When you’re opening for Jelly Roll, you have to be able to stake your place on stage and stand your ground. That’s just what fast-rising singer and songwriter Warren Zeiders is doing as he opens for the country/rap juggernaut on his Beautifully Broken Tour, which kicked off at Delta Center in Salt Lake City on August 27th and makes stops in numerous major markets across the U.S., including New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New Orleans, before wrapping up at Charlotte’s Spectrum Center on October 27th.
“Pure, raw, unadulterated, gritty, supernal, starpower talent”—that’s how Americana Highways describes the Hershey, Pennsylvania native’s sound and presence. The title track of the first of Zeiders’ two studio albums, “Pretty Little Poison,” became a number-one country radio hit, eventually helping him nab the role of direct support on Jelly Roll’s latest arena tour. And two DiGiCo consoles are along for that wonderful ride: a Quantum225 at front of house, piloted by FOH engineer Ben Ivey, and another at monitors, operated by mixer Adam Snyder, with all hardware provided by Sound Image, a Clair Global company.
“It’s the cleanest pre-amp on the market,” says Ivey of the Quantum225’s mic pre’s housed in the SD-Rack that he and Snyder share on an Optocore network loop. “There’s zero coloration to anything to do with the input, which means that everything that I do in front of house as far as the microphone we pick, the vocal chain we pick, the sound gets colored the way it needs to be. And the onboard processing gives me a ton of tonal and dynamic options. For instance, for a while this year I was using the Chilli 6 quite a lot on Warren’s vocal,” he says of the Quantum’s six-band, dynamic, multiband compressor/expander with two independent fourth-order parametric EQ bands.
According to Ivey, “Quantum’s supreme flexibility has been a game-changer,” he says. “The thing that I love the most is you can make any input anywhere, do anything you need it to, and sound any way it needs to. Between the way it sounds and the way it accommodates my workflow, there’s nothing else like it.”
Monitor engineer Adam Snyder, who first encountered the Quantum225 on tour with CCM artist Jeremy Camp last year, is having a similarly enjoyable time on the desk, especially when it comes to operational flexibility. “I switched my artist off of auxes and onto groups, so his mix goes through groups before it hits his ears, and I’m using the Chilli 6 and Naga 6 dynamic EQ the Spice Rack processing now has onboard,” he explains. “Putting that across the groups has really helped me help Warren’s vocal cut through in the mix as the band gets louder.”
And having all the processing he needs in the console assures that there’s no delay. “It’s more robust having it all in the box than having a separate software rack, because sometimes even hardware can fail on the road, so having it all built in is really nice,” he says.
Ivey seconds that, noting, “He’s one of the more dynamic singers I’ve ever worked with,” he says. “Has a very wide range of tone, but also a lot of grit, and the smoothness of the DiGiCo really helps his vocal sound very natural—not super bright or not super low-end heavy. The Quantum processing and the DPA VL4018 vocal mic he’s using are a great combination.”
Snyder also experiences that vocal dynamism, especially in the form of his ability to project. “His vocal shifts tonally a lot the louder he gets, and I’m using a lot of the onboard processing to help smooth that out,” he says. “Also, for the band—who are all on ears—I love how neutral the pre-amps are for monitors. I’m trying to let the band hear what they’re giving me so that they can make choices onstage in tone or in how they play, and having a really neutral pre-amp helps in that. But I also love that if I need to, there is stuff onboard that I can color the sound with and help them. But from a starting point, it’s nice and neutral and true to what the source is.”
What both Ivey and Snyder agree on is that the Quantum225 console lets them let that voice tell its own tales. “We’re here to make sure that every bit of him comes through to every seat,” says Ivey, “and this console helps us do that.”
For more information on Warren Zeiders’ upcoming tour stops, visit www.warrenzeiders.com. Sound Image can be found online at www.sound-image.com.
