DiGiCo Quantums have The Grammys covered
- Details
Getting and keeping all the audio together fell to a cohort of veteran mixers of the show and an all-star cast of DiGiCo mix consoles, provided through ATK Audiotek/Clair Global, the event’s sound-reinforcement vendor.
Two Quantum7 consoles were located at front of house, manned by Ron Reaves and Michael Parker, who alternated mixing live performances by the evening’s artists, including Harry Styles, Bonnie Raitt, Lizzo, and Adele, all of whom were also category winners that night. A Quantum338 desk also shared the FOH platform with them, through which production mixer Jeff Peterson combined the two alternating FOH feeds with production-audio elements such as introductions, announcements, and acceptance speeches from the podium.
Two more Quantum7 in monitor world, manned by Tom Pesa and Andres Arango, reflected a similar split of the bifurcated stage, on which one performance would take place while the next was setting up behind the “close-down” screens that kept the focus on the show. All the Quantum consoles were connected on an Optocore network loop, each with a complement of SD-Racks and SD-MiNi Racks. Everywhere you looked, everywhere you listened, you saw and heard DiGiCo Quantum.
“The Quantum7 is simply the best tool for that job,” says Ron Reaves, who was mixing his 20th Grammy Awards show. “It presents a very good, very powerful platform that lets you do anything you want and place anything you want anywhere on it,” he says. “My template is 168 open faders so I have to be ready for anything, and I am with that console, because it has the horsepower I need for that kind of wide-ranging array of performances.”
Reaves’ counterpart on the FOH platform, Michael Parker, agrees, calling the Quantum7 “the Rolls Royce of consoles.”. During the Grammy Awards, he applied the Spice Rack’s Chilli 6 multiband compressor on many of the vocals he mixed, including during Stevie Wonder’s performance.
Over in monitor world, Tom Pesa covered IEMs for stage right and Arango for stage left, and both on DiGiCo Quantum7 consoles, the third Grammy Awards show for the desks. Pesa, who was on his 23rd Grammy Awards turn, says the basic currency of monitors for the Grammy Awards is a foundation channel template built on the Quantum7’s worksurface. That then gets copied and customized for each artist, for quick recall as the show progresses.
Andres Arango found the Quantum7’s flexibility to be a lifesaver on monitors for the 50th anniversary of hip-hop segment. “Tom and I were going to town on that, and I was amazed at how fast and accurately we were able to work on what was a pretty hectic production number,” he says.
