To honor the legacy of the Allman Brothers Band, godfathers of Southern Rock, the musical supergroup known as The Brothers recently returned to New York City’s storied Madison Square Garden for a pair of shows in April. Led by former ABB guitarist and Gov’t Mule founder Warren Haynes and featuring drummer Jaimoe, the last surviving original member of the Allman Brothers Band, the ensemble also included former ABB guitarist Derek Trucks (nephew of ABB drummer the late Butch Trucks), bassist Oteil Burbridge, and percussionist Marc Quiñones, plus Joe Russo, Reese Wynans, and Isaac Eady, as well as special guest Chuck Leavell on piano.
It was an emotional reunion. The Brothers last played MSG in March 2020 to celebrate 50 years since the founding of the Allman Brothers Band. Fortunately, some very 21st century technology was on hand for the two shows, in the form of three DiGiCo Quantum consoles, as well as a DiGiCo SD12-96 desk, all provided by Southold, New York-based SK Systems (with an L-Acoustics sound system supplied by PRG). At front of house were both a Quantum338 and a Quantum225; the broadcast mix had another Quantum338; and monitors used an SD12-96. So on those nights at MSG, The Brothers relied on another set of siblings – DiGiCo Quantum, all of which were connected on an Optocore network along with an SD-Rack and SD-Nano Rack – to assure a flawless performance.
The workflow began with front of house. Engineer Brian Speiser, who also regularly mixes FOH and acts as PM for Tedeschi Trucks Band, was at the Quantum338 for the main house mix. In addition, systems engineer Chris Bedry, who also performs that role for TTB, manned a Quantum225 next to Speiser, taking stems from Speiser’s house mix and putting them together, over headphones, for a backup broadcast mix. The primary broadcast mix was being handled by Bobby Tis – usually TTB’s monitor and studio engineer – on another Quantum338, with Chris Bailey mixing monitors on a DiGiCo SD12-96.
“Chris Bedry was multi-tracking the whole show, but also sending a backup stems mix from me to the broadcast people so that they had an emergency backup that was coming directly from us if something went wrong in the broadcast room,” explains Speiser, who started laying out this workflow months ahead of time, adding, “the Quantum225 was also submixing all of Marc Quiñones’ percussion channels and sending them back to me on the 338.”
This was only the second performance for The Brothers, the first being 2020’s ABB 50th Anniversary show. “I didn’t mix their 2020 show, so going into what’s essentially a throw-and-go at Madison Square Garden, I felt like it would be best if I had Chris specifically zero in focus on what Marc, the percussionist, was doing so that I can mostly focus on everything else that was happening on stage with two drummers, an organ player, a piano player, two guitar players, bass, and vocals. Marc had a lot of mics that sometimes needed to be live, but sometimes didn’t, and two different vocal mics for his two positions.”
What could have potentially complicated matters was the fact that Speiser had never piloted a Quantum console before this. “I have always been on SD consoles, so I went to a local vendor in Cleveland where I live now who happened to have a Quantum and a Waves server in the shop,” he recalls. “And they were nice enough to let me come over there one day and build my session, and I spent one afternoon just going through it. At first, I was worried that it might feel like a desk that I didn’t know my way around because I had just never been on a Quantum. But I started building my session in the offline editor, and then when I went over to their shop and got my hands on the desk, it was super intuitive – everything was exactly where I would’ve expected it to be based on having so much experience with the SD. It just felt like the exact same experience.”
“Once I had the time in rehearsals, I wound up using a good amount of the Mustard and Spice Rack dynamics,” he continues. “For instance, the functionality of the Mustard version of the Primary Source Expander is the most functional I’ve ever used. I had more success with that than I had with the hardware version or the Waves plugin version. And the other thing that was super helpful was the Mustard compressors having the hardware mix knob – being able to mix the clean input with the compressed signal like that was a game changer. Altogether, these kinds of features made this workflow much easier to manage.”
Broadcast mixer Bobby Tis is also a longtime DiGiCo user – he tours with TTB on a Quantum338 – and felt at home in what he described as a “DiGiCo universe” at the Garden. “It was pretty cool to really network four consoles together and be sharing lines and making it all work together,” he says of the MSG shows. “We were all gain-sharing, which kept things orderly for a one-off type of show like this. It was nice that we had four engineers’ eyes on the gains of every channel, especially with that many inputs. Good gain structures, good shows! Everything worked out the way we had hoped and expected it would.”
Tis says the Quantum338 has become a foundation for his work as TTB’s monitor engineer. “It’s really, really useful, especially for the monitor gig, but using it on The Brothers broadcast made it even more fun because I got to use more of the Quantum features in new and different ways,” he says. “For instance, I used the FET limiter within Mustard quite a bit on inputs and I love the fact that I can use it parallel with all the other Mustard processing, which has saved me inputs. And the Mustard Source Expander is super useful and it’s really better than the hardware versions. I find things like that, really make mixing live music a lot easier.”
A new Fourier Audio transform.engine that Tis used with his console at Madison Square Garden also helped make the broadcast mix a better experience. “I had messed around with other scenarios of running plugins with the DiGiCo, but not with the actual Fourier Audio transform.engine before, and I’ve got to say I was super impressed with how very easy it was to use,” he says. “There’s always a bit of nerves when you’re using something new like that on a show, but I put it through its paces and found it to be a really solid device and I had a lot of fun playing with it.”
One application was applying the oeksound Soothe2 dynamic resonance suppressor to the three pairs of stereo microphones in the arena, used as ambience mics. “I was mixing those into a group on the DiGiCo, and then across that group I was using the Soothe2 plugin aimed at the high midrange to look for resonance and take it out of the room ambience. And then I also am sending one of those pairs of audience mics out to a Bricasti M7 reverb. I’ve come to learn that putting the audience into a great space of its own and extending the room a bit helps the whole thing smear together. I also brought a lot of what I generally use in my studio right to the stage. That combination of the DiGiCo console and the transform.engine had me in my own sweet spot those nights, and that’s a great place to mix anything from.”
For more details on The Brothers show at Madison Square Garden, visit www.thebrothersmsg.com. SK Systems can be found online at www.sk-systems.com.
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