SHAWN
MENDES:
THE TOUR
Reports from the Road – Part 1
By Tom Wood
In this Professional Sound exclusive,
U.K.-born, Canada-based FOH engi-
neer Tom Wood checks in from various
dates leading up to and during Shawn
Mendes: The Tour, which finds the artist
and his team trekking the globe through-
30 PROFESSIONAL SOUND
out most of 2019. The five-leg outing
began in Amsterdam on March 7 th and is
expected to wrap in late December with a
trio of dates in Mexico City.
Pre-Game
You wanna know what’s worse than having a
terrible show in front of 80,000 people? Hav-
ing an incredible one 24 hours later with abso-
lutely no idea why. That was 2018. Fuck 2018.
365 days of promo and we played
PA roulette until the wheel fell off. The
reality is, I have a list of theories as long
as my arm to account for the day-to-day
differences in sound propagation across
another shitty field in rainy Wales: the
temperature, the sub configuration, the
system engineer...
The lesson that came from all of this?
My mix was actually pretty good, and that