Kyle Travis, Instrument Tech for Jam Band Twiddle, Gets Key Assist from Bose Professional

	Instrument tech Kyle Travis. Photo: Adam Straught.

Jam bands are known for their integration of a wide range of influences, and Twiddle is no exception. Twiddle incorporates elements of rock, jazz, bluegrass, reggae, and funk. That style also extends to their touring personnel, including guitar, bass, and keyboard technician Kyle Travis. Travis' older brother -- the band's tour manager -- convinced him to forgo his career as a high-school history teacher and come and explore his passions as a guitarist and technical aficionado on the road with Twiddle. He hasn't looked back since making the career change.

Travis has recently been collaborating with the band's front-of-house mixer, Sam Johnson, on how best to handle lead singer Mihali Savoulidis' massive guitar speaker cabinet, which is loaded with both old-school and new-generation speaker components, requiring enormous power to properly energize. "I had just gotten an entire new amplifier head and pre-amp for his guitar rig, and we were looking for how to best get the sound out of those speakers," Travis recalls. The first time all of those components were in one place was at the House of Blues venue in Dallas, and it was there Travis and the band also encountered the ShowMatch sound system from Bose Professional -- a fortuitous coincidence that allowed the team to test out the new guitar cabinet rig with clarity and precision.

"As a backline technician and sound engineer working together, this was a wonderful experience overall, and I was able to test a new rack-unit-based guitar rig," he says. "The house system was capable of handling the high sound levels and Sam was able to dial in the mix to a whole new level. ShowMatch became our testing ground. No other system I've ever encountered could have let us hear every nuance of this huge amplifier, which is so loud that we don't even need to put it though the PA system at some smaller gigs. In this case, the ShowMatch system had the power to handle it and the sensitivity to capture every bit of its unique sound."

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