Vance Powell Offers Behind-The-Scenes Look At Phish’s Livestream Audio Production

The Working Class Audio podcast’s Matt Boudreau recently caught up with Phish livestream audio tech Vance Powell during Phish’s spring tour stop in San Francisco. The Grammy-winning producer, engineer and mixer offered insights into his work providing album quality audio for the LivePhish.com streams.

Matt Boudreau is the creator and host of the Working Class Audio podcast and he hopped a couple BART trains to meet his friend Vance Powell — who co-produced Phish’s recent studio albums Evolve and Sigma Oasis — in the audio truck parked outside of Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. Sitting in front of his Lawo console, Powell spoke candidly about the challenges faced in such a large production.

“So the band has brought me in to be able to provide album quality audio to the folks at home for every live show. Now, has that happened, no not always. It’s been a big learning curve.”

Powell went on to detail how he wrangles 160 inputs onstage including talkback mics, crew radio channels and click tracks for transitions. On the latter, Vance offered a behind-the-scenes look at how the band handles going from song to song.

“When they want to go to the next song and they’ve just played a song that’s like this (tempo claps) and then they’re like okay we want to play the next song but we don’t want it to be [the same tempo]. So they’ll go click play you know (slower clicks) and they’ll go okay cool and then they go [into the song]. There’s no click track running through the session through the night. There’s [nothing] driving video or lighting or sequencers. There’s no pre-recorded music ever playing back with Phish, ever. It’s just four guys on stage playing and that’s a rarity today.”

Powell also talked about the more technical audio specs of the livestream production including their “Bertha” rack, individual inputs and his history producing live audio for Phish.

Watch the full Working Class Audio segment with Vance Powell below:

Phish just wrapped their 2025 Spring Tour and will kick off their summer tour on June 20 in Manchester, New Hampshire.