Bob Marley was larger than life, and the sheer scale of The Marley Brothers: The Legacy Tour reflected that. The recent outing, featuring five of his sons—Ziggy, Stephen, Julian, Ky-Mani and Damian—boasted a total of 19 musicians, singers, and one Rastafarian flag-waver onstage for the tour, which kicked off in Vancouver and concluded in Miami in early October. The Legacy Tour is notable in part because it marked the first time that the siblings have performed together on the road in two decades. But it’s breathtaking to have had that many artists onstage at the same time. Small wonder then that monitors alone required two engineers manning two consoles—both DiGiCo Quantum338 desks—in addition to a Quantum852 used at front of house. The three desks collectively shared three SD-Racks with 32-bit Stadius pre-amp cards on an Optocore loop, with one SD-Rack on the secondary loop at front of house providing AD/DA conversion for outboard gear, all provided by Clair Global, along with an L-Acoustics K1/K2 PA system with A15 and A10 fills.
In addition to a huge stage to manage, it was a demanding tour, says Jason “Redz” Reynolds, the journey’s monitor engineer for the 18 Wisycom IEMs the production used. “Twenty-three shows in four weeks—grueling but energizing,” he says as the tour neared its Miami finale. But also complex, as Reynolds shared monitor duties with Steve Thom, who was mixing all of the d&b audiotechnik M2 wedges and a J8/J-SUB stack per side for the stage, in a rare large-scale blend of speaker and IEM monitor infrastructure. “Only two of the brothers—Ziggy and Ky-Mani—are on in-ears, while Stephen, Damian, and Julian are all on wedges and side-fills,” he explains. “I mix the ears and Steve mixes the speakers. It’s unusual to see that these days, but it’s what each artist onstage needs.”
Adds Thom, “It is a little bit like two separate worlds: Jason’s fairly self-contained in his IEM world and I’m fairly self-contained in my monitor world. But we do overlap on the input side of things, where he may be able to notice something has a little bit of a buzz or a little bit of a hum on it that I may not notice because there’s just so much noise going on out on deck. He’s got his IEMs directly in his ears, isolated, so he can hear some of those little nuances a little bit better than I can. We work together and share the same Quantum platform.”
Reynolds says the Quantum338 has been the perfect desk for this complex production, noting that its three very bright screens make using the consoles outdoors very effective, even in the brightest sunlight. “We used to be on Quantum5 desks, but this tour is an amphitheater tour, so we’re outside and our soundchecks are in the daytime,” he explains. “So the major upgrade from the Q5s has been the screens.”
Processing is also part of the charm for him. “I’m using quite a bit of Nodal Processing as well as Mustard processing,” he says. “I’m using Nodal Processing mainly on the drummer because of how he likes to hear his drums versus how everybody else needs them: a lot less compression on his rim, his side stick mic, and other stuff to make him comfortable, but different processing for everybody else. And then some Mustard processing to give it a little bit of an analog sort of flavor.”
“When you get down into connectivity, which is a major thing for me, especially since I’m using quite a bit of MADI, having the two DMI slots onboard is a major boost. With 95 inputs coming from the stage, not including talkbacks, I would need eight MADI ports (four pairs) to be able to have 128 channels of multitrack recording and virtual soundcheck along with 128 channels going to my KLANG:konductor, running at 96kHz. The additional connectivity options that are available with the DMI slots make this possible. The connectivity you find on Quantum consoles is absolutely unparalleled.”
Reynolds says that the integration between the consoles and the KLANG:konductor is next-level. “It’s what enables me to give every IEM user onstage exactly the kind of immersive mix they want,” he says. “I’ve been using KLANG pretty much since the beginning, since 2018, starting with the :fabrik. I find it very difficult to go back to mixing in stereo; I can’t get the space in the mix that I can achieve with KLANG. My approach is creating space in the mix as you would if you’re mixing a record. So putting things in the right places, where they can be heard without over-EQing and over-processing them to create that space, is what the :konductor gives me.”
What that translates into is a near-studio experience onstage. “That’s what we’re trying to accomplish,” says Reynolds. “It’s why Steve [Thom] mixes the side-fills almost like a PA mix, like it’s a full mix. We want it sounding as close to the record as possible. And we can accomplish that with DiGiCo and KLANG.”
Steve Thom is focused exclusively on the stage’s wedge and side-fill monitors. He says the band members and vocalists who prefer that kind of monitoring want a front-of-house type mix onstage, and the Quantum338 console he pilots allows him to give them exactly what they want. “I’m using the Spice Rack a fair bit. I’m actually using the Naga 6 [multiband dynamic EQ], and I’ve got one instance of the Chilli 6 [six-band, dynamic, multiband compressor/expander] on the side-fill mix, and every vocal mic has its own instance of the Naga, just to help smooth out some of the tonality coming through the wedges,” explains Thom, who also acts as audio crew chief on the tour. “So when the brothers hit certain notes, they don’t just stand out or sound harsh or anything like that. It’s a great tonality-smoothing tool.”
“I’m also using a fair bit of the Mustard processing: different flavors of compressors to really make the side-fill mix gel together and sound like a front-of-house mix. That’s what the brothers want onstage: they don’t want it to sound so much like monitors; they want it to feel like they’re a true mix. So Mustard helps a lot with that to just get some different character on certain inputs and really make it sound the way they want it to.”
Thom is also appreciative of the console’s True Solo feature, part of its extremely intuitive workflow design. “When I cue things, whether it’s a group bus or an input channel, I’m cueing it through the entire path that it would take to get to the stage,” he says. “So now I can cue something and hear it exactly as it comes out onstage, and I’m not having to guess at how that relationship will work.”
Asked about his input count, front-of-house engineer and Marley Brothers production manager Veer Dhaniram says, “I lost count after the first week of rehearsal, but I think we’re close to a hundred”—enough, he notes, to completely fill both of the DiGiCo SD-Racks he has at FOH on an Optocore loop shared with the monitor consoles, plus a third SD-Rack onstage as a backup. Dhaniram, who mixed monitors by himself when he first started with the Marleys in 2015, before moving to FOH two years later, is no stranger to complex I/O. He says that the Quantum852, which was added to the tour in its second week on the road, has been a huge boost for that.
“We took it out of the truck, set it up, got everything connected, and started working right away,” he says. “We were able to get the A and B engines connected, mirrored, and we were off to the races. One of the biggest advantages with this desk is its bigger screens, which means you see more information more easily, and that lets you do more, faster. The show is in constant motion with primary performers rotating through songs, as well as instrumentalists moving through key solos, and the Q852 allows me to keep up and manage all these changes.”
“I’m using Mustard processing across almost all my input channels, EQ and dynamics, as well as tube drive on a few drum channels. The console is so easy to use, easy to manage, and it sounds great. I listened to the recordings we did that first night and could immediately hear the difference in the console—an extension in both the high and low end; there’s just more information there. There’s noticeable improvement in the depth perception as well.”
And the channel-specific macros were a welcome addition, too. “These were implemented on instruments that had key solos in the show and were used to bring channels to the center and back out with the press of a button. I have already told the folks at Clair Global that we definitely will not be going back to a different console. From now on, the Quantum852 is the one.”
For details on the tour, visit www.stephenmarleymusic.com/news/the-marley-brothers-legacy-tour. Clair Global can be found online at www.clairglobal.com.
