USA - 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. 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 - gruelling but energising,” 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 amphitheatre 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.
“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.
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. “
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.
