Tyler Childers’ seventh and latest studio record, Snipe Hunter, is an adventurously sprawling collection of tunes that spans a range of genres, from Appalachian folk and gospel music to psychedelia and experimental rock. To properly cover a lot of musical ground on his current Snipe Hunt Tour, which kicked off in Dallas on April 23, the Kentucky-born-and-raised singer-songwriter is backed up by his raucous seven-piece band, The Food Stamps, which generates a joyous explosion of musical creativity on stage each night. To best keep all of the singers and musicians in sync with their own performances as well as each other, Sound Image, a Clair Global brand, is carrying a DiGiCo Quantum338 as the tour’s monitor console.
Cory Benson has been the artist’s monitor engineer for three and a half years now, first hitting the road with Childers on 2023’s Send in the Hounds Tour. “As that tour wound down, I was taking inventory of the gear and reviewing what worked and what could be improved upon based on Tyler and the band’s needs,” he shares. “I remember seeing a lot of positive videos and writeups on the DiGiCo Quantum338 and requested one to work with before the next tour prep began. What first drew me to the Quantum was a tossup between the superficial and the real-world applications. I’m a sucker for aesthetics and the Q338 is such a stunning console—the layout, the colors, the size, and those fantastic screens.”
“On the more practical side, the Nodal Processing was a game-changer,” he continues. “As a monitor engineer, you can find yourself cluttering up your fader banks with duplicated channels for specific sends. Being able to handle the individual sends from one channel allows me to keep my layouts simple and clean. Besides the fader bank cleanliness that Nodal Processing provides me, the safety net of my show lives in the macros. I’ve mixed on other desks, but nobody does macros better than DiGiCo. The layout and functionality are top notch on the Q338.”
Benson describes his Snipe Hunt Tour monitoring setup as “pretty simple,” with the DiGiCo desk controlling two SD-Racks loaded with 32-bit mic pres and analog output cards. He’s also utilizing two DiGiGrid MGBs to pull MADI into his recording computer.
From his typical position at stage left, Benson is supplying eight stereo IEM mixes for the band, along with five stereo IEM mixes for the backline techs, one stereo IEM VIP mix, and up to three stereo IEM mixes for guest sit-ins, potentially bringing the total to 17 on a busy day. “I also send a backup stereo mix to a hardwired pack for our drummer, Rod, and a feedback wedge for our guitarist, James, which is only used for a few of his solos since all our amps are upstage of the risers.”
This being Benson’s third official outing on a Quantum338 has only further cemented his appreciation for DiGiCo’s Quantum platform. “Man, trying not to sound too much like a DiGiCo fanboy is tough!” he laughs. “The Mustard and Spice Rack processing is yet another powerful set of tools that help keep me in the box. True Solo is a tool that you don’t think you’ll need until you have it, and then you wonder how you’ll ever work without it. The footprint of the Q338 is also great and can easily squeeze into some of the tightest of underplays that we sometimes find ourselves in. And the rugged, road-worthy build has definitely been tested in the past couple of tours: from rough ferry crossings across the UK/EU, to dusty outdoor festivals, to gale-force winds and rain in the Pacific Northwest, to a sweltering prehistoric show in a small grassy patch next to the highway—our most recent underplay at Dinosaur World in Kentucky—this console has never failed to perform.”
Largely eschewing audio plugins and external processing, Benson prefers to keep everything onboard as much as possible. “I utilize the Naga 6 on Tyler’s vocal channel to reign in the wild dynamics of his performance before sending it through the DYN Blue Classic compressor, which is filtered to catch any aggressive peaks in his upper-mids,” he says. “I’m also running DYN Blue Classics on my band buses with a higher threshold to just glue everything together and catch any runaway transients. I use the Mustard gates for my toms because they feel a little more musical and organic than the SD’s. And with DiGiCo’s latest V22 software update, I’m now utilizing the new Mustard Levelling Amp, The Silver One, on upright bass—this thing is killer!”
“In my opinion, this desk works so well for this band because of its sonic transparency,” he adds. “These artists work so hard to craft the tones and sounds they want, so the last thing I want to do is affect it. I want the artists to be confident that what they’re hearing in their IEMs is an accurate representation of what their instruments are doing on stage.”
The confirmation that Benson has received back from the performers has confirmed that he’s taking the right approach—with the right console. “They’ve all, at one time or another, said positive things. But the comment that immediately comes to mind was from Jesse, one of our guitarists/multi-instrumentalists—they call him ‘The Professor’ because he actually is a music professor back in his home state of Kentucky. During our first rehearsal after the switch to the Q338, he turned to me a few minutes in, smiling, and said that he noticed a major positive difference in the clarity and fidelity compared to our previous console. All the guys on stage have great ears and don’t tend to sugarcoat anything, so when they comment positively on the audio, I know it’s genuine.”
The Snipe Hunt Tour stops at a variety of iconic venues—including Chicago’s historic Wrigley Field and Pennsylvania’s Hersheypark Stadium—before wrapping up on October 3 at Portland’s Moda Center. For details on Tyler Childers’ upcoming performances, visit www.tylerchildersmusic.com. Sound Image can be found online at www.sound-image.com.