Celine Dion, five-time Grammy award winner and one of the biggest-selling solo
artists of all time – has resumed her residency at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, with
her long-time Front Of House Engineer and Tour Manager Denis Savage, and
Systems Engineer Frankie Desjardins, choosing the SSL L500 live console for Front
of House duties.

Desjardins is Chief Technical Advisor at Solotech, a large entertainment technology
services provider with offices around Canada and the US. He has also been the
Systems Engineer for Dion and Savage for over 20 years. “The show might look
simple enough, but it’s actually quite complicated,” he explains. “There are 128
inputs coming from stage via the SSL Alpha-Link Live R convertors. A MADI router
distributes those streams to the two monitor consoles, front of house, and a Pro
Tools rig for recording.

Denis Savage has been Dion’s Tour Manager and Front of House engineer for 28
years. He sees the advent of the programmable live console as one of the most
significant changes in over that time. “It’s rare you run a show under 100 channels
these days,” he says. Everybody goes mad with the orchestration because they
know you can just program changes into the snapshot memory… Before that, 50 or
60 channels was a very big show”

The SSL L500 has been one of the main enablers for Savage: “I really like the way
this console sounds. When we started rehearsing both Frankie and I thought it
sounded much wider and deeper than anything we had before. Even my own
outboard reverbs were more ‘present’.’

The SSL L500 has 96 slots in its internal FX rack with over 45 different effects to
choose from – that is, in addition to the 208 fully processed paths that all include
parametric EQ, full dynamics, an all-pass filter, delay, and tube emulation.

Of particular note is Savage’s use of the SSL FX Rack Dynamic EQ in Celine Dion’s
vocal channel. It is very capable of the kind of subtle control that he needs,
preserving Dion’s amazing signature vocals: “If her voice does get harder I grab
that with the EQ,” he says. “But she’s a great, great singer and she’s always on top
of things. She controls her instrument so well… We get a feeling of such power, but
she controls it so well.”

The console has been through extensive rehearsals and many flawless
performances since it was specified for the show, and it continues to impress both
Savage and Desjardins. Dion recently performed her 1000th show at the Caesar’s
Palace Colosseum, and the SSL L500 had the best seat in the house. “We’re very
happy with it,” says Savage. “It sounds really good and is super sturdy – we’re
happy to have it.”