USA - After a seven-year hiatus, two-time Grammy Award winners Linkin Park are back on the road. Their 50-plus-show From Zero World Tour takes them from Mexico City’s Estadio GNP Seguros on 31 January through 15 November in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and pretty much everywhere in between to stadiums and arenas globally.
“Getting back out on the road has been incredible,” band co-founder Mike Shinoda said in a statement about the trek promoting the group’s new set. “The fans’ support is overwhelming, and we’re ready to take this energy even further around the world.”
Some of the world got a taste of what’s to come when the band did a whirlwind mini tour late last year to key regions the band would do multiple shows in, including Europe and Asia, which also served to introduce new band members co-vocalist Emily Armstrong and drummer Colin Brittain, and dropping album singles The Emptiness Machine and Heavy Is the Crown.
Also playing key roles on the tour are a pair of DiGiCo consoles: a Quantum852 console at FOH and Quantum338 desk on monitors, all sharing two SD-Racks – one each stage left and right, and one SD-MiNi Rack for track playback – on a dual Optocore loop. These are joined by Fourier Audio’s transform.engine loaded with v1.3 software and transform.suite ’25 at FOH, plus an immersive KLANG:konductor IEM monitor mixing system in monitor world. All of this DiGiCo-centric gear was supplied by the tour’s technology vendor, Sound Image, a Clair Global brand.
Jim Ebdon, the tour’s front-of-house engineer, is new to the band. “It was about April last year when they started asking around, and of course no one would name the band, as it was a heavily guarded secret,” he recalls, noting the impact the band wanted to make with the new personnel lineup. The first show was a private affair in September at Warner Studios in Los Angeles, and it had the hoped-for effect. “It was amazing to be a part of that experience,” he says.
Ebdon says he bought the serial-number-five D5 console from DiGiCo founder Bob Doyle in 2002. “He sold me one whilst having coffee with me in my kitchen back in England,” he remembers. “So I’ve been a user since they first started, really, and I’ve used them ever since. I love the layout of this new Quantum852 surface. As well as it sounding clean and present, the console has such an improved look and feel with big bright screens. It’s a real pleasure to operate.”
Ebdon says he’s also a huge fan of the platform’s Spice Rack processing, and regularly uses its compression and EQ as a starting point. “I love just the default one on each channel when you open that tab up, and I like the EQ, which just sort of sweetens the entire console out a bit for me,” he says.
The inclusion of Dante connectivity also makes a huge difference in workflow. “We’ve got a lot of inputs; off the top of my head, I’m probably mixing 60 musical inputs. We’re also direct Dante-from-Pro Tools playback, and the guitar systems are all in the box, so we can just take Dante splits from there.”
Over in monitor world, engineer Pasi Hara is piloting a Quantum338 – his favourite surface of the lineup – with a KLANG:konductor IEM mixing system integrated. “The flexibility that the Q338 offers is incredible for workflow, and being able to easily route things wherever needed point-to-point, as well as being able to share the head amps with FOH,” he says.
