J.P. Huff Adopts Solid State Logic Live Platform for Pierce the Veil's Front-of-House Duties

While touring with American rock band Pierce the Veil, Nashville-based FOH engineer J.P. Huff relies on a fully compatible showfile that works seamlessly across the SSL Live console range.

11/04/2026

San Diego, California, November 4, 2026 — Pierce the Veil has been touring with the SSL Live platform since the beginning of 2025. J.P. Huff, the band’s front-of-house engineer since 2022, has now mixed the band on every console model in the SSL Live range. Huff used an L550 Plus during the band’s recent Australian tour, taking advantage of SSL Live’s showfile compatibility across the entire console range. This allowed him to move seamlessly between models, from the compact L100 Plus to the flagship L650, while retaining the same showfiles.

An unrivaled workflow
“I built the showfile on an L350 Plus and deployed it across an L650, L200 Plus and L100 Plus using SSL Live’s compatibility mode,” says Huff. “The only real difference between my setups is the stem architecture. From the L350 Plus up to the L650, I’ve pushed stem usage to almost the maximum, which is a big part of my workflow.”

He elaborates: “I leave certain inputs mono to do time-based effects on the channel. With Pierce the Veil, it's stereo guitars, but they're both mono until they hit the stem, so there are four inputs and four stems — two stereo stems — that go to a guitars master stem and then go to a band master stem. And there are also stems for vocals, and for kick, snare, drums, parallel drums, parallel distortion drums, cymbals, toms, etc.,” he says. There are also “buried” stems, he says, including a talkback stem that sums all of the talkback channels together and can be muted when needed.

He continues: “I've got crowd mics on stage coming to front-of-house, and I can pick off my master bus and send it to a channel. That channel feeds a stem, and then I have another stem with all the crowd mics. I time-align those, then sidechain-compress the crowd mic stem while the band's playing. When the band’s not playing, the crowd cheers and you get all the ambience. All that prints to a stem, and that is a quick broadcast mix in the box.”

SSL Live: the undisputed champion
Huff first used SSL’s Live consoles several years ago with pop singer Jake Miller, mixing on an L200, and later took an L300 on tour with R&B/jazz artist Masego. “The SSL Live desk was the undisputed champion every time I took it out. No matter if we were playing clubs, small arenas or theaters, everyone would say, ‘What's that?’ We would do the show, and everyone would be like, ‘That was crazy! I've never heard this room sound like that.’ And a lot of that was a testament to the SSL desk.”

While Huff does use some effects, he typically also carries a rack of outboard gear. “The SSL BUS+ sits on my band bus and gives me that classic SSL Bus Compressor sound that everyone loves. The addition of dynamic EQ makes it even more versatile. You can set those fixed points to expand or compress, and it really helps on a band bus.” He bought an SSL Fusion about five years ago but has lately left it in storage since Live’s software was upgraded to include the unit’s processing capabilities. “What's nice about it being on the desk is being able to change your processing order. I can hit it with drive, then high-frequency compression, then the EQ, then the width, and that's really helpful,” he says.

In fact, he reports, “Some sort of Fusion processing has lived on every single mix I've done in the last six or seven years, whether it's hardware or now in the desk. For guitars, high-frequency compression is pretty much a staple at this point because the bands I mix have that big mid-range. I’m able to dial in around 3 kHz to 5 kHz and knock it down a little bit.” When he’s using the Fusion rack unit, Huff says, “that lives on the vocal bus. The transformer, drive and high-frequency compressor are all great. For me, at times, it's all buttons in, turn it all the way up, and you're in a whole other world.”

Huff also recently acquired a pair of SSL Revival 4000 channel strips and Harrison 32Classic MS Mix Strip channel strips and used them for the first time during Pierce the Veil’s Australian shows.

SSL plug-ins and 4K E channel strip
While Huff says he isn’t much of a plug-in user, he does use SSL plug-ins when the need arises. “When I find myself in that situation, I go to my SSL plug-in folder and think, ‘Which one's gonna do the job?’ I've gone as far as using Vocal Strip 2 and X-Saturator on things. The whole plug-in range has been really nice to work with. The SSL plug-ins work more efficiently than some other companies’ plug-ins, so you don't get the same latency. Even on the few studio mixes I’ve done, when helping remix some things for some friends, it starts with the 4K E Channel Strip. You just paste that across the channels and you're 50, 60, 70% of the way there.”

This year, for the first time, Huff began using snapshots on the Live console with Pierce the Veil. “One day in Germany, I woke up and thought, ‘I'm going to automate all my EQs and fader movements on guitars, tracks and stuff.” Initially, he says, “we were just doing song by song. Now, we're triggering all the snapshots from timecode. Having the LTC timecode input on the rear of the console means I don't need any additional hardware or conversion software to follow timecode.”

Huff recently mixed on an L100 Plus during rehearsals with another band. “I didn't realize how maxed out my L350-through-L650 show file was until I got on the L100 Plus,” he laughs. “But it's very nice to just walk up to any SSL live console, load your show file,and have the system to report what aspects of the show file are supported by the console’s DSP.” He can then choose to disable non-essential programmed features to free up console DSP, he notes. “It's really nice to be able to do that and not have to go through a separate program.”

Looking ahead to a summer of shows with Pierce the Veil, he says, “There are a lot of shows with My Chemical Romance this year, which is fun, because they're also an SSL band.”

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