Justin Timberlake is currently crossing the States on the Man of the Woods tour, the artist’s sixth major worldwide event. His two live sound engineers, Andy Meyer and Paul Klimson, both rely on DiGiCo consoles supplied by Clair Global, the touring sound reinforcement provider.
FOH engineer Meyer is at a DiGiCo SD7 receiving 200 input paths, with 138 outputs. “I’ve got snapshots for changes that I want to make, and I fire it all off of timecode,” he says, adding that the snapshots are starting points. “I don’t EQ the system—I let the system be the system and I fix it in snapshots. If there’s a frequency bugging you, you find out what it is and then you put a snapshot in to clean it up. It’s level-wise that I’m doing the work in real time.”
Related: Justin Timberlake 20/20 Experience Tour Profile, by Steve Jennings, March 1, 2014
Meyer likes to be hands-on with Timberlake’s vocal: “You can’t just leave that up,” he says. “That’s because everyone is everywhere [on stage], so I have to make changes around that. Every once in a while you have that magic show that’s perfect, but it’s pretty much always an adjustment situation.”
Monitor engineer Klimson has worked with Timberlake since the artist’s 20/20 tour in 2013. “The SD7 is the only console to use when you’re talking big channel counts,” he says, citing the surface layout, “flexibility of programming with the macros, and having the ability to see many channels at once without having to page around to find things. There are two stage racks and a Nano rack, and I use all of the inputs, so we’re at 140 channels. There are 32 stereo monitor mixes between Justin, the dancers and the band; they have a couple of players who come and go. We are very lucky working with these guys!”
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