#73 Jacob Trunzo | A Day With NEEDTOBREATHE’s Production Manager & FOH Engineer
It’s 10:20 a.m. at FirstBank Amphitheater in Franklin, Tennessee, and Jacob “Trunz” Trunzo is short on R-clips. The little safety clips that keep the truss pins in place shook loose somewhere on the truck ride. One of the crew is checking the trailer, and Trunz is walking the deck asking everyone to find him if a pin is missing one.
“I’ve never seen anything fall out anyway, but like, safety is not negotiable.”
Trunz is the Production Manager and Front of House Engineer for NEEDTOBREATHE on The Long Surrender Tour. That means two jobs on the same day: get the rig into the building in the morning, then mix the band at night. Nikki Sanz and the Giggs team followed him through a load-in with a stage smaller than he wanted, heat in the mid-90s, and a console that would start glitching hours before doors.
Four Rig Versions and One Small Stage
Before the trucks arrive, Trunz gets an overlay or 3D drawing of each venue and sends it to Christian, a rigging contact back at the office. NEEDTOBREATHE’s truss isn’t straight lines. It has 60-degree angles, and a lot of amphitheater stages slope back or have vaulted roofs, so the tour carries four versions of the rig.
In some venues they’ve cut 16 feet of truss, eight on each side. In others, 24 feet a side. Franklin is a small stage, and it’s the Nashville show.
“It’s kind of a nonnegotiable to me that we’re doing the largest version of the rig.”
That puts the trims close to the limit, which is where head rigger Dalton Brandt comes in. Dalton lays out every point on the deck from a map he keeps in a notebook he borrowed from his son. When a point lands directly under a beam, it’s a dead hang: throw the line up, wrap it, drop it down. When it doesn’t, he builds a bridle, two pieces of steel running to the beams on either side so the center of the V lands where the motor needs to be.
Every bridle costs height. Trunz walked through the math: start with a 28-foot trim, lose a few feet to the steel, then two more to the motor, then another for the attachment points.
“By the time you’re done, you’ve lost 8 or 10 feet from the top of the frame.”
When Nikki asked him to read the bridle sheet out loud, Trunz handed it to Dalton. If he got one detail wrong on camera, he said, somebody on the internet would tell him he was going to kill someone. Dalton walked through it: a five-foot basket around the steel on each side, a shackle, six links of chain, a two-foot dog bone, and enough math to keep the angle at 90 degrees or less. Nikki’s verdict was “rigging hieroglyphics.”
Nikki asked whether production managers are basically engineers. Trunz’s answer was that he needs to understand how all of it works, because at the end of the day it’s his responsibility. A lot of it he learned on the fly on this tour, by doing it and asking every question he could while he was on site.
The Same Mix in Every Seat
Zach Johnson, the tour’s systems engineer, starts on each venue the night before. He measures the room in Google Earth, then checks those numbers on site with a laser that gives him a distance and an angle. Venues don’t hand him the measurements. He builds them himself.
The work matters because every room is different. A few days earlier they’d played Red Rocks, where the top boxes were aimed up at the trees. Hang that same PA in Franklin and it wouldn’t sound right.
Most of Zach’s day is timing. Sound travels slower than light, so the side hangs and front fills have to arrive at the same seats at the same moment, or they interfere with each other. He tunes with Smaart and three measurement mics, one at the drive rack, one on the floor, and one on axis with the PA, so he can hear what’s happening across the whole venue and not only at front of house.
“People who paid to come see the show, it matters how they hear it, not how I hear it.”
Temperature and humidity change how sound travels. So does elevation, and this crew had just come down from Denver. Zach tunes for an average, knowing it can’t be perfect everywhere. Nikki asked him to describe his role in the painting terms she’d been using for Trunz. Zach said he makes the canvas, in whatever shade of white or off-white Trunz needs. Trunz called it cleaning the window.
Trunz doesn’t undersell it. He sets up Zach’s drive rack every morning while Zach is flying the PA, and he told Nikki he can’t do this tour without him.
Analog Character at Front of House
When Trunz took the job, frontman Bear Rinehart wanted analog energy, enough that he floated carrying an analog console in the bus trailer. Trunz loved the idea and didn’t think it was practical. He looked at Midas, but the audio vendor didn’t have one available, and at the time he didn’t think the platform had hit its stride.
He landed on a Yamaha RIVAGE. Monitors runs the bigger PM5; Trunz chose the PM3 because he hates hauling a heavy console. To him the RIVAGE has saturation and analog character built in, which makes a rock mix that hits harder than a polished one, and almost everything he needs is already in the desk. His outboard is one Waves box.
Keeping things inside the console also keeps latency down. Bear sings with one ear out, listening to wedges, side fills, and the PA, so every bit of conversion delay throws him off. Trunz estimates the delay between his desk and the PA at under 10 milliseconds, as little as they can make it.
The band is analog almost everywhere. Six guitar amps on stage, all tube, a Leslie, a drum kit with no shields, and the Nord as the only digital instrument. That means the stage sounds different in every city.
“I think part of the fun of the band is that it is all just different every day.”
Bear’s goal for the mix guides all of it.
“He wanted to feel good rather than just sound good.”
That day they were testing a stereo band mix with a mono mix of Bear’s vocal, with more wedges coming from the vendor to try it out.
One Drop of Water
When the shade over front of house got pulled back during load-in, water was still sitting on it. A drop landed on the console’s most-used section, and in that heat it started acting on its own. Trunz wiped it off and reset the surface, and figured he could work around the bad section until help arrived.
Nikki asked how he handles a day going sideways.
“Normally, when things start to go haywire and screw up, my response is typically to get calmer and to just kind of smile and be like, all right, let’s do it, whatever it is.”
Plenty of people would rather cut something, he said. He’d rather push through. Things breaking don’t scare him. He pulls out the tools and fixes them.
He also called Spectrum Sound, the tour’s Nashville-based audio vendor, and a new surface was on its way for around 4:00. In the meantime there was a line check to run. Before the band walks up, the crew goes through every input, send, and receive, top to bottom.
“Before the band gets on stage, we want to make sure that when they walk up, the only thing they’re thinking about is playing their instrument.”
Then, after line check and before doors, Trunz and Zach swapped the console. The engine that processes the audio stays put. They only replaced the control surface, which Trunz described as the hands and feet. The new desk recognized the system almost immediately, they reloaded the show file, and the inputs started metering.
“Every front of house guy ever is going to think of me as a crazy person.”
It worked. Trunz was already joking that everybody would say it was staged.
A Show With No Video
Lighting designer and director Johnathan Rickard started on this tour about four months earlier, pitching designs with his colleagues at Denver’s Voyage Productions. Feedback from Bear and management pushed them toward a recording-studio look. The white baffles on stage reference sound baffles at RCA Studios, a chandelier hangs over the band, and a riser package slopes in toward Bear like a conversation pit. At points in the set, the band comes down to join him there.
Early on, the band told them to stay away from video. Past NEEDTOBREATHE tours carried a lot of it, and this time they wanted the focus on the music. Lighting and scenic carry the whole look. Even the chandelier was a budget call. Trunz said proper automation would have cost around $37,000, so the crew runs the cables up chain sliders and paints the pieces so they read as metal from the crowd.
This is Johnathan’s first tour as a designer and LD. He previously toured as a lighting technician and operator with Cirque du Soleil on Songblazers, CRYSTAL, and the big top show ECHO. He went to school for music education and percussion performance and left early to go on the road. The drummer still shows up in the work. The show was programmed to timecode for previz and rehearsals, but there’s no timecode during the show.
“The whole show is manually operated. Everything’s firing via me.”
Kick and snare hits land differently every night, so the show changes with the band. Next up for Johnathan is The Chicks. His advice for anyone moving up is to go a little slower than you think you need to, because you usually have more time than you think, and staying focused beats rushing.
What the Day Runs On
Greg Tribble has been driving buses for Pioneer Coach long enough that Nikki first met him years ago, when she was a runner at Bridgestone Arena. On this run he’d covered 13,000 miles and 30 states in about five weeks. By late morning he was headed to the hotel to sleep through show day so he could drive overnight to Birmingham.
Every person Nikki met in Franklin had the same job description underneath the title. Dalton makes sure the motors hang where the design says. Zach makes sure the PA sounds the same in every seat. Greg makes sure everyone wakes up in the next city. Trunz makes sure that when the band walks out, the only thing left to think about is the music.
Before doors, Trunz walks the stage, checks in with Bear about any changes, and makes sure the video team has what it needs. Then he waits for showtime.
“We hope that we make it till show.”
