Look under the hood of Thomas Rhett’s just-concluded “Bring the Bar to You” Tour, a 30-date US trek that kept him and his band busy from June to mid-October, and you’d have seen a complex technical signal path and workflow worthy of any arena-level pop performance. In preparation for the trek, whose name came from a track on Rhett’s Where We Started album released earlier this year, FOH engineer Trey Smith and monitor engineer Jimmy Nicholson had plotted out much of the tour’s sonic complexity during a series of extensive rehearsals leading up to it. During these, while the band, musical director and Smith arranged keyboard and guitar-amplifier modeling patches, Nicholson perfected what Rhett himself would hear in his IEMs while allowing each performance to be both true to the recordings and fitted perfectly to each successive venue. The only way to accomplish that, according to the audio engineers, was via DiGiCo’s Quantum7 console—times two. Rented through Nashville-based...
