SNL Celebrates 50th Anniversary with Radio City Hall Concert

Saturday Night Live (SNL) marked its 50th anniversary with SNL 50: The Homecoming Concert on February 14. The event was broadcast live on NBC and streamed on Peacock from Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan, with select IMAX screenings at Regal Cinemas. The sound team opted for DiGiCo Quantum7 consoles and an extensive L-Acoustics loudspeaker system for the evening’s audio.

The concert featured musical performances by returning artists, including Bonnie Raitt, Cher, Dave Grohl, David Byrne, Jack White, Jelly Roll, Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, and Ms. Lauryn Hill. SNL comedy alumni John Mulaney, Dave Chappelle, Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Robert De Niro also made appearances, with former cast member Jimmy Fallon hosting and performing Soul Man.

“For my career and for that of everyone who worked on that show, we knew we were not going to be around for SNL’s 100th anniversary,” Mark Dittmar, VP of Sales for Firehouse Productions, said. The production company handled the live-sound reinforcement for the three-hour event.

“So it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work on a show that has absolutely crazy amounts of music, and at the same time huge amounts of sketch comedy, musical comedy, and dialogue. Every note, every lyric, every word of every bit had to sound great and be totally intelligible to everyone in the house. And it was.”

Firehouse Productions provided the audio setup, utilising DiGiCo Quantum7 consoles for front of house and Quantum338 consoles for monitors, along with SD-Racks. An extensive L-Acoustics loudspeaker system, designed with Soundvision software and managed by LA Network Manager on a Milan-AVB network, accommodated the event's turntable stage. This setup allowed for continuous performances with interstitial comedy segments in a separate downstage area.

“DiGiCo is the industry standard for a lot of performers, and the power of these desks is enormous,” Dittmar said. “The Quantum7 is unparalleled in the number of inputs and outputs it can handle. We had a total of seven 56-channel splitters feeding all of the I/O SD-Racks for this, so there was a huge amount of inputs and outputs that were being shared among these desks and at monitors, feeding over 40 in-ear mixes and 30 monitor wedge mixes, plus three sets of stereo side-fills.

“It was a huge amount of equipment, and it takes a very big desk to accomplish that. Our engineers who were mixing the show are all intimately familiar with the DiGiCo line, specifically the Quantum desks, and they’re very fast on them. That power is what allows them to work so fast.”

Dittmar then explained how the DiGiCo desks proved most valuable when the rehearsals became particularly intense.

“The pace of rehearsals is tougher than the pace of the actual show because that’s when you’re building things, you’re figuring things out,” he said. “A band is telling you that their input list changed, so we have to be able to be very, very fast with our ability to integrate those changes. This is the moment when it all comes together. From that, we build the snapshots that will make up the final show, and DiGiCo excels at that, being able to route things quickly and successfully.

“If all of a sudden we need dialogue from a comedy act in the ears of someone on the upstage side, because they are going to have to react to the end of that comedy routine, we have to be able to do that quickly and accurately. So it’s never just the band on the turntable at the moment – it’s the entire show and everything that’s going on around it. And DiGiCo lets us manage that.”

The DiGiCo consoles were split to manage different sections of the turntable stage, enabling engineers to mix the diverse musical performances efficiently. The L-Acoustics system was designed to provide optimal sound within the acoustics of Radio City Music Hall, a venue known for its stringent requirements for temporary audio systems.

“Radio City’s just such an amazing sounding place, it was imperative to have a system that performed well both musically and coherently,” Ditmarr said. “It was an honour and a spectacular experience to bring an L-Acoustics system into that venue.

“Dialogue needed to be at the right levels of volume and intelligibility. This audience was one of the most reactive I’ve ever seen in my career, and intelligibility is vital to getting that level of reaction to comedy bits. At the same time, fidelity is paramount for music. With L-Acoustics, we had both.”