Maroon 5’s UK+Europe 2023 tour set out recently in support of the band’s seventh studio album, 2021’s Jordi, beginning in Lisbon, Portugal and moving through Spain, Italy, Czech Republic, Denmark, Netherlands, Germany and France before concluding in Birmingham, England, in early July. Now, the band return to their ongoing residency at the Dolby Live venue at Park MGM in Las Vegas.

On the road, Maroon 5 are a ‘stereo band’, while in Las Vegas, they deliver an immersive experience through Dolby’s Atmos format. What remains consistent is their suite of DiGiCo mixing consoles.

Front of house is mixed on a DiGiCo Quantum5 by Vincent Casamatta, while Marcus Douglas manages monitors on an SD5 and Dave Rupsch handles lead singer Adam Levine’s vocals using an SD10. All three consoles share an Optocore network loop and two SD-Racks, were supplied by Clair Global.

Rupsch arrived to focus on lead singer Adam Levine’s vocals in mid-2021 and, according to Casamatta, was a game changer – adding a further console actually reduced the overall amount of gear needed thanks to the desks’ onboard processing and flexible workflow.

‘With everything on the loop, we have less gear and it sounds and works better than it ever did,’ he confirms. ‘It sounds so much better not going through a splitter. The whole package has been really, really solid.’

While the Quantum5 ostensibly mixes the same show regardless of whether it’s Prague or Las Vegas, Casamatta says the shift between stereo on the road and immersive in Las Vegas has subtle but significant distinctions.

‘I need my stereo show on the DiGiCo to exist at all times behind the immersive mix and vice versa,’ he says. ‘So I’m literally booting up the same show file whether I’m mixing an immersive show or have a stereo two-bus mix happening. It doesn’t matter. And that was a huge mandate of mine because I didn’t want to compromise. No matter what format we were doing I wanted it to be the same mix, and the Quantum5 made that easy.’

To accomplish this, Casamatta uses a combination of subgroups and Madi to assure that each of the audio ‘objects’ used in the Atmos mix retain the same processing used in the stereo mix on the road. ‘I have a lot of groups anyway in my stereo mix, and I was able to use those to create objects out of them,’ he explains. ‘I already have a complete kick bus and a snare bus and a vocal bus, so I can just send those out as objects into the immersive environment.’

Rupsch says that the ease with which he does his job is a combination of being on the same page as the singer and the layout of his DiGiCo SD10 console – which feeds JH Audio Roxanne IEMs on a Shure PSM 1000 wireless system, the same units the rest of the band use. ‘The whole workflow is definitely streamlined by all of us being on the same loop,’ he says. ‘Without a splitter, I’m getting Adam’s vocals right from the source, so the sound quality couldn’t be more pristine.’

His approach to mixing is largely the same, whether on the road or in Las Vegas – where he also has three horn players and two backup vocalists – although the Park MGM can present challenges: ‘Adam spends a lot of time on the stage thrust, and it’s not unusual to get some PA bleed into the vocal microphone there,’ he explains. ‘But in Las Vegas, there are three PA hangs that shoot directly onto the thrust, so there are artifacts such as differing arrival times, plus there’s slapback from the back wall of what is a smaller venue than most of the shows we’ve been doing.’

To counter, he brings in a Neve 5045 Primary Source Enhancer analogue processor through an I/O on the console. He combines this with a switch from Levine’s long-time Shure SM58 vocal mic to a newer Shure KSM-11. ‘That combination of the 5045 and the much tighter mic capsule solves the problem,’ he says. ‘I also like the computer landing pad on the SD10, which is really convenient for dialling in other plug-ins and fine-tuning the filters on noise gates. The console’s got a lot of features, but because everything’s so easy and intuitive to use, I can keep the focus on Adam’s vocals.’

Douglas has moved up the ranks in the Maroon 5 universe, starting as the monitor tech in 2015, becoming the band’s sole monitor engineer in 2019, shortly before Adam Levine’s monitor mixes acquired their own silo. The SD5 he uses for monitors was also his first extended experience with DiGiCo desks, and he was glad to have the introduction. ‘The SD5 sounds great and has a very easy, intuitive workflow,’ he says. ‘I could walk right up to it and get started immediately.’

Douglas says everything he needs – from gates to compressors to effects – are onboard and to hand for the five band members: ‘I also like the Con-Send feature that we use on the loop, which integrates the talkback and shout speakers without having to use up any extra channels. It seems DiGiCo really thought of everything.’

‘DiGiCo did a great job of giving engineers tools to make artistic and aesthetic choices without needing outboard gear,’ Casamatta agrees. ‘It’s the complete package.’