Drake kicked off his 2024 touring season with an 11-week trek with J. Cole. Onboard for the It’s All A Blur Tour – Big As The What? is Demetrius Moore, on his 14th year as the artist’s front-of-house engineer.
Drake is officially the first artist to take a new Clair Global-supplied DiGiCo Quantum852 console out on tour and Moore is thrilled. “I was on the Quantum852 for two weeks before the first show, at rehearsals at Drake’s place in Toronto and then at the Izod Center in New Jersey, and I have to tell you that it has made me an even bigger fan of DiGiCo—and I have been a huge fan of their consoles for years,” noted Moore. “It has an entirely new level of warmth and clarity. Right out of the box, the experience was like when we went from 48k to 96k. Every instrument and voice occupies its own space. You can instantly hear the difference, even over the talkback, which we’re sending over the comms line.”
The Quantum852 offered advantages that allowed Drake’s FOH engineer to manage the 30 channels of tracks used for the tour. And the new desk is getting a workout on the tour, he said, who is joined by Monitor Engineer Chris Lee on a pair of DiGiCo Quantum338 consoles Drake’s show will see him use every inch of the stage, and with no tunnel beneath the stage Lee may have to run between desks if there are any problems with the rapper’s IEMs and Ryan Koolman on an SD12 mixing the tour’s marching band.
Moore used plenty of “flavour” from the Quantum852 Spice Rack, including multiband compressors and dynamic EQs, while he applied a BAE 1073MPL mic pre and an Avalon 737 tube mic pre for Drake’s Sennheiser 9000 mic. In particular, he applied the Chili 6 six-band, dynamic, multiband compressor/expander to the 9000s of Drake.
Moore is also now using a brand new DiGiCo-distributed Fourier Audio transform.engine, a Dante-connected server designed to run VST3-native software plugins in a live environment, to bring studio software processing to Drake’s shows.
Once he and the Quantum852 hit the open waters of the tour, Moore says he really began to feel the power of the new desk. “The new fader caps are amazing—the traction, the firmness of the movement—and the screens are easy to see while also easy on the eyes,” he noted. “The only way to really express it is to say that it’s like riding in a Rolls-Royce. The Quantum852 is the Rolls-Royce of live mixing consoles: stable, smooth, and perfect.”
