With five Grammy Awards and three Juno Awards, and Billboard Hot 100 awards for the most charted songs of any artist, the most top 10 singles, the most top 10 debuts, and the most cumulative weeks in the top 10, Drake recently opened his touring season with an 11-week US excursion with J Cole, running from Florida in February to Colorado in April. Onboard for the It’s All A Blur Tour – Big As The What?, Demetrius Moore is marking his 14th year as the artist’s FOH engineer, and is joined by monitor engineer Chris Lee.
The tour also makes Drake the first artist to take a new Clair Global-supplied DiGiCo Quantum852 mixing console on the road.
‘I was on the Quantum852 for two weeks before the first show, at rehearsals at Drake’s place in Toronto, and then at the Izod Center in New Jersey, and I have to tell you that it has made me an even bigger fan of DiGiCo – and I have been a huge fan of their consoles for years,’ says Moore. ‘It has an entirely new level of warmth and clarity. Right out of the box, the experience was like when we went from 48k to 96k. Every instrument and voice occupies its own space. You can instantly hear the difference, even over the talkback, which we’re sending over the comms line.’
The ergonomic advantages of the Quantum852 allow Moore to manage the 30 channels of tracks used for the tour. Drake’s show sees him use every inch of the stage, and with no tunnel beneath Lee may have to run between his two DiGiCo Quantum338 consoles if there are any problems with the rapper’s IEMs – and Ryan Koolman on an SD12 mixing the tour’s marching band.
Moore is using plenty of ‘flavour’ from the Quantum852 Spice Rack, including multiband compressors and dynamic EQs, while he applies a BAE 1073MPL mic preamp and an Avalon 737 tube mic preamp for Drake’s Sennheiser 9000 mic. In particular, he’s been applying the Chili 6 six-band, dynamic compressor/expander to the 9000s of Drake and the one used by the ‘sports’ announcer who roams the crowd during the show, assuring a high level of speech intelligibility and clarity.
Moore is also now using a new DiGiCo-distributed Fourier Audio transform.engine, a Dante-connected server designed to run VST3-native software plug-ins in a live environment.
Once he and the Quantum852 hit the road, Moore says he really began to feel the power of the new desk. ‘The new fader caps are amazing – the traction, the firmness of the movement – and the screens are easy to see while also easy on the eyes,’ he says. ‘The only way to really express it is to say that it’s like riding in a Rolls-Royce. The Quantum852 is the Rolls-Royce of live mixing consoles: stable, smooth and perfect.’
