LITITZ, PA – Karol G’s 2023-2024 Mañana Será Bonito tour, the subject of Karol G: Tomorrow Was Beautiful, a documentary that premiered May 8 on Netflix, stood out in a number of ways. As noted by Cohesion, she was the first Latin artist to carry her own full PA across South America.
More details from Cohesion (www.cohesionaudio.com):
To say Colombian mega-star Karol G experienced a groundbreaking 2024 minimizes the sheer volume of records she achieved that year. In February alone, her monumental album, Mañana Será Bonito, won both Best Música Urbana Album at the 66th Grammy Awards and became the first Spanish-language album by a female Latin artist to top the Billboard Top 200. She then re-embarked on the tour supporting that historic album, a three-continent trek that launched the previous summer, selling out all 20 shows.
Her tour statistics underscore the weightiness of the endeavor: a total audience of 2.3 million; four consecutive sold-out shows at Estadio Santiago Bernabéu in Madrid; the highest-grossing Latin tour of all-time for a female artist; $307 million in ticket sales; and the first Latin artist to carry her own full PA across South America. Starting this week, fans can watch the Netflix documentary that showcases how Karol G fought to bring her vision of the tour to life.
For such a mammoth undertaking, Karol G was heavily involved in the audio production of her tour, insisting on exceptional clarity and consistency for her PA. The selected Cohesion system became essential to upholding the high standards she held for the record-smashing journey around the world.
“Karol G wanted her music to sound how it does on the records,” explained FOH Engineer John Buitrago. “When you use Cohesion, it’s like mixing in the studio. You can recreate that experience. You don’t need to EQ the PA; you can let it be.”
The South and Latin American performances required eighteen Cohesion CO12 left-right for the main hangs and sixteen CO12 on each side hang. Six Cohesion CP218 II+ subwoofers were front-flown left-right with an additional dozen per side stacked on the ground for low end extension. Eight Cohesion CO8 per side were used as fill, and four delay towers were comprised of ten CO12 each.
The system was bolstered with up to two additional flown CO12 on each main hang, six additional flown and three ground-stacked CP218 II+ per side, and four CO8 per side as needed for venues in North America and Europe. Clair Global deployed the system at each stop.
Cohesion’s lightness and form factor efficiency appealed to the production team, who needed to fit the PA into a 747 airplane for the South American leg of the tour. “The compactness helped 100 percent,” said Head of Production Roly Garbalosa. “It fit perfectly into the plane. It is a compact rig, and we only needed seven pallets. We made it work because of the size.”
Buitrago mixed entirely from the mains 240 feet from his FOH position and remarked that he did not use near field monitors. “You can hear the whole PA without any near field to achieve more accuracy,” said Buitrago, who also mixed Karol G’s 2022 “$trip Love” U.S. and Canada tour using a Cohesion system.
The “Mañana Será Bonito” Tour showcased Karol G’s chart-topping blend of reggaeton, pop, and R&B. “The show sounded absolutely amazing, and John made it sound the same every night,” said System Engineer Paul Jump, who joined the tour in South America. “You could hear every single note of the bass guitar and every low-frequency tone.”
Jump attributed this to the engineering of the CP218 II+. “No sub out there is that efficient and that powerful,” he said. “When you hear that low end, you hear the definition of the notes of the instrument. It’s not just a wall of low end. It’s defined.”
“You could hear all the details,” said Buitrago. “People don’t understand the power of Cohesion.”
Garbalosa concurred that Cohesion “definitely throws—I think it’s a really good product. If the mix is good, it’s going to sound amazing.”
Jump walked each stadium on tour to confirm that “every seat in the house from the floor to the upper balcony” received even coverage and excellent intelligibility from the PA. “If you curve it just a little bit, you get a smoother sound and a more even response in your high end, as well as your low end.”
The open-air South American stadiums on the tour hosted crowds upwards of 100,000 spectators. Often the atmospheric conditions in those latitudes proved to be a challenging variable, as Buitrago illustrated: “In Mexico, it was dry and windy, but El Salvador and Guatemala are very humid. You had to push the MHF and HF, but the Cohesion system had the headroom, tons of it, to do so. In any acoustical conditions, it did a great job.”
Jump recalled how fans frequently provided their own boisterous acoustical conditions. “We had some really, really loud crowds, and John wanted to keep the whole show between 97 and 101 dB. It wasn’t meant to beat anyone up. It was a dynamic, intimate show with acoustic sets.” Significantly, Cohesion kept Karol G “on top of the crowd so everybody could hear her vocals.”
“She was super happy with the sound,” concluded Buitrago. “It was beautiful.
