New York, NY (May 1, 2025)—Currently in the middle of a four-night stand at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, Charli XCX’s Brat Tour has been circling the globe since kicking off last July. While the New York shows close out the U.S. leg of the journey, the pop songstress has plenty of live work ahead, with nearly a dozen European festivals lined up for the summer months. Along for the ride are front of house engineer Mat Collis and Barry Tymms, monitor engineer.
Ensuring consistency of sound throughout the tour, Collis and Tymms have been overseeing DiGiCo desks provided by Eighth Day Sound (Highland Heights, OH), with an SD12-96 used in monitor world and a Quantum 338 taking pride of place at front of house.
Collis has worked with the artist for 13 years, only missing a handful of shows in that time. At his house mix position, Collis gets 32 channels of playback arriving via MADI to an Orange Box, DiGiCo’s bi-direction audio format conversion unit. The Orange Box uses DMI cards to create audio paths across any interface and has dual power supplies for added security.
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“In addition to the audio needed for the show, we also have timecode and an internal BLDS (Buffer Loop detection Signal) for redundant switching,” he said. “We also have analog back-up signals, talkback for the sound team and for Charli if she needs it. The increased channel count on the Quantum 338 is useful; even with a vocal and track gig, you can quickly rack up the channel count, especially when you take the effects returns and duplicated inputs into account.”
There’s three banks of faders available on the surface of the Quantum 338 and Collis makes use of them not only for mixing the show but also for additional feeds for broadcast, recordings or social media.
“I tend to send broadcast stems from the stage rack, but occasionally it’s just a left and right instrumental, with Charli’s vocal separated, or a direct MADI split,” he recalls. “Having pretty much all your channels in front of you is great and the Macros are really powerful; there are so many handy things you can utilize them for. I also love the Snapshot function, using it to lift levels during the chorus or switch tracks on and off.”
At monitors, Tymms’ SD12-96 has 96 channels at 48 kHz / 96 kHz and he uses many of the 155 Dynamic EQ processors that can be assigned to any input or output channel. The main show is entirely to track, with guest artists, such as Lorde, Yung Lean and Addison Rae making surprise appearances.
“I started with Charli XCX for the run of U.K. Arena shows, so I’ve been with the tour just a few months,” he says. “I use loads of Snapshots during the shows and when we have guest singers, I have additional Snapshots that I can incorporate for the extra checks we need. I love the two screens on the SD12-96 and the number of macros is really handy, especially on a small surface.”
