Capturing the Crowds of Green Day Live

San Francisco, CA (August 12, 2025)—Green Day has been on the road for upwards of two years now behind its Grammy-nominated Saviors album and the punk power trio will kick off its Latin America leg in Bogotá, Columbia next week. With frontman Billy Joe Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tré Cool filling stadiums around the world, shows can get incredibly loud—and that’s just the audience, so Danny Badorine, Green Day’s monitor engineer for the past 18 months, has been using a passel of Schoeps microphones to fit that crowd into the band’s monitor mixes.

“Billy Joe wants to hear the crowd sing his songs back to him all night,” says Badorine, who uses eight Schoeps MiniCMIT miniature shotgun microphones at every show to capture the energy of the audience. “Those Schoeps mics are among the most important inputs on the entire stage for me. They’re on a console VCA and when we do a two-and-a-half-hour show, my hand doesn’t leave that fader. The VCA fader is moving up and down 10 or 15 dB all night. I practically have carpal tunnel syndrome from those audience mics.”

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Badorine uses three MiniCMIT shotguns on either side of the stage to pick up the crowd, panned left and right in pairs according to their positions, with two more MiniCMITs on the downstage edge of the thrust panned closer to the center. The mics are carefully positioned to avoid picking up any of the front fill speakers. Badorine rolls the mics off at 500 Hz or 600 Hz, so there is no leakage from the subwoofers. “I want to be 20 to 30 feet away from the crowd with the mics,” he says. “The two downstage ones are closer, but they can’t get too close to people. I’ll turn that pair up or down depending on how loud the crowd is screaming. The rest of them just pick up a big crowd mage.”

The crowd mics are what help him keep his job, says Badorine: “The guy who was mixing monitors before, who set me up for success, called me for the gig. He said, ‘Hey, man, the gig is audience mics.’ I’ve learned the cues; I know the singalong spots. There are other cues, but the guys are pretty easy—Billy’s going to look at you and ask for his vocal up or down, and he wants the crowd.”

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Another pair of Schoeps—MK 21 wide cardioid capsules atop CMC 6 preamplifiers—are part of drummer Tré Cool’s in-ear monitor mix. “We have the overhead image and we individually mic every cymbal,” Badorine explains. “The Schoeps pick up a stereo image of the drums, the snare sounds and tom sounds. That’s how he wants it, and it works for him…these are three-dimensional and present. They are easily my favorite overhead mics I’ve ever used on a drum kit live.”