A just-concluded 23-date U.S. tour by blues guitarist Joe Bonamassa in support of his 2021 LP Time Clocks was served by a new pair of DiGiCo Quantum5 mixing consoles manned by front-of-house engineer Mike Lavielle and monitor engineer John Kaylor.
The desks were supplied and supported by North Carolina-based Special Events Services (SES), which recently added the pair of desks to its rental inventory. Also on the trek were a DiGiCo SD-Rack, with 32-bit microphone inputs feeding both consoles, and a SD-Nano Rack used for ancillary duties at front of house, all on an Optocore loop. The two desks consoles also accompanied two-time Grammy nominee Bonamassa and crew aboard the Norwegian Pearl for his sold-out Keeping The Blues Alive at Sea VII cruise in late February.
Bonamassa and his band employed a combination of wedges and IEMs for monitoring, and Kaylor, who has worked with Bonamassa for seven years in dual roles as monitor mixer and production manager, says the Quantum5 offers him a broad sonic palette to create the environments each musician wants to hear onstage. “The console’s Nodal Processing gives me the ability to EQ things differently for different people on the stage,” he says. “There are lot of both wedges and IEMs, so having that ability is big plus, to be able to create very distinct environments with each musician based on exactly what each one wants to hear. I’m getting that from the Quantum5’s Spice Rack and Mustard Processing.”
Lavielle, who has been mixing Bonamassa’s house sound since 2019, says he’s also made utilized othe Spice Rack on the console’s buss outputs, including the keyboard and vocal groups. “It makes a noticeable difference—it makes it all ‘pop’ nicely,” he notees. “There are a number of different compressors, and I find they offer me a lot more control, especially in the low-frequency ranges. I use it on both bass inputs and on the Leslie left and right inputs. It works so well for me.
“It’s such a solid platform,” Lavielle adds. “When you turn it on, you know it’s going to work, and you know where everything is.”
Kaylor concludes, “And I love its sonic invisibility. It doesn’t color the sound. What the artist onstage is giving you is what the audience is getting—totally transparent. And when you have music this great onstage, that’s what you want your console to give you.”
