Watch This “FOH Playthrough” Video by Periphery Sound Guy Alex Markides Twiddling His Knob(s)

If you’ve seen Periphery live then you know that their sound is always impeccable. It’s nothing short of remarkable how consistently good they always sound, and the Rube Goldberg-like system of computers that controls every element of their show — amps, patch switches, lights, monitors, etc — is the stuff of legends.

Behind all of that is one man, Alex Markides, who keeps everything running smoothly and introduces the one thing necessary to make it all sound good to the human ear in any given venue on any given night: the human element. Alex has been with Periphery for years, and he’s also done sound for Whitechapel, Textures, the entirety of Summer Slaughter and many more bands you know and love.

Below, check out a “playthrough” video of Alex manning the boards for Periphery’s performance of “Ragnarok” in Tokyo over the weekend. Such a good idea — I can’t remember any FOH sound guy ever putting together a video like this before, although a lot of sound guys probably don’t do nearly as much finger-dancing as Alex does. Admittedly, with my limited knowledge of live sound, I’m not sure of what he’s doing most of the time — one thing I can discern is that there’s a button he presses to temporarily activate a delay on Spencer’s vocals at various points throughout the song (maybe he’s just muting and un-muting an Aux channel with a delay on it?) — but I’m sure you tech-nerds out there will be able to get a lot more out of it.

If you’d like to learn more about the gear Alex uses to run Periphery’s show, check out this very detailed write-up that he and guitarist Jake Bowen put together for MetalSucks in 2012, although surely the rig has changed a good bit since then.