Here’s an unprecedented pre-show look at the console setup of Slipknot’s front-of-house engineerWhile there’s plenty of chaos when Slipknot take to the stage, there’s a precise formula when it comes to capturing their heavy metal carnage live. And the band’s front-of-house engineer, Bob Strakele, has given an unprecedented tour of his mixing console.
Strakele, who was also worked with AWOLNATION, Avenged Sevenfold and Erasure, explains that he has recently switched to Yamaha’s PM5 Rivage after 11 years on a Solid State Logic console. “I was just kind of ready to make a change,” he tells Kohle Audio Kult. “I went to the PM5 Rivage series by Yamaha, and I’ve done maybe 15 shows on it.”

READ MORE: AI music awards organisation bans viral AI band Velvet Sundown from entering: “This doesn’t align with our values…”

The console is a Rupert Neve Designs collaboration, featuring tech from Bricasti and Eventide. As Strakele shows the host around, he explains: “It’s not just a GUI that looks fancy – it’s the real deal.”
While the number of channels coming out of the PA around “the high 60s, low 70s”, with 96 channels of inputs, Strakele only mixes the groups mid-show. “The fader levels pretty much stay flat,” he explains. “The groups… that’s where I spend the show.”
“I just pretend it’s an analogue console with 4-band EQ,” he says. “Just touch it and turn it and when it sounds good, it sounds good. Whatever, right?”

A handy stream deck helps the engineer easily roll through any intro recordings,. But there’s no backing tracks or click tracks once the band are in full-swing. “There’s no tracks,” Strakele says. “It’s all live. It’s 100% live.”
All fine tuning, EQs, reverbs, and effects are done on the console, with the outboard essentially just being compression. Once the show is in motion, his job is tweaking faders, keeping an eye on the drum buses, aforementioned Bleeps groups, effects, and so on. The outboard is all fixed settings. “I don’t mess with any of it,” he says.
The outboard features a Governer dual slope optical compressor, designed by Hungarian company Gainlab Audio, which Strakele notes “doesn’t really behave like an optical compressor” due to the fact “it can be very gentle if you want it to be – but it’ll get gnarly if you want it to be as well”.
The Governer also boasts an inductor-based passive EQ, which Strakele explains is “similar to a Pultec, but not a clone”, with its own “cut and boost” abilities.

The outboard also has a Dictator flexible compressor, another Gainlab Audio creation. “The Dictator is handling everything electronics-based,” Strakele says. “Sometimes things can get out of control in the electronics world because they’re just tweaking mixers and gain stages and stuff – this thing just works. It gets fatter, but you don’t necessarily hear it hit a knee or a threshold.”
“Everything electronics-based goes to a group, which I call ‘Bleeps’,” Strakele laughs. “It works killer!”
There’s also Wes Audio 1176-style Mimas compressors. “I’ve toured with real 1176s and all sorts of clones, and, for the size and the form factor, it’s perfect,” he explains. “And I honestly prefer it to a real 1176. It does the thing that you want!”
Vocally, Strakele again splits lead singer Corey Taylor, stage right, and percussionist Shawn Crahan (Clown) into three different groups. “I like to do everything on the channel in the box, and this is all the groups,” he explains. “So I know that the round trip is all going to be in phase… If it’s latent, it’s like 0.4 of a millisecond… it’s no big deal.”
Strakele also uses The Wizard as his choice of multiband saturator – a brand new offering from Gainlab Audio. “It’s really interesting, because every part of it interacts with a different part,” Strakele explains. “You have your thresholds for the very mute part, but that’s a feedback off of the output. So you can make it do really cool soundscape-y stuff if you are using synths. I’m using it on guitars, and it’s just locking it all together and adding some warmth.”
“A little saturation, a little compression, and a little bit of EQ,” he continues. “The EQ is pretty gentle. I think at max it’s only a 6 dB boost. So I’m just adding a little pinch of it here. A touch.”
An API 2500 Bus Compressor rounds everything off. “This thing reacts a little bit harsh to low frequency information… so I just add length to the toms, essentially, and some distortion,” he says.
“I keep it pretty simple,” Strakele admits. “A lot of people like to overcomplicate things, but that’s just like not how I work. And I mean, a show like this doesn’t really change that much. It’s mostly the room… That’s what we spend the most time on, the room acoustics.”

Slipknot aren’t ones to carry out excessive sound-checking, so Strakele usually plays back a recording from another show to gauge the room acoustics. “That way, I can basically tune the room the night before a show,” he explains
The Prodigy multifunction audio processor handles all the IO for the outboard and PA drive system. PA-wise, Strakele discussed the band’s Cohesion PA system back in April.
Slipknot’s live set utilises six Cohesion CP218 II+ systems behind each main hang, as well as eighteen CP218 II+ in six ground stacks of three, according to Lighting & Sound America.
“We had a lot of subs, but more for coverage,” Strakele told the magazine. “Brian and I had an agreement that we were going to get most of the low end from what was in the air. It’s honestly impressive that a 12″ goes that low, and you felt that energy. I liked the people in the front row to have a visceral feeling, not an oppressive one. When the guitars were chunking, you felt it on Cohesion.”
“This system was killer,” he added. “It made things easier for me where the guitars and vocals live. I’m a mid-range guy. Heavy metal tends not to have mid-range in the guitars, and it can be a conundrum of pushing the guitars too loud to hear them, but you still don’t hear them. With this system, I didn’t have that problem. This PA is a keeper.”
The post Here’s an unprecedented pre-show look at the console setup of Slipknot’s front-of-house engineer appeared first on MusicTech.