A veteran team of mixers employed numerous DiGiCo Quantum consoles supplied by ATK Audiotek/Clair Global in their work on the recent 65th Grammy Awards at the Crypto.com Center in downtown Los Angeles that this year offered more complex productions, most notably 35 rappers and four DJs who turned the stage into a 15-minute-long history of rap.
Two Quantum7 consoles were located at front of house, helmed by Ron Reaves and Michael Parker, who alternated mixing live performances by the evening’s artists, including Harry Styles, Bonnie Raitt, Lizzo, and Adele, all of whom were also category winners that night. A Quantum338 desk also shared the FOH platform with them, through which production mixer Jeff Peterson combined the two alternating FOH feeds with production-audio elements such as introductions, announcements, and acceptance speeches from the podium.
Two more Quantum7 consoles in monitor world, utilized by Tom Pesa and Andres Arango, reflected a similar split of the bifurcated stage, on which one performance would take place while the next was setting up behind the “close-down” screens that kept the focus on the show. All the Quantum consoles were connected on an Optocore network loop, each with a complement of SD-Racks and SD-MiNi Racks.
“The Quantum7 is simply the best tool for that job,” says Reaves, who was mixing his 20th Grammy Awards show. “It presents a very good, very powerful platform that lets you do anything you want and place anything you want anywhere on it,” he says. “My template is 168 open faders so I have to be ready for anything, and I am with that console, because it has the horsepower I need for that kind of wide-ranging array of performances.”
With more than two dozen individual artists performing at the show, he spent time on every song during rehearsals and soundchecks consulting with their FOH mixers, and the Quantum’s SD-Range heritage helped facilitate that. “All the guest engineers know it and are familiar with it,” he says. “It gives us a common language, and that makes keeping a hugely complex production like the Grammy Awards moving and on schedule. The snapshot capability is exceptional.”
“It’s great for softening up the vocals in a certain range, between about 2k and 5k,” says Parker of the Quantum7, which is designed to provide a flexible worksurface that proved to be a boon during the show’s 50th anniversary of hip-hop segment, when he and Reaves changed their workflow: instead of mixing performances on one side or the other of the split stage, Parker handled all of the vocals for the entire stage while Reaves mixed the music tracks, live band, and three DJs.
“On the network, we all had access to all of the inputs, and the Quantum7 lets us easily configure each console for each production,” Parker adds, who was also recently using a Quantum338 on Fox’s The Masked Singer. “And the Stadius 32-bit mic pre’s were also great to have on that show. Everything just sounded so good.”
On monitors, Pesa covered IEMs for stage right and Arango for stage left, and both on DiGiCo Quantum7 consoles, the third Grammy Awards show for the desks. On his 23rd Grammy Awards turn, he says the basic currency of monitors for the Grammy Awards is a foundation channel template built on the Quantum7’s worksurface. That then gets copied and customized for each artist, for quick recall as the show progresses.
However, both mixers have to be alert for last-minute changes. Pesa recalls on the 2014 edition of the show Paul McCartney’s performance was moved from one side of the stage to the other, 30 minutes before he soundchecked. “We had to quickly create a new template for that,” he says. “You want to have every parameter at your fingertips at all times because you never know when you’re going to have to make a quick adjustment. The biggest challenge is keeping as many options on the table as possible, even as you’re trying to pare each template down for each artist to keep it manageable. The Quantum7 is a big help for that.”
Arango also cites the flexibility of the Quantum7 as helpful for the 50th anniversary of hip-hop segment: “Tom and I were going to town on that, and I was amazed at how fast and accurately we were able to work on what was a pretty hectic production number,” he says. “Questlove was calling out each performer just before they came onstage and giving a quick countdown over his talkback mic. “Ice-T—one, two, three, four, go! Busta Rhymes—one, two, three, four, go!’ We were just racing. And the Quantum7 kept up. I don’t think there is another console that could have handled that fast-paced show as well as it did.”
