Hitting the road on the initial North American leg of her Unbreakable World Tour, Janet Jackson kept the company of VER Tour Sound, including DiGiCo SD7 mixing consoles at front-of-house and monitors. Support Jackson’s new No. 1 album, Unbreakable, the tour ranks among the top ten hottest autumn season concerts based on ticket sales.
The features more than 30 songs in just over 90 minutes, and requires 109 inputs, including Pro Tools tracks. Serving as Jackson’s FOH engineer since her previous tour in 2011, Kyle Hamilton has no need for additional outboard effects: ‘I stay away from using extra outboard stuff, because I don’t need it,’ he says. ‘Everything I need in a desk is already there.
He likes to keep things simple, he continues. ‘Reverbs are for when you’re in a sterile environment, to create atmosphere and ambience. I just add the stuff that makes it cohesive for the environment that we’re in. My goal is to mix to make it sound like the record with a live feel. That particular method has kept me working for the past 22 years.’
Hamilton only carries four outboard mic preamps – for vocals and bass. ‘What I’m getting from the band sounds great,’ he says. ‘Our Pro Tools is incredible and the stems are all amazing, because we take time to go through all of that meticulously. So I don’t need to add extra processing.
‘Pro Tools is the sixth band member,’ he adds. ‘If you break it down to a five-piece band it sounds empty if you don’t have all the elements there. The meat of everything comes from our band; the sweetness comes from Pro Tools.’
In addition to the SD7, he is using a DiGiGrid MGB coaxial Madi interface to record to a laptop for subsequent virtual soundchecks.
Hamilton has worked with a string major artists – including Pharrell Williams, Prince, Toni Braxton, R Kelly and Nicki Minaj – over the course of more than two decades. He has been using DiGiCo consoles since 2008, when he took a D5 out on a Lionel Richie tour. ‘I’ve used them all: SD5, SD10, SD11; from the biggest to the smallest. I know the DiGiCo family very well,’ he says.
Monitor engineer Jim Roach, whose resume includes Guns N’ Roses Joe Cocker and Keyshia Cole,among others, is another long-time DiGiCo user: ‘I’ve been using DiGiCo since 2010, maybe a little before, and I used a D5 in 2007,’ he says. ‘The audio quality is stellar. With other digital consoles, I sometimes find myself missing the old analog sound, but DiGiCo happens to have a sound that I love.’
Roach feeds 44 outputs to Jackson and the five band members (drums, bass, guitar, keyboards and a DJ) and the three background vocalists on in-ears, plus nine dancers, on side fills, as well as the production and technical crew. The DiGiCo console has allowed the musicians to experiment with different instrumentation and song arrangements during the extensive rehearsal period, he reports: ‘It’s the most flexible console I’ve ever used,’ says Roach. ‘On a show like this that changed and evolved over the course of 10 weeks of rehearsals—they were trying out different ideas – it was great to be able to change the console around every other day to meet the new configurations.’
The Unbreakable World Tour will run to the end of June 2016, with the North American leg is followed by dates in Japan. It resumes in January 2016 in the US before heading to Europe in late March, returning for more shows in the US and Canada in May.
