Known recently for his worldwide hit Despacito, Puerto Rican singer songwriter Luis Fonsi started his Love + Dance World Tour, supported by FOH Sound Engineer, Yamil Martínez, who specified an RCF TT+.
As a Puerto Rican Latin Grammy Winner, Martínez has many major studio recording and live engineering credits to his name, including: Alex Campos, Ana Gabriel, Ricky Martin, and Tommy Torres, to name a few.
His band feature 4 musicians, background vocals, guest singers, while further inputs are provided by the voice and acoustic guitar of the Artist himself — all running through 56 channels of a DiGiCo SD10, upgraded with Waves SoundGrid and UAD plugins as well as a Korg Kaoss Pad for additional live FX. Each musician uses IEM monitoring, but the stage is not entirely silent: subs are available for the musicians’ reference sound and side-fills for dancers. While monitor mixes are handled by Zoilo Rodriguez.
Martínez explained: “If those things are present, then it is just a matter of tuning the system correctly. I would prefer to have a beast to control than a pet that behaves nicely but doesn’t have the balls to deliver when is needed.”
“Having good mics, converters and speakers are crucial for overall performance. If I have to choose between sound-checking or tuning, I choose to tune! If the system is well-tuned, mixing is quicker, whereas mixing through an unoptimised PA works against the mix and, most importantly, against the music! By the way, Oscar Mora’s set-up and assistance were great. Without him, it wouldn’t have been the same,” Martínez added.
Luis Fonsi’s show featured a full flown rig of RCF TT+ — comprising TTL55-A / TTL33-A upgraded with the new firmware which includes FiRPHASE processing and RDNet 3.0 compatibility, tuned by Oscar Mora, RCF Touring Sound Specialist. “It’s fantastic when you have a professional engineer like Yamil using the system. You feel that all your effort, time and energy to reach the best performance of the system was worth it, Yamil made a fantastic mix that night!”
Martínez concluded: “I’ve used the TTL55-A in both versions. I wish I had the opportunity to do an A/B test. I was impressed by the FiRPHASE version — the hi-end is remarkably sweet. The venue was challenging, and the result was amazing!”