit Paul’s DM7 compact, my full-size DM7 and then the playback guy in the middle with a couple of Dante switches and an analog whip feeding an analog split.”

Ensuring the audience on the pier heard the best show possible, Wichmann mixed the show remotely in front of the P.A. “I literally had the DM7 in a shipping container on the barge, and then I ran a router outside of it and just mixed it with an iPad,” he explained, “I connected my iPad and then I mixed the show using Yamaha’s StageMix app, which was really slick.”

On the Road With Jelly Roll

Also slick—or at least hard to attach to—were the containers themselves, which had little usable space to set up antennas and crowd mics; this wrinkle did not escape Wichmann’s attention: “It was just storage containers with handrails, leaving very little to mount the antennas to; there’s nothing to mount crowd mics to, and if there’s a problem, how do you get up there?”

Inside the container, Storey wore the same in-ears as the artist and made use of the DM7’s 1176 compressor and dynamic EQ plug-ins to manage Tyler’s vocal range effectively, explaining, “He’s very dynamic. To go from talking as loud as you and I are to literally almost distorting a mic capsule, it was interesting to try to dial that in.”

Following the opener of “Rah Tah Tah,” Tyler sprinted through often shortened versions of tracks for the 30-minute, 10-song show before closing out with the appropriate “I Hope You Find Your Way Home” and hopping back on the boat that first brought him to the barge. The end result was a starstruck crowd, making all the prep for the unusual show worth it for everyone involved. “The fans were on the pier, and they were just going wild,” said Wichmann. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for them. Tyler’s fans are incredibly dedicated, and they loved the unique setup.”