On tour with British indie outfit The K’s, live sound engineers Christian Sherwin and Harley Stewart reveal why two Neve 1073OPX units have taken centre stage in their touring setup, transforming their front of house and monitor sound night after night.
When British indie breakout band The K’s hit the road, they gave their engineers a simple brief, make the show sound bigger and better.
For Front of House engineer Christian Sherwin and monitor engineer Harley Stewart, the answer wasn’t investing in boutique microphones or complicating the signal chain. Instead, it was bringing the world’s most iconic analogue preamp into their touring rack.
By deploying two Neve 1073OPX units, the crew discovered that classic British analogue colour is just a studio luxury. On stage, it serves as a powerful problem solver, streamlining processing, restoring body to digital instruments, and providing rock-solid consistency across diverse venues.
Here is how the 1073OPX proves its worth in a modern live sound environment.
Punch, Harmonic Drive, and Simplifying the Mic Package
Chasing high fidelity on tour often leads engineers down a rabbit hole of delicate, expensive microphones. Early on, Sherwin and Stewart tested a range of specialised mics on the drum kit before stripping the setup back to standard road-tested workhorses. The difference came from driving the 1073OPX preamps.
Pushing the input stage introduced natural harmonic saturation that thickened the transients, delivering an immediate, record-ready drum sound without delicate gear or heavy corrective EQ.
Here’s how Christian describes it:
“One thing we did try at the start of this tour was a lot of fancy microphones, and we took them all off and put on just your standards. What that 1073 gave was just for a standard drum package… it was amazing. Like things like snare drum and just absolutely slamming it. You look at them and you go, that’s way too much. But as you bring it back in, you just have this really, really full sound. It kind of gave us that edge.”
Streamlining Workflow and Easing Monitor Compression
In live mixing, speed is essential. When a preamp delivers natural harmonic weight and gentle soft-clipping at the input, channels sit into the mix with far less digital manipulation downstream.
For Harley Stewart on monitors, that natural roundness meant backing off heavy processing, keeping in-ear mixes cleaner, punchier, and less fatiguing for the musicians on stage. Harley’s experience bears that out: “Since I’ve moved over to using the 1073s on monitors, I’ve actually been able to back off my compressors a little bit. It’s been less harsh in my processing.”
On the workflow side, Christian was just as positive: “Just the lack of extra processing. Getting to that finished product so much sooner just makes your workflow so much faster.”
Restoring Analogue Life to Digital Modelled Guitars
Amp modellers like the Quad Cortex have transformed touring logistics, offering portable, reproducible tones night after night. Yet running purely direct digital patches straight into a digital console can sometimes sound sterile or unyielding in a dense live mix.
Routing their digital modellers directly through the 1073OPX gave The K’s the analogue character of a driven transformer stage, restoring natural depth and presence without sacrificing the convenience of a modern digital touring rig. Christian recalled this shift in sound, stating: “Running Quad Cortexes through the 1073 really just gave us that warm character, but kind of reintroduced the life back into those guitars that we were missing when we did go digital.”
When asked further about the Neve sound, Harley echoed the same positivity:
“The Neve sound is personal and characterful and isn’t clinical, like so many things can be in this age of digital audio. And it’s great that we’re able to incorporate it with that digital world.”
Modern Connectivity: Dante Integration and Remote Control
A live preamp needs to fit modern touring networks without requiring extra copper runs or manual trips to the stage box. With optional Dante connectivity and standalone software control, the 1073OPX bridges vintage circuit topology with modern networked stage integration.
Whether units live in stage-side racks or out at front of house, gain, impedance, and pad settings can be dialled in effortlessly from a laptop across the arena.
Harley was relieved to have the Dante option: “Being able to have the Dante card was really helpful as well… It was just a really quick, easy way to integrate it.”
Christian elaborated further, “I can be 100 feet away and still control everything. It’s a unit right by your feet, so if you need to control it by just crouching down, you can. But I’m 100 feet away and just with a click of a mouse, I can change what I need.”
Tour-Grade Consistency Every Night
Ultimately, it’s about certainty. As touring rooms vary in acoustic shape and size, the front end remains consistent, dependable, and musical. When asked about his favourite thing about working with the unit, Christian didn’t hesitate to praise the 1073:
“My favourite thing about the OPX is just probably the character and consistency it gives me from every show, every venue. I’m just getting the same result… Neve just makes it sound like music. It’s what we’re used to.”
Ready to transform your live sound? Learn more about the Neve 1073OPX.
