Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson Steps Out on Tour

New York, NY (October 1, 2025)—As the frontman of Iron Maiden, Bruce Dickinson has thrilled audiences for decades with his soaring vocals, but during that time, he’s also been a pilot, author, radio host, brewer and more. Clearly, he’s a guy who doesn’t like to sit around. True to form then, in 2024, he used downtime between runs on the band’s multi-year Future Past World Tour to release The Mandrake Project, his first solo record in two decades, and then hit the road supporting it. The solo trek was a smash, but it focused on Europe and Latin America with only a scant three U.S. shows, all held around Los Angeles. The pump was primed for him to return, so Dickinson answered the call in 2025, embarking on a full North American tour that wraps up this month.

When it came to finding a front-of-house engineer and a production manager for the solo jaunt, Dickinson didn’t have to look far: He turned to Ken “Pooch” Van Druten, Iron Maiden’s house engineer since 2017. As a first-call engineer for everyone from Linkin Park to Travis Scott, it’s been a while since Pooch wore multiple hats on the road, but it came back to him quickly. “I did a bunch of two-truck tours as the production manager, but that was 25 years ago,” says Pooch. “I had to call some old friends like Robert Long, production manager to the stars, and ask, ‘How do we get into Canada’ and things like that. I’m pretty good at organization though and a pretty OCD guy, so that makes me a pretty good production manager.”

If tackling two roles on the road has made life more complicated, there’s at least one thing that has helped simplify things: his console. Rather than bring along the sizable rigs they use for arenas and stadiums, both Pooch and monitor engineer Kevin “Tater” McCarthy are using Waves’ new eMotion LV1 Classic mixers.

Placing the company’s software-based LV1 mix engine in a traditional compact mixing console for the first time, the diminutive desk debuted earlier this year at NAMM, so the Bruce Dickinson tour is the highest-profile production yet to take it out on the road. While small, it offers 64 stereo channels and 44 stereo buses, 16 preamps and more in a 38-pound form factor.

The tour is also carrying Waves Ionic 24 and 16 digital stageboxes for a compact stage rack package. “We are not using the SoundGrid network in terms of using Ethernet cable between monitors and front of house,” says Pooch. “We decided to go with fiber and have switches at both ends that are converting the SoundGrid network to fiber so that we can run longer distances.”

Dickinson and his five-piece band only take up 42 channels, so the desk has room to spare, but it was the console’s weight that proved to be a crucial point—because in early September, the tour headed south for a special one-off date, playing The Town festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil, alongside acts like Green Day and Bad Religion.

“Tater and I said, ‘You know, it would be great if we could take our consoles and stage racks down there and just plug into their cabling,’ so that’s what we did,” says Pooch. The engineers checked 35 Pelican cases of gear as luggage on a commercial flight—including the LV1s. “It turned out great,” he reports. “No problems at all, traveling both directions; the consoles worked flawlessly.”

Back in the U.S., the tour has mostly been playing 3,000-seat theaters and House of Blues outposts, so the shows have been heard through a variety of Adamson, d&b audiotechnik, RCF and L-Acoustics speaker systems. “Most of these places have pretty good P.A.s once you wrangle them in,”

noted Pooch. “If you have a nice round bump in the low end—let’s say 6 or 9 dB of boost in the low end from 50 to 100 maybe, and then a nice slope into 125 and linear all the way out—and then you hand that P.A. to a touring engineer, I guarantee you they’re going to be happy. Maybe they’ll do a couple of filters, but then they’re done.”

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If the loudspeakers change daily, the mics do not, and Dickinson’s sonorous tenor is captured with his tried-and-true Shure Beta 58 mic. Once in the LV1, it runs through a vocal channel of Waves faves—the Primary Source Expander plug-in, leading into a C6 multiband compressor, followed by the F6 floating-band dynamic EQ and then the X-FDBK feedback eliminator.

Fans who come to the shows have a great time, but they’re not getting Iron Maiden Lite. For one thing, the show is laser-focused on Dickinson’s solo work, and Pooch mixes it to emphasize the heavier chunkiness found in its riffs. In fact, the only Maiden track in the setlist is “Flash of the Blade.” Written by Dickinson for 1984’s Powerslave album, the song has never been played live before, so it’s a treat for fans young and old—and there’s plenty of both. “Iron Maiden and Bruce are in a really interesting place these days,” says Pooch. “It’s three generations that are coming to shows now. People that were fans and had a kid, now those kids are bringing their kids! They’re all coming to shows together, which is really, really cool.”