With the recent release of Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, Caroline Polachek’s fourth solo studio album, the former Chairlift singer-songwriter is in the midst of the Spiraling Tour that kicked off with a European and UK leg in February before moving to North America, with both front of house engineer Mikey Weiland and monitor engineer Kaan Kurt delivering their mixes on a matching pair of DiGiCo SD12-96 consoles sharing a single SD-Rack loaded with 32-bit I/O and connected via Optocore.
The control complement for the EU/UK run of the tour was supplied by London-based Stylus Productions, with Clair Global providing the same kit for the US/Canada theatre-auditorium trek, which offers a rotating lineup of opening guests, including Alex G, Ethel Cain, Sudan Archives, Magdalena Bay, George Clanton, and Toro y Moi.
Although the LA-based Weiland is a relative newcomer to the DiGiCo platform, he says that he has become a convert: “We initially took a pair of SD11s, sharing a MaDi-Rack, out on Caroline’s fall 2021 run, and I very quickly fell in love with the workflow and haven’t looked back since. The jump to SD12 desks with an SD-Rack for this run was born out of necessity. Her show has expanded quite a bit on this new touring cycle and the extra real estate and processing power has been a huge step up for us.”
Working with 36 channels coming from the stage, Weiland notes that he sparingly uses some Waves plugins—“mostly a few C6 multiband compressors and S1 stereo enhancers, plus some song-specific FX chains that get punched in and out via snapshots”—but ultimately lets the SD12 “do the bulk of the processing and heavy lifting,” he says.
“For Caroline’s vocal chain, I try and keep things simple and very intentional. Her vocal range and control is truly amazing, so the goal for me is to do as much as possible to preserve and showcase that,” he continues. “She gets some multiband compression at the top of the channel to even out jumps between her lower and higher vocal registers, followed by the onboard HPF, into two stages of very light compression with varying attack and release times. Her input channel is topped off with a side-chained outboard Neve 545 PSE on insert B to clean up stage bleed. That channel then runs into a group, where it’s joined by most of her vocal FX returns, sweetened up with some dynamic EQ, and sent off to a final stage of very light compression to glue everything together.”
Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK-based Kaan Kurt first joined up with Polachek for her 2022 summer festival tour, and says of console spec for monitors, “I learned everything I know on DiGiCo, and they’ve always been my first choice when given the option. I’ve always found the sound quality to be above anything else on the market, with the flexibility to program my file however I want it, and quickly make changes where needed. These reasons combined meant I knew it would be perfect for Caroline, who knows exactly what she wants and can communicate it super efficiently.”
He adds that the SD12’s onboard processing “has absolutely everything I need. Caroline has a lot of choreography in her performance and is constantly floating and dancing around the stage. Her vocal range is also insane! Having the dynamic EQ built in allows me to keep her vocal at a consistent tonality no matter where she is. Communication across all departments is also essential, and DiGiCo’s matrix routing allows me to hear absolutely everything I need to at any given time. I’m also running snapshots for the entire show, in relative group mode. This has made things really consistent across the entire tour.”
Including Polachek, there are four musicians on stage—including a drummer, bassist, and guitarist—all on Shure IEMs to lower stage noise. “I’ve really harnessed the power of the macro on this run,” says Kurt. “I’ve managed to set one up that fires whichever band member’s mix I need into the spare transmitter literally at the click of a finger. Same with firing the input from the spare vocal into the main channel if needed. Thankfully, we haven’t had to use it, but it brings a lot of peace of mind knowing that in case anything happens, we’re quickly covered.”
