ASIA PACIFIC: As Charlie Puth takes his Whatever’s Clever World Tour across North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, the chart-topping singer-songwriter’s most ambitious live production to date is relying on a familiar cornerstone at front-of-house and monitors: a pair of DiGiCo Quantum 5 consoles.

Supporting Puth’s fourth studio album, the tour launched in San Diego in April and is scheduled to conclude in Perth, Australia, in November. While the onstage setup remains relatively streamlined, featuring drums, bass, guitars, keyboards and three backing vocalists alongside the artist, the audio infrastructure behind the scenes is considerably more sophisticated.

Production Manager and Front-of-House Engineer Mike Schaeffer, together with Monitor Engineer Josh Cruz, have built the tour’s audio workflow around two DiGiCo Quantum 5 consoles supplied by Clair Global. Connected via a single Optocore network, the system incorporates an SD-Rack, SD-MiNi Rack and an Orange Box bidirectional audio-format converter, creating a highly flexible environment for routing, processing and control. “The Quantum console has been on the rider for Charlie since 2018,” says Schaeffer. “It’s always been my preferential console. I’ve always chosen DiGiCo, and so the console became a requirement based on anything we were doing.”

The touring system integrates a range of outboard processing tools, including Waves plug-ins and a Rupert Neve Designs Shelford channel strip used on Puth’s vocal chain. However, Schaeffer notes that the Quantum 5 remains central to virtually every aspect of the production’s audio architecture. “The Quantum 5 is a very comfortable desk to move around on,” he says. “My workflow is pretty straightforward. I do a lot of bus processing. I like the fact that you can send a bus to a bus, which a lot of consoles just didn’t do for a while. I use a Rupert Neve Design master-bus processor and a master-bus transformer. No matter what configuration of outboard and onboard processing I need, the Quantum 5 lets me organize it however it best suits my workflow needs.”

For Cruz, who joined Puth’s touring team in 2022, the Quantum platform offers the flexibility required to manage a complex monitor environment while maintaining a streamlined workflow for performers. “DiGiCo has also been my preference for a while. I’m doing a lot more than just your basic channel input to aux output,” he explains. “So having the flexibility of the three banks of faders, a powerful macro section, and the amount of inputs and outputs the Q5 offers were super helpful.”

Cruz adopts a minimalist philosophy when it comes to monitor mixing, prioritising the preservation of each musician’s individual sound and performance dynamics. “I tend to take a very basic approach to monitor mixing: a lot of my EQs are pretty flat, not a ton of compression going on. The band members are very particular about their sounds and it’s not my place to unnecessarily manipulate any of that. For example, our guitar player uses an Axe-FX and he shapes a lot of his sounds on the front end. He literally says, ‘Do not put any filtering, EQ, or compression on it.’ It’s an XLR straight to the desk and I simply send it right back to him at the level he wants.”

The scale of the production places significant demands on the system’s input and routing capabilities. While the physical stage inputs exceed the capacity of a standard SD-Rack, the overall channel count expands considerably through playback systems, effects returns, utility channels and networked audio connections. “We’re a little over the 56 I/O an SD-Rack offers in terms of physical inputs coming from the stage, but in total terms of what’s on my desk, I’m almost maxed out: there are a few double-patched inputs, effects returns, and there’s a number of playback channels, which come in over MADI through the Orange Box. We also have the Sound Devices Astral wireless ARX16, running two of them in mirror mode, and that provides all of our vocal inputs. Plus, I have a number of utility channels that I’m using to allow for some tech control. It expands well beyond the normal use case of an input channel being something coming from stage.”

According to Cruz, the Quantum platform’s architecture allows engineers to rethink conventional console workflows and maximise the available resources. “Fortunately, the Quantum 5 is more than up to the task, designed, as Cruz puts it, ‘to remove the guardrails around what it means when you look at an input channel, an aux, a group, or a matrix,’” he says. “I can essentially take any of those things and turn them into anything that I want and route them anywhere. And because of that, it has allowed me to push the limits as to what each of those things can do.”

Beyond processing and routing flexibility, both engineers highlighted the platform’s extensive integration capabilities. Leveraging Optocore fibre networking, DMI cards supporting Dante, MADI and Waves, and external software control, the system enables seamless interaction with a wide range of technologies throughout the production. “One thing that I really appreciate is that the DiGiCo consoles have the ability to have external control from a number of different sources,” says Cruz. “Being able to incorporate the console into a network is pretty common in a lot of consoles these days, but with the Quantum 5, specifically, I’m able to control it from multiple sources at monitors.”

He also pointed to the use of Companion by Bitfocus and the DiGiPanion module developed by fellow DiGiCo user David Lim, which allows complex console functions and external platform interactions to be triggered via a single command. “The flexibility of what DiGiCo has made available through their OSC control has been super helpful for me,” he says. “Capabilities like that, and the ability to let us work the way we want to, is why DiGiCo is always the top choice.”