“I drove everyone crazy with it because I was the only one who noticed at first, but once I pointed it out we all heard it and wanted it gone”: The curious case of The Weeknd’s mic distortion, and how his live sound team fixed it

As the Weeknd, Abel Tesfaye has gone from underground alt-R&B artist to one of the biggest pop stars in the world, which means that his recent After Hours Til Dawn tour saw him filling stadiums rather than the smaller venues he started in.

A job well done, then, but it turns out that there was one unwanted technical side effect of the shows getting bigger, and it was down to The Weeknd’s live sound team - front of house engineer Derek Brener, monitor engineer Lewis Lowder, and RF technician Diego Correa - to solve it.

“I’d been chasing this very subtle intermodulated distortion that had begun to manifest once the systems got larger,” explains Brener. “I drove everyone crazy with it because I was the only one who noticed at first, but once I pointed it out to Diego and Lewis, we all heard it and wanted it gone.”

Obviously, a problem with the main attraction’s mic is always cause for concern, but Brener and his team did at least manage to work out what was going on.

“We came to realize that it was the result of the combination of [the Weeknd]’s unique vocal timbre and the hyping of compression and high-end,” he says. “This being companded gave us this high-end ‘rizz’ in certain areas.”

It’s one thing to isolate a problem, though; what you really need to do is fix it, and that took a while. In fact, it took a whole new mic setup.

“After months of trying to figure this out and swapping things out multiple times for other brands, we were introduced to the Sound Devices Astral and the Astral HH product line and realised we finally had a solution,” says Brener. This offers not only improved headroom and fidelity but also Sound Devices’ Gain Forward technology, which removes the need for companding.

“It really sounds like a wired microphone to me – not something you can say for most wireless units,” says Berner. “It’s a really flexible mic in terms of aesthetics and customisation as well, so we tricked it out in a gold shell and used [The Weeknd]’s favoured Sennheiser 5235 capsule and he took to it without saying anything – the ultimate compliment!”

Whether they actually told Tesfaye what they’d done isn’t quite clear, but it sounds like everyone is happy with the new arrangement.

“Most importantly – the ‘rizz’ was gone,” says Brener. “It solved this big problem that had been plaguing us for years, and suddenly we had a lot more flexibility in the RF setup as well.”