KLANG Helps Hilary Duff's Monitor Mixes Come Clean on TourHilary Dyuff's the lucky me tour kicked off June 21 at West Palm Beach, Florida's iTHINK Financial Amphitheatre and will span seven countries, with dates across the US, Canada, Mexico, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, running into February 2027. The tour supports the star's critically acclaimed new album, luck...or something, and marks her first full-scale global headline run in almost two decades. Someone else who is listening intently to this show is Nathan Bond, who runs monitors for the tour. He and lots of other people on the show are enjoying what they're hearing through KLANG's immersive monitoring. A DMI-KLANG card is fitted into the DiGiCo Quantum338 console that Bond is piloting, provided for the tour by Ontario's Soundbox Productions, which is also providing the show's Sound Devices Astral ARX16 wireless system. "It's complicated -- my world is kind of funny," says Bond, only half-jokingly. A graduate of the Ontario Institute of Audio Recording Technology, he has worked with Canadian rock legends Our Lady Peace and Alexisonfire. "Our whole show runs on a big Dante network, with Rupert Neve Designs RMP-D8 preamps for all of our main band inputs. So I have a DiGiCo SD-Rack as well that I'm doing all of my auxiliary stuff on, like running all talkback mics through that. Anything that's not front-of-house-related runs through there. And because I'm limited to 64 channels of Dante on the DMI card, our playback stuff comes to me over MADI. Like I said, a bit complicated." That's even more so because, in addition to the musicians and vocalists on stage, Bond is also matrixing much of the tech crew during the show. And the KLANG system shines in that regard. "Our input list is at 80-plus, but then once I have all these talkbacks and everything else, my console is really like a big switchboard for a lot of things," he says. "For instance, throughout the show, I have a separate tech mix going, with a lot of people on that. There are a lot of different talkbacks, and I have radios going through there. It just keeps growing and growing." In fact, he points out that he added several Elgato Stream Deck controllers to the console so some personnel could create their own separate comms channels, such as between the guitar tech and various musicians. Another is the video director, who wanted to be able to control his own mix during the show. "I ended up running Ethernet cable over to him, giving him a KLANG mix on his computer running KLANG:app, so he could make any changes he needed to his mix without having to go through me to do it. I am actually using KLANG for every single mix, including the tech mixes. I don't think we could do all this without it." Bond first encountered KLANG systems in 2020, when he acquired a KLANG:fabrik IEM mixing system, and has been a fan ever since, now moving on to the DMI-KLANG card for native console integration. "KLANG's immersiveness makes it just so easy to make a mix sound really good without fighting anything, especially when you have that many input channels," he explains. "Just being able to find a home in the mix for everything is so easy. Our techs even came up to me early on in the tour and said, 'Man, it sounds like the guitar amp is coming from behind us a little bit!'" While KLANG is helping change the role of the monitor mixer to one that's as much logistical as artistic, it's also helping plenty in that latter aspect. "For me, KLANG is one of those things that just really helps me do my job," he says. "For instance, when you have a singer, you can move things around so that you can have space for the vocal to be there and be really heard, but without being way too loud or buried by other elements of the mix. To be able to still hear everything else around, but keep the vocal as the central primary focus, has been awesome. And, for the musicians, I find that it allows me to make a mix that's more of a realistic experience on stage, being able to take the audience mix, add it in, and spread them around. The people on stage get to hear more of a natural experience of being on stage instead of feeling like, 'I have my headphones on and I'm playing music.' That's what KLANG helps bring to the table: making moments where you can feel like you're almost not wearing your in-ears anymore." For details on Hilary Duff's upcoming tour stops, visit www.hilaryduff.com/live. 
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