Four Year Strong Hits the Road

Worcester, MA (May 5, 2026)—Pop-punkers Four Year Strong just wrapped up a busy spring, opening for The Devil Wears Prada on tour, and along for the ride was front of house engineer Jonah Kay, who made sure the band’s signature sound translated to the raucous crowds every night.

Using house boards and dealing with festival slots can be a recipe for inconsistent sound, so to mitigate that as much as possible, Kay has been mixing on a 48-channel Allen & Heath SQ-5 digital console. The desk is small enough to be flyable, but it also ensures that the mix is the same, day after day. “Ultimately what it comes down to is consistency; I can basically just unmute the PA and like ride the master fader up,” said Kay. “I’m not worried about how I’m gonna get a mix to sound good in each venue.”

Carrying his own desk on tour also means Kay can have a daily workflow and familiar features available at every stop, such as the desk’s built-in 32-channel USB interface. “I record tracks from every show to my laptop,” said Kay. “That serves me if the band needs the recordings later, and it also lets me run a virtual soundcheck at the next venue.”

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Crucially, he can also make use of the desk’s onboard DEEP processing plug-ins. “I’m using 16T compressor quite a bit across my vocal and snare groups,” he noted. “I also like the new BUS compressor for my drum groups and the Tube preamp models. I double up my vocals so that I can have one clean and one with that Tube saturation.”

Kay also programs custom SoftKeys to trigger different preamp settings and mix in stereo guitar tracks, creating a wider, more dynamic live mix when needed: “When we go back to the verse with just one guitar, I can jump back to mono with another key press to create that separation.”

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Kay will be out with the band and the SQ-5 again this summer for 2026 Vans Warped Tour performances in Montreal and Mexico City lined up for this summer.