On Hilary Duff’s the lucky me tour, monitor engineer Nathan Bond runs every mix, from musicians to the technical crew, on a DiGiCo Quantum338 fitted with a DMI-KLANG card that also works as a communications switchboard.
The tour kicked off on 21 June at West Palm Beach’s iTHINK Financial Amphitheatre and spans seven countries (US, Canada, Mexico, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand) through February 2027. It supports the album luck… or something and is her first full-scale global headline run in almost two decades. Ontario’s Soundbox Productions supplies the DiGiCo console with the DMI-KLANG card, as well as the Sound Devices Astral ARX16 wireless system.
A complex network
“Our whole show runs on a big Dante network, with Rupert Neve Designs RMP-D8 preamps for all of our main band inputs,” explains Bond, who has worked with Our Lady Peace and Alexisonfire. A DiGiCo SD-Rack handles auxiliary inputs such as talkback mics, and because the DMI card is limited to 64 Dante channels, playback reaches him over MADI.
Beyond the band, Bond matrixes much of the tech crew during the show. He added several Elgato Stream Deck controllers so some personnel could create their own comms channels, and ran Ethernet to the video director so he could control his own KLANG mix with KLANG:app.
Our input list is at 80-plus, but then once I have all these talkbacks and everything else, my console is really like a big switchboard for a lot of things. I am actually using KLANG for every single mix, including the tech mixes. I don’t think we could do all this without it, says Bond.
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Space in the mix
Bond first used KLANG in 2020 with a KLANG:fabrik and has now moved to the DMI-KLANG card for native console integration. “KLANG’s immersiveness makes it just so easy to make a mix sound really good without fighting anything, especially when you have that many input channels,” he explains.
With a singer, he can move elements around to leave space for the vocal without it being too loud or buried. For the musicians, adding the audience mix and spreading it around creates a more natural experience on stage.
That’s what KLANG helps bring to the table: making moments where you can feel like you’re almost not wearing your in-ears anymore, Bond concludes.
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