Gracie Abrams Tour
Gracie Abrams is a lot of things: Grammy Award-nominated, featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, and winner of the American Music Award for this year’s New Artist of the Year. But despite being the daughter of acclaimed filmmaker J.J. Abrams and television producer Katie McGrath, she’s no nepo baby. The talented 25-year-old singer-songwriter earned her signing with Interscope Records in 2019, and since then, her soulful voice and emotionally charged songwriting blending indie folk and pop has taken her a long way.
Following high-profile opening slots on Olivia Rodrigo’s 2022 Sour Tour and Taylor Swift’s 2023/24 Eras Tour, Abrams has this year been out on her own headlining The Secret of Us Tour, which included a well-received Lollapalooza performance. And joining her on the road have been a pair of DiGiCo Quantum338 consoles, supplied by Clair Global and operated by engineers Dom Rizco at FOH and Juan Carlos Garcia-Spitz on monitors.
Rizco started out with Abrams as both her front-of-house engineer and production manager, but the singer’s rapid success led him to focus solely on the mix. “With the scale of this tour, I figured, I'm just going to stick to the faders on this one,” he laughs.
That still leaves him plenty to work on, though, with as many as 120 inputs at FOH, through his DiGiCo Quantum338 console with its Pulse software upgrade to 156 input channels and 72 aux/group busses. That control surface is paired with two full-sized SD-Racks on stage, plus another for the B and C stages, and MADI playback of tracks.
“The combination of the Quantum’s flexibility and the Mustard processing is what lets me manage all of this,” he says. “A lot of the things that they’ve added – like the Mustard Source Expander, the Mustard EQs, and variety of compressors – it’s all so musical but also so manageable. We’re automating stuff like input-source changes, even routing different sockets on a song-by-song basis to channels. Because there are so many instruments on stage and everybody will just kind of pick up whatever they want to play, we have to make sure we can route them to the corresponding channels. The Quantum desk lets me make all of the moves completely reliably.”
Abrams’ shows have a lot of dynamic range, with the crowd hushed for the ballads and full-throated for the rockers. To help manage that, Rizco is using Oeksound’s Soothe Live dynamic-resonance suppressor plugin through a Fourier Audio transform.engine, a Dante-connected server designed to run VST3-native software plugins in a live environment to bring premium studio software to live sound. “One of the big reasons I love DiGiCo is because they ‘play nice with others,’ and I use tools like the Fourier transform.engine up at front of house to run Soothe Live on vocals to help tame some of the harshness of the crowd bleed in the mic,” he explains.
“The really big thing about DiGiCo is that it lets me do what I want the way I want, and that’s a big thing when a lot of other consoles won’t let you route audio a certain way and try and tell you that this is how your workflow should be,” he says. “DiGiCo just lets you do it however you need to do it, and that’s allowed me to try different things and finally come to a solution that works really well for any situation. I think that no matter what I’m mixing tomorrow, I would want to be on a DiGiCo Quantum.”
For Juan Carlos Garcia-Spitz up in monitor world, the decision to use DiGiCo is an easy choice. “Anytime we start one of these projects, the other engineers and I get together and are like, ‘well, what do you want on this one?’ And one of DiGiCo’s strengths is handling multiple digital formats,” explains Abrams’ monitor engineer, who has also done road stints with Lizzie McAlpine, Iron & Wine, and others. “So being able to take in instruments without having to do an extra A/D conversion was pretty key for us; for instance, being able to do any kind of playback digitally via MADI. It’s such a strong suit of DiGiCo’s. There’s not really any other console that just has it as standard.”
Garcia-Spitz, who’s become a fan of the Quantum’s Mustard and Spice Rack processing – “It allows me to do a proper vocal chain without needing an external effect in Waves,” he says – also cites the console’s unique management capabilities. “The monitor console is a hub for so many things on this tour,” he says. “There’s everything coming in off of the stage – four band members who each play three or four instruments – and then the rest of the crew integration with wireless comms and our directors. Any of the crew that are part of making the show happen, we'll get them on a pack and it’ll go through me and the Q338, as well.”
That’s especially important as the tour audiences, which began in theaters and have since grown to arenas, have gotten larger. “One of the big things about this show is that this crowd is very, very loud, so having crew on ears for comms was a really big key to just making sure that we’re all on the same page when we need to start,” he says. “As soon as the crowd sees her, they’re a physical force of nature in terms of sound – and it becomes part of the show’s sound. Even when we were opening up for Taylor, the Q338 desks were able to scale the show for us. DiGiCo has been there with us throughout all of that.”
For all of its ability to manage a complex production, Garcia-Spitz says the Quantum338 also offers a level of user-friendliness that’s critical for a fast-paced, complex mission like his. “Because I have so many moving parts to manage, simplicity and consistency are key,” he explains. “I just want it to work, and to work fast, so I can make sure that everything is ready to go when I need it. So being able to do something like a full-blown vocal chain completely within the console, being able to route a three-band compressor into a de-esser into a dynamic EQ, and then being able to have a nice little optical compressor all as a chain set up within the channel makes my life so much easier – without having to add an external processor, and all with zero latency. The Quantum338 really does it all.”
For more information on Gracie Abrams, visit www.gracieabrams.com.
Clair Global can be found online at www.clairglobal.com.
About DiGiCo
DiGiCo is a UK-based manufacturer of some of the world’s most popular, successful and groundbreaking digital mixing consoles for the live, theater, broadcast and postproduction industries and is exclusively distributed in the US by Group One Ltd. of Farmingdale, New York.
Website - go to www.DiGiCo.biz.
Canadian distributor - GerrAudio Distribution - www.gerr.com