Zach Bryan Aims for Another Kind of Record and Four DiGiCo Quantum Consoles are Ready to Power It

	Zach Bryan's recent September 6 performance at Notre Dame Stadium, overlooking the DiGiCo Quantum852 front-of-house console, supplied by Eighth Day Sound

Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Zach Bryan added new dates to the Quittin' Time Tour, which first kicked off in Chicago at the United Center on March 6, 2024. But don't think of them as winding the road show down; quite the opposite, as they'll be stadium dates and one of them is shooting for the single-headline-artist ticket-sales record for a one-off show in the US, set last year by George Strait. That aspirational moonshot will take place September 27 and will represent yet another first: the first-ever concert at U of M's 107,600-seat Michigan Stadium -- aka "the Big House" -- in Ann Arbor.

Breaking a live performance record takes quite a team, and Bryan's crew and gear are up for the challenge. Jamie Hamburg (front-of-house), Absalon Flores (artist monitors), and David Lim (band monitors) are piloting no less than four DiGiCo consoles: two Quantum852, one Quantum7, and one Quantum5, all provided by Eighth Day Sound, a Clair Global brand.

Front-of-house engineer Hamburg may be looking at a record of his own, as he's managing about 200 input channels, including 125 from the stage, plus effects, returns, and more on his DiGiCo Quantum852 out front and a Quantum7 located backstage used for recording, track-playback, and after-show mix applications. "It's a pretty dense show, pretty big band, and we have a lot of backups for things," he explains. "We have a ton of audience mics, all sorts of stuff that just adds up on the channel count."

The Quantum7 is standalone, with front-of-house and monitors on their own discrete Optocore networks, and both networks share all the inputs from the stage. "I've got control of my head amps, and Lim is controlling his head amps for himself, while Absalon is gain-tracking on those," he says. The 40 wireless microphones and instruments in use are on a Dante network shared between both Optocore loops using two DiGiCo Orange Boxes, which are clocked together by an external wordclock. The system also has six SD-Racks, two of which are deployed when a "B" stage is used.

Hamburg, who started with Bryan in 2022 --"When it was just a bus and a trailer, and I was tour manager and front of house," he remembers -- is a fan of the Quantum's Mustard and Spice Rack processing. "I'm currently using the new MSEs that came out on all of his vocal channels," he says. "After that, it's going to a vocal group where there's some Mustard EQ on it, as well as a Mustard Optical Compressor, which is doing a lot of the heavy lifting just to keep Zach up front and keep it smooth. He really just wants it to be well defined, but also wants it to feel as natural as he can while still being consistent at the front of the mix, and Mustard gives me the tools to do that."

But he especially like the Quantum's flexibility. "With the expanded overlay, I have a really great view of the EQ, and for a show that big, the last thing I want to be worrying about is menu-diving in a desk," he says. "I really want to be able to watch the show and react because I have enough faders and enough space to do it and when I need to find something. The Quantum852 just makes it so quick, so easy -- I have every fader that I need in front of me at all times. We've been doing a ton of different types of shows with a ton of different PAs this year, so we're looking for the desks to be consistent, because everything else around the desk is going to change."

For Absalon Flores, the choice of the DiGiCo Quantum5 console was dictated as much by its functionality as by it sonic quality. With the exception of a few key outboard processors, his dedicated onstage monitor mix for Zach Bryan stays within the console itself. Key among them are the Mustard Source Enhancer (MSE), a new dynamics processing feature available on the Mustard processing designed to reduce unwanted background noise and provide more gain before feedback for selected audio sources. They have a lot of ground to cover.

"We have sometimes up to four of Zach's vocal mics that he'll hop between at any time, and we have a lot of bleed on stage," he explains. "As he's jumping between those, I'm using the MSE to trigger them within a certain frequency range. You can use a filter as the key, high- and low- passing it, so that it's not being triggered by too much of the cymbals right behind him, so that each mic is only opening up when it hears him. He always has a lot of lower-mid chest resonance in his voice, so I use that as the information to trigger the MSE."

The Quantum5 also offers Flores a lot of signal management options. "I have a bank of all of Zach's channels, and then that all gets grouped into a single group that becomes my fader where I EQ and process it," he says. "Those mics are individually opening through the Source Expander only when needed. But there's no EQ on those individual channels. There's only EQ applied once they all get grouped together."

It's a complex vocal chain, but one that Flores says he can comfortably execute night after night, thanks to the Quantum console's reliability. "I can't emphasize that enough how reliable this stuff is, and that's what matters to me most. What's really important is making sure that the artist doesn't notice any variable that takes him out of his 'flow state' every night, because that's sacred time for him. And this gear allows me to assure that."

Lim's DiGiCo Quantum852 desk is managing 32 mixes for crew, guests, and the dozen and a half musicians and vocalists onstage around and beside Zach Bryan. The console offers him a single platform to wrangle a complex show. "I have everything at my fingertips -- everything," he says. "I have larger screens, more real estate, and more places to put things. And so, with as many inputs as we do, having it all being able to be laid out instead of constantly banking through it all makes a huge difference. I can see all the information right at hand."

What he likes best about the Quantum852 is its center screen. "The center screen being usable for processing, and not just a master screen, makes a huge difference in speeding up my workflow," he says. "I think it's the best thing they could've done as far as updating from the Q7."

Mustard Processing also is also a massive benefit for Lim's stage mix. Other than a few outboard pieces he's using, the rest of the entire stage is running through the console's onboard processing. The Mustard compressors in particular, which can emulate different types of analog hardware, such as optical and VCA units, offering a choice of smooth, natural compression or faster, more aggressive limiting, are the stars of that show, he says.

"The EQ is very good, but the compressors are fantastic, and having them means that I've gotten pretty much completely off of plugins and able to be on the console fully," he explains, adding, succinctly, "Basically, anything that matters gets Mustard."

So when the band hits the stage at Michigan Stadium, what's dressing the hot dogs won't be the only or best Mustard in town.

For details on Zach Bryan's upcoming shows, visit www.zachbryan.com. Eighth Day Sound and Clair Global can be found online at www.8thdaysound.com and www.clairglobal.com.