American rock band Blackberry Smoke, which played more than 250 dates in 2022, as well as popular Canadian electronic duo Bob Moses, both rely a range of Radial Engineering DIs and “problem-solver boxes” as key components in their touring sound toolkits.
“The thing I love about Radial gear, in addition to how great it sounds, is that it’s just built like a tank and I never have to worry about it failure-wise,” states John Farrell, front of house engineer and production manager for Blackberry Smoke. “For me, that’s incredibly important because I have limited time every day to do things, even if everything’s 100 percent functional, let alone troubleshoot anything. So the fact that I don’t have to worry about the Radial gear and it sounds great is just such an amazing combination to me.”
Allan Bates, production manager and monitor mixer for Bob Moses, points in particular to the Catapult Mini compact passive audio snake that enables driving four analog audio channels over a single shielded Cat-5 cable. “The Catapult Mini sits on our keyboard rig and the Cat-5 cable goes offstage to another Catapult Mini for playback,” Bates explains. “This allows us to run the keyboards and trigger playback changes from onstage over a single Cat-5 cable. The Catapult Mini is an essential tool in our show, and one that must work reliably every night, and it does.”
Farrell notes that he’s going to be incorporating JX44 V2 instrument switchers, which along with the JX42 V2 switcher was officially launched during a period of the pandemic where touring was essentially at a standstill, for upcoming dates.
The JX44 V2 can accommodate up to four instrument inputs and four amp outputs with any combination active at the same time. Backlit switches on the front panel facilitate choosing which instruments are live, and any inputs that aren’t selected automatically feed a dedicated tuner output.
“We’re going to be adding JX 44 V2s in the rigs that live in the semi,” Farrell confirms. That’s going to really add a lot of versatility to the types of shows we do, whether it’s on the road or short and quick fly date shows.
“I’m a Radial guy for life because of its reliability and the support we get,” he concludes. “When it comes to dependability, I’ll take a J48 [active DI box] that works every day over some boutique piece of gear that half the time needs to have the tubes replaced.”
