DiGiCo drives OneRepublic’s endless summer
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Equally elated were FOH engineer Justin Ripley and monitor engineer Dave McMullin to be manning their mixes on a pair of DiGiCo Quantum7 consoles provided by Nashville’s Spectrum Sound, which supplied the control and PA packages for the tour.
For over a year, Spectrum has also been equipping the production team with a pair of DiGiCo Quantum338 consoles for the band’s many non-tour-related shows. “We’ve been out for most of this year, including seven weeks in Europe during April and May, but we’ve always had a good number of one-offs in between,” says McMullin, who has been with OneRepublic for the past six years.
“We have a lot of creative itinerary routing, with many side shows scheduled in the midst of ‘normal’ touring, so Spectrum has provided us with multiple control packages that allow us to send different rigs as needed. In my time with the band, we’ve only really had two proper touring seasons, with the rest of the time being filled with many small runs and one-offs, often still doing 60 to 70 shows per year. Having two rigs ready to go at all times allows us to be flexible and make the potentially challenging scheduling work.”
During non-tour times, the group’s A and B control rig are identical, both consisting of a Quantum338 at FOH and monitors, one SD-Rack with 32-bit input and output cards and AES cards, one SD-MiNi Rack, and one Orange box with Optocore and DMI-MADI cards for integrating with playback. With the need to scale up input counts for the Never Ending Summer Tour, the A package consisted of a Quantum7 at FOH and monitors, two SD-Racks with 32-bit input and output cards and AES output cards, and two Orange Boxes, both with Optocore and MADI Cards - one each for integration with playback and video.
FOH engineer Justin Ripley’s working history with the band goes back to 2019. “Although I first saw a DiGiCo console in 2011, I didn’t actually carry one out on the road until I fully made the switch over to DiGiCo and Waves in 2016, which I’m so glad I did because I need all the modern bells and whistles to get the OneRepublic mix to really pop,” he says. “I really prefer, at least currently, to start with more of a neutral sound, which DiGiCo is known for, and then beat the hell out of the signal from there.”
Over in monitor world, Dave McMullin has been appreciative of the Quantum7’s generous I/O capabilities on his end of the fibre. “We’ve been carrying Quantum338s in our packages for the last year and a half, and I’ve loved the Quantum platform, but we’ve also been maxing those desks out in terms of input counts,” he describes. “When going on tours, the band typically adds some additional instrumentation, and we may have the occasional string quartet or a few guests. The Quantum7 gives us the necessary expandability for those additional inputs when they arise.
With the North American tour freshly wrapped up, the group will soon be heading back to Europe as well as Israel, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, and South Africa in the fall. Touring will later pick back up in the spring of 2023, hitting Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.
