Audio Engineers Mickey Beck has been with Josh Groban for 12 years and Chris
“cookie’ Hoff has been with Josh for three years. They recently came to South
Africa on the “Stages’ tour where they worked on two DiGiCo SD10 consoles with
waves and two 2SD Racks. The Stages Tour was held recently in Johannesburg
(Ticketpro Dome), Durban (ICC Durban Arena) and in Cape Town (Grand Arena,
GrandWest) with the full technical supplied by Gearhouse South Africa.

Mickey and Chris commented, “The main reason we have chosen DiGiCo consoles
for the Josh Groban “Stages’ tour was its scalability with a cohesive UI throughout
the model range. There is no typical Josh Groban configuration. A show may be
just Josh with piano or a trio which adds a guitar. There have been shows where
Josh has sung with an orchestra or orchestra and full electric band. We needed a
console line that would allow us to move our work up or down in input list size
without having to start from scratch every time.

The DiGiCo platform helps us achieve our goal with it’s straight-forward UI, ease of
use, sonic quality, and scalability of input racks. We love the stage rack sharing
ability as it helps us meet our daily production/rehearsal schedule by allowing us to
line check onstage while FOH is tuning and we know that if we have the input on
stage, FOH will certainly have it as well. Our first real dive into DiGiCo was August
2015 starting with Josh’s PBS special recording. We both use Waves MultiRack with
our DiGiCo consoles as well as a pair of Bricasti M7 reverb units at both console
locations. MultiRack is on the console using the DiGiCo/Waves IO with Waves
Extreme Servers and we send to and receive from our Bricasti units via the local
AES IO on the surface.’

Both engineers say that working with Groban has many highlights. “Josh is a
tremendous vocalist. His power and technique is in a class far beyond a typical pop
vocalist. He cares about his craft and works very hard to constantly refine his
abilities. This translates to a quality vocal for us to work with. We have great gear
and great musicians. We hide nothing.’

Finally, they had a word about South Africa. “It’s not a typical destination for most
American artists. We feel very privileged to be able to travel to distant lands and
put on our shows. We had great audiences, great local musicians, great weather
and great gear to work with thanks to DWR Distribution and Gearhouse.’

Jakobus de Wit from Gearhouse South Africa was involved in the project. “The crew
from Josh Groban are of the best around the world. That should say something
about the equipment they choose to use. This was a show of high standard and we
all feel proud that we played a part in it.’

Kyle Robson from DWR also toured with the team. “I made sure their DiGiCo
system was set up at each venue and I was there for support. That said, the system
was solid and ran without a hitch.’