Maroon 5 Tours with DiGiCo SD7

Maroon 5 toured this summer with another headliner, Train, visiting more than venues from July through the end of September. Veteran mixer Jim Ebdon handled the band's front-of-house sound on a DiGiCo SD7, powered by the new DiGiCo SD Rack with the system clocking at 96kHz. Ebdon cut his teeth behind the faders of a D5 for many years on global tours with Maroon 5, as well as with Aerosmith, Matchbox Twenty, Annie Lennox and Sting. He traded up to an SD7 for Aerosmith's 2007 North American tour. For the summer Maroon 5 outing, he decided to add the DiGiCo/Waves SoundGrid bundle for some added color.

"In my opinion, DiGiCo consoles -- whether it's the SD7 or any of the new ones like the SD8, SD9, SD10-are the best-sounding digital consoles currently available," said Ebdon. "And I love the extra boost I get in power and sonics now that we've upgraded from the DiGiRacks to the new SD192 rack. I decided to get my hands on the Waves SoundGrid for this tour and was pleasantly surprised. It's subtle but noticeable. The console sounds so good on its own, so I'm not using Waves to make it better, but rather to achieve a different color, dynamic, and depth to my mix. I like being able to hear what the plug-in is actually doing. I went immediately to the SSL Channel EQ and the SSL Stereo Bus Compressor and have used the compressor across my drums quite a bit and love how it just fattens up the drum sound. Waves has a proprietary "H Compressor" and the "H Delay," both of which sound amazing. The delay has some really wacky presets, which can make any sound more interesting. Overall, I've found the Waves plug-in bundle has a lot to choose from and can be a useful tool to add a different ambiance to what the console already offers.

With the addition of a touring keyboardist, Maroon "6" comprises approximately 54 inputs at the front of house for onstage instrumentation and audience mics for the occasional recording. Ebdon's go-to features are the onboard multiband compressor, macros, and DiGi-Tube emulation, which he uses extensively for guitars. "The macros I've found to be very useful. For instance, there are some places during the performance that I'll need to switch off four or five gates simultaneously or quickly set a different decay time on a reverb. It's now so easy to program these moves into macros. We also went back to using Pro Tools for this tour for backing vocals and percussion."

As the U.S. leg of the summer tour comes to a close, Maroon 5 will have a short break and then head to Europe until the end of the year.