On September 13, Rome’s Vatican City hosted Grace for the World, the first-ever music concert held in St. Peter’s Square, reportedly drawing more than a quarter of a million people to the venerable plaza.
Also streamed live on Disney+, Hulu, and ABC, a massive worldwide audience tuned in to witness uplifting musical messages delivered by a star-studded lineup, including co-directors Andrea Bocelli and Pharrell Williams, along with John Legend, Jennifer Hudson, Jelly Roll, Karol G, and others. And making sure that all of the music performed at this historic event came through crystal clear was a pair of DiGiCo Quantum852 consoles, at front of house and monitors, provided by the Berlin, Germany office of Clair Global.
“This was more than a concert, it was a true event, and the broadcast put it on a level with a world-class awards show,” observes Jeremy Peters, who works from Clair Global subsidiary Sound Image’s Escondido, California office, and who served as the production’s audio co-designer with audio supervisor Michael Abbott.
Peters says he turned to the DiGiCo Quantum852, the desk he says that he and FOH engineer Kyle Hamilton have been using religiously since it was introduced. He likes its analog feel, but also how it puts so much information at his fingertips. “For the monitor person on a show like this, that’s critical,” he says, noting that the monitor input count was nearly maxed out.
And while he’s a fan of the Quantum processing, especially Mustard, Peters says it was the console’s flexibility that made it work. “This show was by far more ins and outs than I have ever had to manage. Normally, on an event like this, you’d likely have two monitor engineers, two house engineers, a dialog mixer, and so on. But, here, it was one front of house guy and everything else was coming through me on stage.”
The Quantum852 offered Grace for the World’s FOH engineer, Kyle Hamilton, the processing he needed to manage all of the individually mic’ed instruments on stage, which particularly helped control the impact of the percussion instruments in the reverberant space. In fact, he says, it all came down to management. “The Quantum852 was on it, one hundred percent,” he says. “The multiple worksurface layers, the routing flexibility — it let us what we had to do to corral that massive infrastructure. The workflow let us do multiple things at the same time, because everybody needed something different — often at the same time! So that flexibility was huge. Any other desk just wouldn’t have been able to handle it.”
