Ian Beveridge on Mixing Nirvana: 'I Felt Like I Was Watching History Being Made'

Veteran monitor engineer Ian Beveridge, who has worked extensively with the likes of Foo Fighters, Green Day, Weezer and more, tells Headliner how he got into mixing live sound, shares stories of his formative years on tour with Nirvana, and reveals why he uses JH Audio in-ears both at home and on the road.

Beveridge is the kind of person who is never not-busy. Toronto-based but recently found in-and-around L.A doing shows to promote his friend Dave Grohl’s new book, he had become acquainted with mixing Foo Fighters’ immense live shows remotely during quarantine, a pursuit which he says served as a pleasant respite from touring life, as well as a real education.

“Essentially how that worked was, there’d be a mixing console on site at the venue where the band was playing, and then I would remote into the editor that was hooked up to the console via TeamViewer,” explains Beveridge. “Clair Global devised a system where we could tunnel audio between the venue and me. My cue bus was sent to me and then I had a talk-to-stage mic that was sent to them, and then we just did a Zoom call or Webex call to actually hook up the video.

“I was in Toronto doing a bunch of shows and the band were in Los Angeles, and as far as latency was concerned, the biggest it got was about 40 milliseconds, which was slightly awkward for communication because of the delay, but still doable. All I had was a D/A interface, my JH Audio IEMs for monitoring, and a Yamaha PM10 console to create shows from a template.”

Like most in the music industry, Beveridge started out playing in bands, which sparked his interest in recording. After accumulating some gear, he hired rehearsal spaces in his native Edinburgh and recorded bands for free, completely immersing himself in the craft. He was soon asked to be the sound engineer on tour for a local band, catapulting him head-first into the world of live sound.

“The guy that booked that band was called Russell Warby, who’s the Foo Fighters’ booking agent to this day,” he remembers. “He called me up in ’89 and said, ‘I’ve got this American band coming over called Nirvana and they’re looking for crew - do you want to do it?’ Russell sent me the album Bleach in a cardboard box, and for want of a better expression, it completely blew my doors off. So with a little encouragement from home, I said yes.

“The greatest memory of all was watching the fever of the audience – the crowd was insane. I was just a young kid at the time, and I remember thinking, ‘I bet this is what it was like watching Zeppelin in 1971’. Dave talked about it just the other day actually – he said that the first thing he would do when he got on stage was check where the exit was, in case things got crazy. At the time, I really, really felt like I was watching history being made.

“There was one show I remember, where I think they played eight bars of one song and then just smashed the gear up,” he adds with an air of fond recollection. “You never knew what you were going to get. We had incidents where the barricades would be on the verge of collapsing, with people being carried out left and right after passing out from the heat. It was just madness.”

Beveridge is a long-time user of JH Audio’s Roxanne IEMs, using them to duplicate Grohl’s wedge setup as a cue system. Interestingly, it’s been at least 10 years since he’s used a conventional cue wedge for mixing.

“With IEMs you can just be more accurate in what you’re doing,” he says. “With modern amplifier and speaker technology, most mixes these days pretty much sound identical. In the old days that wasn’t the case; the crossovers might have sounded slightly different because of the manufacturing technology and the design of the speaker box itself, so there were way more variables.

“It can be difficult to establish a reference point on wedges, but once you have that consistent reference point on IEMs, you can take that with you everywhere, because your in-ears are not subject to the acoustic environment. And from that reference I can hopefully then draw logical conclusions.”

Beveridge is working all the way up until Christmas mixing more Foo Fighters shows, and is hoping to head out on a full year tour with the band in 2022, doing what he does best.

“Dave’s probably the hardest working guy in music,” he signs off. “We’ve been doing these shows promoting his new book at the moment, and I’m sure there’ll soon be some other kind of side projects that the band will be involved in, so we roll on!”

You can listen to the full interview with Ian via the Headliner Radio podcast here: