Philadelphia, PA (May 31, 2022) — Jazmine Sullivan picked up two Grammy Awards this year—Best R&B Performance and Best R&B Album—for 2021’s Heaux Tales, Mo’ Tales, and now she’s on the road with a string of shows, including with upcoming, high-profile dates at Governor’s Ball Music Festival in New York City and Lollapalooza in Chicago. Along for the ride with Sullivan, her four-piece combo and three backup singers are a pair of DiGiCo SD12 96 consoles, at front of house and monitor positions, part of the audio package put together by Clair Global.
Tonderick “TW” Watkins has done Sullivan’s front-of-house mix for much of the last year. “What I like about the SD12 96 is the same thing that I like about all of the DiGiCo SD consoles: the processing and workflow across all of them is consistent and great,” says TW, who has also mixed FOH for artists like Outkast, Ludicris, and Mary J. Blige. “I recently mixed Ciara at the Lovers & Friends Festival in Las Vegas and all four stages had SD12s on them at some point, along with two SD7s and an SD10 for Lauryn Hill’s monitors. The SDs have different amounts of real estate on them in terms of channel counts, but the processing and operation are the same. No matter where you’re working, you feel at home on an SD.”
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TW tends to turn to the console’s onboard integrated effects processing. “I’m at the point where I just don’t use plug-ins,” he says. “Everything I need is already on the console, in terms of EQ and dynamics. It even has tube emulation, so why would anyone want to use a tube-emulation plug-in, which would just be running an outboard head amp into the console’s head amp? It would just raise the noise floor. No, everything I need is on that console already, and I can put any of it exactly where I want it. It’s the perfect console.”
