Dan Hermouet

FOH Engineer

Perfume Genius

Dan Hermouet is the front-of-house audio engineer for internationally touring artist Perfume Genius.

“Overall the Soundtoys collection gives me a versatile creative palette. It’s the ideal companion to bridge the gap between analogue flavors and digital creative possibilities.”

We asked Dan to give a rundown on how he incorporated the Soundtoys plug-ins into his live rig for the Perfume Genius world tour:

“My current live set up with Perfume Genius includes a mobile set up for voice processing revolving almost exclusively around Soundtoys plugins.”

The original setup was created a while back when touring Perfume Genius’s album Too Bright. At the time I was looking for a portable and versatile system that could reliably allow me to captivate a wide range of vocal qualities for a charismatic live performance. The conversion from the album to the live performance required special care and attention.

Dan Hermouet mixing a Perfume Genius show.

Finding high quality plugins is pretty straight forward but in a live context, processing power is generally a stumbling block. This is where Soundtoys really excels and punches above the rest. It delivers high quality audio with very low processing requirements. 

The collection is packed with attitude and allows room for dedicated creative set ups. 

The current signal path flows is based around M1 processors on a MacBook Air, with the plug-ins hosted in Ableton Live. I retain control over specific live effect parameters through MIDI. I came up with a solution with MIDI Designer and created a hands on interface dedicated to Perfume Genius live set up performance. It mainly evolves around Mike’s vocal. The MIDI interface contains 8 different banks of reverbs, delays and saturation which I combine live during the performance.”

Dan also provided us with the preset he uses for the Perfume Genius live vocal delay, which we made available for download right here! Just download, unzip, drag+drop it onto EchoBoy in your DAW, then save it to your computer using the Soundtoys preset manager:

You can hear Dan Hermouet’s live mix of Perfume Genius right here, from their September, 2020 performance at Los Angeles’ Palace Theatre:

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