Alissa White-Gluz Chooses KLANG for Vocal Separation

	"I kept Alissa's vocal dead straight and center, but elevated above her head in the mix," Kurkela recalls. "This gave me loads of clarity and the tone really brightened up." Photo: Jens the Panda, courtesy KLANG

Known for her surprising vocal style, with deep growling tones mixed with melodic soprano notes, Alissa White-Gluz is an impressive melodic death metal performer. For monitor engineer Paavo Kurkela, KLANG:konductor, supplied by Go Audio, was the solution for balancing Alissa's vocal while on tour with Arch Enemy, ensuring that her immersive IEM mix delivered what she needed.

White-Gluz was lead singer of Arch Enemy for over a decade. Announcing her departure in November 2025, she began her solo career with brand new single, The Room Where She Died, with a debut album soon to be released. Kurkela began working with Arch Enemy in 2018 and over the years, KLANG has given him the control and flexibility he needed to balance vocals and instrumentalists perfectly. On tour, the band favored a mixture of in-ear and wedge style monitoring and achieving a balanced mix for everyone was made much easier with KLANG:konductor.

"Alissa is a tremendously powerful vocalist," he explains. "This means that when she sings, she naturally hears herself very loudly through bone conductivity. It makes separation especially difficult, particularly when the guitar is in exactly the same frequency range as her voice. Her balance has to be perfect, because Alissa can hear just a dB or two difference instantly. Luckily KLANG is extremely accurate, so even with variables thrown in on tour, I can keep her vocal in that sweet spot."

Kurkela uses KLANG:vokal+ and KLANG:konductor, alongside his Allen & Heath dLive with a range of clients and this combination has become an essential part of his tool kit. Thanks to his big brother, Kurkela has worked in the industry since he was just 14 years old, giving him time to hone both his skills and outlook. He shares that he believes in positivity and empowering others to succeed, which not only shines through in the way he develops his IEM mixes, but also in his work with beloved vintage audio gear for his company 5 by 5 Custom Shop, a custom audio repair company based in Helsinki. Getting the mix just right is a moment that he really looks forward to and the immersive placement possibilities of a KLANG mix really help to make the magic happen. With KLANG, musical elements are not just placed in the horizontal plane. Vertical placement is also possible and when instruments are placed above the eye line, it can make all the difference.

"I kept Alissa's vocal dead straight and center, but elevated above her head in the mix," Kurkela recalls. "This gave me loads of clarity and the tone really brightened up. KLANG processing is super clean and gave me massive separation between instruments. Even when she screamed super loud, Alissa could still hear the guitars placed off to the sides. It worked first time and when she heard the mix, she was really happy. I'd never seen a vocalist smile like that."

KLANG is a console-agnostic, flexible, immersive in-ear-monitoring system that is fully adaptable to the needs of each user. Engineers and artists have multiple interaction options available to them, from personal apps, KLANG:kontrollers and console integration, so they can be as hands on as their application requires. For Kurkela, being on tour with KLANG:konductor and the Allen & Heath dLive worked brilliantly, regardless of the type of venue.

"It's really easy. One tool, a few touches and we're all set," Kurkela continues. "We had a couple super dry rooms on the tour and being in those sorts of spaces was a real moment for us all. With her KLANG mix being so clean and locked in, Alissa was able to really pin-point the difference and it just highlighted how clean the IEM mix had become with KLANG. We were really able to separate each element and refine it individually. It was really positive."

Kurkela's setup is transferrable across all his artists and offers a flexibility and freedom that he enjoys, with low latency and easily customizable user interface. With Arch Enemy and Alissa, he accessed his KLANG:konductor mixes via KLANG:app on a Mac and used four mixes for the band, plus an extra mix ready for guests and to explore new ideas. As he concludes, KLANG is well-suited for the melodic death metal genre, giving him the separation and clarity he needs within intense, densely layered arrangements.

"Alissa is super accurate, just a little difference and I will get a sneaky bad-eye, which is funny," he says. "Musicians know their mixes. I say to every client, 'it's not my mix, it's yours, you tell me what to do'. I like to know exactly where I am, so it's good that when I move the fader, KLANG:app gives me a graphic representation, too. I'm a little fixated with the dB readout, it helps me to stay as accurate as Alissa needs me to be. Balancing important elements like click and backing tracks would be almost impossible without KLANG and I wouldn't want to work without it."