ESCONDIDO, California - May 2025 - Multi-Grammy-winner Lenny Kravitz is currently on the US leg of his Blue Electric Light tour, which kicked off in Europe in June 2024 in support of his twelfth studio album. Sound Image, a Clair Global brand, is supplying a control package for the tour that includes two DiGiCo Quantum852 consoles for veteran FOH engineer Laurie Quigley and monitor engineer Josh Mellott, two SD-Racks, and six SD-MiNi Racks, plus three Fourier Audio transform.engine platforms.
Mellott is something of a DiGiCo whisperer. He has been touring with Kravitz for 14 years, initially as a monitor tech before getting behind an SD7 to mix, and previously worked on DiGiCo desks with Crosby, Stills & Nash on tour and at Sound Image's shop in Southern California. I was the code writer for all the socket files for any tours that were still using D5 and D1 consoles, he says. Over the years, he and Quigley, who has been with Kravitz for more than two decades, have used virtually every model of DiGiCo console, from the D5 to the new Quantum platforms.
Quigley, who has also worked with KISS, Aerosmith, M tley Cr e, Whitesnake, Ozzy Osbourne, Bon Jovi, and others, began the tour in 2024 with an SD7 but switched to the new Quantum852 at the beginning of 2025. I do a lot of the programming, reports Mellott, who has also toured with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Bob Dylan. I'm more familiar with it, so I'm faster. I converted Laurie's file over to the Quantum during a two-week break and programmed the desk layout to be the same as the SD7. He can just set up the console, turn it on, and everything is roughly in the same position.
After years of layering updates on his SD7 at monitors, Mellott says, he chose to start from scratch when he switched to the Quantum852 for 2025, copying every setting from the SD7 before hooking up Pro Tools for a virtual soundcheck. I spent three or four days on everybody's monitor mixes, going through every snapshot, every song, every mix, and readjusting everything, he says. We still had the same 32-bit cards and fiber system, but now everything sounded the way I wanted it to sound. I was even able to take away some of the EQ cuts and keep the dynamics involved. I didn't need to have all this compression or EQ anymore, because it was sonically in my face and where I wanted it to be.
Kravitz and Craig Ross, his guitar player and longtime collaborator, are extremely knowledgeable about audio, writing, performing, recording, and mixing all of Kravitz's studio projects. On the road, the pair are also very hands-on, Mellott says. Lenny and Craig will go to front-of-house and listen to the band with Laurie and make adjustments. Craig will come to the monitor console and listen to his mix and make adjustments. We all talk to each other and work together to make this whole collective thing work, because audio is such a big part of Lenny's performance.
The switch to the new Quantum852 consoles did not go unnoticed by their principle, Mellott continues. Lenny has been really happy with what Laurie and I have done over the years. He's never really had any complaints. But towards the end of this leg, he pulled me aside and said, I don't know what the difference is between last year and this year. Obviously, we have the same band, the same microphones, all the same setup, but this year is just dramatically better. Everything sounds clearer. It sounds like there's more space in the mix.' I explained that we had upgraded to the Quantums, and he was like, You know, it could be that!'
Out front, Quigley has an SD-Rack for his interconnections, while Mellott has an SD-Rack at monitor world just for the wireless microphones and IEM outputs. We also have six SD-MiNi Racks scattered around the stage and I have an Orange Box interface to run the playback and backing tracks, Mellott says. All of the DiGiCo equipment is on a fiber loop.
The core band may be just two guitars, bass, drums, and keyboards, but between them they take up a lot of channels. In addition to 24 channels of guitars, Mellott says, There are 20 keyboard channels and 20 drum channels. We record every night, and the most I can record is 128 channels. That's not everything, so I had to stem down some things like the 12 audience mics to just to one stereo channel.
The two engineers have worked hard over the years to deliver studio-quality sound both to the audience and onstage. During band rehearsals in the Bahamas for the current tour, Mellott and Ross regularly visited the studio to document every delay and reverb used on the Blue Electric Light album, then combed through the plugins on Fourier's transform.engine to best replicate the devices used on the recordings. I listed eight different reverbs and eight or ten different delays just for Lenny's vocal, Mellott says. He programmed those into Quigley's transform.engine at FOH, but instead of duplicating everything at monitors, he simply takes whichever effect Quigley has currently applied over the Optocore loop. Mellott can then make that effect available to anyone who wants to hear it in their monitor mix.
For the most part, Mellott continues, Lenny has a specific space that he likes in his in-ears, so I have my own reverbs for Lenny's vocal. His mix also goes through a dbx 160, because that's how he does it in the Bahamas. The 160 keeps the band in check but keeps his vocal on top and in his face without taking away any tonality from the band or his vocal. Mellott runs a single computer with two transform.engines for redundancy, setting up a Dante patch to seamlessly switch over as a backup if ever needed.
To replicate the guitar tones of the record releases, Kravitz and Ross each have 12 channels of amplification, ranging from a small Fender Tweed to a
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ESCONDIDO, California - May 2025 - Multi-Grammy-winner Lenny Kravitz is currently on the US leg of his Blue Electric Light tour, which kicked off in Europe in June 2024 in support of his twelfth studio album. Sound Image, a Clair Global brand, is supplying a control package for the tour that includes two DiGiCo Quantum852 consoles for veteran FOH engineer Laurie Quigley and monitor engineer Josh Mellott, two SD-Racks, and six SD-MiNi Racks, plus three Fourier Audio transform.engine platforms.
