DiGiCo and Fourier Audio keep Kehlani’s Crash World Tour smooth-sailing

California-born Kehlani recently embarked on the third and final leg of their Crash World Tour, which, since September 2024, has crisscrossed North America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania, and will finish in Hawaii on 26th March. The tour is carrying a pair of DiGiCo Quantum338 Pulse consoles supplied by Eighth Day Sound, a Clair Global brand, with FOH engineer Moshe Davenport also incorporating a Fourier Audio transform.engine into his workflow.

Davenport has been using a Quantum338 since Kehlani’s first world tour, Blue Water Road Trip, which hit 28 cities across North America and Europe in 2022. This time out, he’s been appreciating the upgrade to DiGiCo’s Pulse software. “Anything that helps me get the best sound quality is always going to be the right choice, which is why I also went with the Fourier transform.engine,” he said.

Having the transform.engine available has allowed Davenport to pick and choose which sources he sends through the plugin server and which he treats with the Quantum338’s onboard Mustard processing, he says, noting that he receives around 54 inputs from the stage, plus 20 tracks of playback. “Mustard is a powerful tool. By using both the transform.engine and the onboard Mustard processing, it really is having the best of both worlds.”

Having reportedly heard good things about the Fourier Audio system, he opted to use the plugin server for the entire tour: “I wanted to try it. I know it’s going to be the next big thing, so I wanted to get ahead of it. I have Kehlani’s vocal chain going through the transform.engine with a few plugins on it, and I have the tracks, drums, bass and guitar all running through it, just to add a little flavour.”

“There are a few things I do differently when I’m using DiGiCo,” said UK-based monitor engineer Femi Bello, who started working with Kehlani at the beginning of the Crash World Tour in September 2024. “I make sure that the stage rack has the 32-bit cards, and for really dynamic instruments, like drums, I’m using the Mustard EQ and Mustard dynamics – compression and gate. The Mustard EQ is completely different to the standard EQ. It changes the sound completely from what I’m used to, but in a good way, of course.”

The FOH and monitor consoles are connected over an Optocore loop running at 96 kHz. “We can see each other’s SD-Racks, but we’re not sharing gains, and it sounds fantastic,” Bello reported. “We’ve had no bugs and no errors. And I’m able to take two separate record feeds off the back of the desk over MADI at 96k, which works great.”

Bello is typically generating 15 mixes on this tour, feeding Kehlani and the musicians as well as the dancers, plus sends to side-fills, subs, thumper and the lighting director at front-of-house. The Ableton playback system runs over Dante via a DiGiCo Orange Box fitted with a DMI-DANTE64@96 card. Bello decided to also integrate a DiGiCo SD-MiNi Rack into his setup to provide a redundant, analog backup feed as a failsafe, he says. The tour carried an SD-MiNi Rack on the UK leg late last year to handle the additional playback tracks required for the opening act, Davenport notes.

Davenport routinely records the shows to Logic, using the multitrack files for his virtual soundcheck. That way, he said, when the band is unavailable, “I can still get an idea what the PA is doing. Kehlani normally does not soundcheck, so to have a live vocal that I can put through the PA and hear what it’s going to sound like in the room is an amazing tool for me. There were a couple of days when the band didn’t soundcheck, but they would come out and hear how it was sounding in the house. They don’t usually get that opportunity.”

As for the functionality of the Quantum338 Pulse, Bello said, “One of my favorite features is being able to take a block of channels from one place and quickly move it to a new fader bank – custom fader banks on the go. Then there’s the macros; I don’t think there’s another console brand that does macros or function keys the way DiGiCo does them, and they’ve updated it in the new firmware, so there’s even more functionality.”

To make the most of DiGiCo’s capabilities, Bello said, his desk is fully programmed with snapshots and macros. “When we have a guest come on, I have a macro that allows the guest to do a soundcheck in their in-ears. It isolates everybody. Then I have a ‘go live’ button for the guest that puts them everywhere that they need to be. I’ve also customised where my talkbacks go: talk to artists, talk to band, talk to crew, talk to guests. Then, with the playback backup, I’ve got it so that if I press a macro, the Dante lines are killed and the analogue lines are unmuted. I’ve gone macro crazy!”

Bello’s work has not gone unnoticed by his artist. “I do know Kehlani is happy with their in-ear mix. Kehlani used to only wear one in-ear, but since I started working with them, they have had both in-ears in all the time. So I must be doing something right.”

For details on Kehlani’s upcoming tour stops supporting their latest release, Crash, visit www.kehlani.com.