LOS ANGELES – In just a few short years, Benson Boone has gone from a brief stint on American Idol and his first chart-topping single to opening for Taylor Swift at London’s Wembley Stadium and performing on the main stage at Coachella 2025. With his highly anticipated second album, American Heart, dropping on June 20, Boone is currently playing the summer festival circuit, followed by arena shows across the US and Europe, including Madison Square Garden, with DiGiCo Quantum338 consoles supplied by Clair Global at front-of-house and monitors.
Joey Diehl, Boone’s FOH mixer since early 2024, is a longtime DiGiCo fan, and has been using the Quantum338 since it was released, during the pandemic. “At the time, I was with Special Event Services, doing a lot of streaming shows. It’s one of my favorite consoles I’ve ever used,” he says. “It feels very modern and up-to-date with current requirements, with the things that people are looking for and what sounds good now – and it keeps getting better.”
Carter Luckett, who has mixed monitors with Boone since August 2024, is another DiGiCo aficionado, using them at both monitors and FOH over recent years. “I toured heavily on the Quantum225, then upgraded to the Quantum338 a couple years ago,” he reports. “For monitors, it’s hard to use anything else because of the functionality and the speed with which you’re able to get around the desk and get mixes pulled up quickly and accurately. Quantum desks have really changed the way I work, and with the new Quantum processing, I’ve got a lot more ‘flavor’ to work with, building on the already robust, consistent DiGiCo infrastructure. It’s my preferred workflow.”
Coachella was a highlight of this year’s tour dates so far, not least because Queen guitarist Brian May joined Boone for his rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Luckett had to stay alert as the high level of movement on stage by Boone didn’t favor the use of wedges, put out exclusively for May. With both artists operating in the same space, Luckett expertly merged the two environments together. “Obviously, we didn’t want any squeals or squawks, so I would ride his mic in and out based on where he was on stage to keep his vocal from feeding back,” he says. “But it worked out.”
While Diehl uses some outboard gear, he’s equally happy relying on DiGiCo’s onboard Mustard and Spice Rack processing when there’s not enough real estate for racks at FOH. “Give me 30 minutes and a pair of headphones and I’ll be set because I love everything on the DiGiCo. Even with outboard, I still use the EQ on the desk. The way that you can send things and build out files is very close to what I would do at home in a studio, so it’s given me the ability to have that studio process on the road.”
Diehl continues, “The best thing for me are the macros and how the snapshots work. I don’t think any other console has yet gotten close to how powerful the snapshots on the DiGiCo can be. It can do anything, and it can do it really well. I do some crazy stuff; there are songs where I have 20-something snapshots. I am doing such minutiae in these snapshots, but it makes a massive difference.”
It took a lot of programming, he says, but his efforts are matched by the musicians, who have worked hard to replicate Boone’s recordings. “Our MD is amazingly critical and famously very detailed oriented. Lately, we’ve been landing the actual record in playback; I’ll go back and forth between my mix and the record. By the end of the song, I can press play and say, ‘OK, this sounds like the record.’ And it’s all saved to the snapshots,” and driven by the show’s timecode.
“I have a couple of outboard analog pieces,” Luckett reveals, together with a hardware reverb, “just to polish Benson’s vocal and give it a little saturation to set it apart. It’s an extra sauce to add to Benson’s mix to make him feel comfortable in his own space. He’s the star of the show, so we’ve got a solid band mix, then his vocal just floats right on top of it. That chain, paired up with what’s inside the DiGiCo for the rest of the band, really complement each other.”
Elaborating on the musicians’ in-ear mixes, he says, “The keys player is our band leader, so he wants to hear each musician equally to keep tabs on everything that’s being played. He wants to hear an honest representation of what each player is creating. That’s where the DiGiCo helps – it’s really easy to get good, clean sounds that replicate what each player is actually playing, not coloring the sound, and without having to scoop ‘mud.’ But when you want to add some flavor, you have Mustard and Spice Rack, which give me a nice, almost front-of-house mix for my artist, while maintaining these clean, honest mixes for the players – or even give a fun little mix to somebody who wants to hear the record, or some version of it.”
As for the rest of the band, he continues, “I’ve got one player who wants a really dry mix that’s mostly her on guitar, no reverb on anything. The bass player wants more of a record feel, where he gets Benson’s reverb and a little more treatment and compression to round things out and help glue everything together. The drummer is similar to the guitar player, where he wants a fairly dry mix – but he mostly wants click and drums, like most drummers.”
This next leg of the tour passes through North America and Europe, before ending up in the Middle East in December, and offers few breaks, the pair say. “If it wasn’t a DiGiCo console and it wasn’t Clair Global, I swear it would be impossible, logistically. As much as I love other production companies and other consoles, this is how it has to be to get it done,” Diehl comments. Luckett agrees: “You can get a DiGiCo anywhere in the world, and even if it’s not the exact same console, you can convert the file. It’s the only way for us to get through some of these shows.”
That said, Diehl and Luckett recently spent some time at Clair Global’s HQ in Lititz, PA, getting familiar with the new DiGiCo Quantum852. They are looking forward to adopting the new console when they have the opportunity, likely this fall, during production rehearsals for the arena tour. “It feels very familiar, but it also has loads of new features. It’ll be fun to figure out exactly what new implementations you can do with it,” Luckett says. Diehl adds, “I sat down and made a file, and it only took me a few hours, so I could do a show on the Quantum852 right now!”
For details on Benson Boone’s upcoming tour stops, visit www.bensonboone.com. Clair Global can be found online at www.clairglobal.com. For more information about DiGiCo consoles, go to www.DiGiCo.biz.
