Charlie Puth Takes to the Road with Clever DiGiCo Quantum5 Consoles

LOS ANGELES, California – June 2026 – Chart-topper and multi-award-winner Charlie Puth’s Whatever’s Clever World Tour is just that; it will take the singer-songwriter-producer on one of his largest live productions to date, with headline dates across North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific, starting in April in San Diego and closing (so far) in Perth, Australia in November, in support of his fourth studio album. Onstage, it’s a tight group: besides the artist there are drums, bass, guitars, keyboards, and three backup vocalists. For production manager Mike Schaeffer, who is also mixing front of house, and Josh Cruz at monitors, their instruments are equally important: a pair of DiGiCo Quantum5 consoles, supplied for the tour by Clair Global.

“The Quantum console has been on the rider for Charlie since 2018,” says Schaeffer. “It’s always been my preferential console. I’ve always chosen DiGiCo, and so the console became a requirement based on anything we were doing.”

Both consoles are on a single Optocore network, sharing it with an SD-Rack and an SD-MiNi Rack, as well as an Orange Box bidirectional audio-format converter that connects between any two of the compatible DiGiCo Multichannel Interface (DMI) cards. In this case, some of the outboard used on the tour includes various Waves plug-ins, as well as a Rupert Neve Designs Shelford channel strip that combines transformer-gain microphone preamp, an inductor-based equalizer (EQ), and a diode-bridge compressor that Schaeffer applies to Puth’s vocals. Otherwise, the Quantum5 desks are pretty much the center of all routing as well as processing.

“The Quantum5 is a very comfortable desk to move around on,” he says. “My workflow is pretty straightforward. I do a lot of bus processing. I like the fact that you can send a bus to a bus, which a lot of consoles just didn’t do for a while. I use a Rupert Neve Design master-bus processor and a master-bus transformer. No matter what configuration of outboard and onboard processing I need, the Quantum5 lets me organize it however it best suits my workflow needs.”

Josh Cruz joined Puth crew in 2022, as the band was just formulating itself around the core that would be on the current tour. “DiGiCo has also been my preference for a while. I’m doing a lot more than just your basic channel input to aux output,” he explains. “So having the flexibility of the three banks of faders, a powerful macro section, and the amount of inputs and outputs the Q5 offers were super helpful.”

Cruz describes his goal when monitor mixing as preserving the feel for the musician. “I tend to take a very basic approach to monitor mixing: a lot of my EQs are pretty flat, not a ton of compression going on. The band members are very particular about their sounds and it’s not my place to unnecessarily manipulate any of that. For example, our guitar player uses an Axe-FX and he shapes a lot of his sounds on the front end. He literally says, ‘Do not put any filtering, EQ, or compression on it.’ It’s an XLR straight to the desk and I simply send it right back to him at the level he wants.”

“We’re a little over the 56 I/O an SD-Rack offers in terms of physical inputs coming from the stage, but in total terms of what’s on my desk, I’m almost maxed out: there are a few double-patched inputs, effects returns, and there’s a number of playback channels, which come in over MADI through the Orange Box. We also have the Sound Devices Astral wireless ARX16, running two of them in mirror mode, and that provides all of our vocal inputs. Plus, I have a number of utility channels that I’m using to allow for some tech control. It expands well beyond the normal use case of an input channel being something coming from stage.”

Fortunately, the Quantum5 is more than up to the task, designed, as Cruz puts it, “to remove the guardrails around what it means when you look at an input channel, an aux, a group, or a matrix,” he says. “I can essentially take any of those things and turn them into anything that I want and route them anywhere. And because of that, it has allowed me to push the limits as to what each of those things can do.”

Another capability both engineers celebrate about DiGiCo’s Quantum technology is its ability to manage control from numerous sources via massive I/O capacity, Optocore fiber loops, DMI cards (Dante, MADI, Waves), and extensive software integration. “One thing that I really appreciate is that the DiGiCo consoles have the ability to have external control from a number of different sources,” says Cruz. “Being able to incorporate the console into a network is pretty common in a lot of consoles these days, but with the Quantum5, specifically, I’m able to control it from multiple sources at monitors.” He cites the software Companion by Bitfocus using a custom module called DiGiPanion by fellow DiGiCo user David Lim, which allows operators to manage tasks such as triggering complex macros and interfacing with external platforms such as DAW systems, with a single button press. “The flexibility of what DiGiCo has made available through their OSC control has been super helpful for me,” he says. “Capabilities like that, and the ability to let us work the way we want to, is why DiGiCo is always the top choice.”

For details on Charlie Puth’s upcoming tour stops, visit www.charlieputh.com. Clair Global can be found online at www.clairglobal.com.

About DiGiCo

‍DiGiCo is a UK-based manufacturer of some of the world’s most popular, successful and groundbreaking digital mixing consoles for the live, theater, broadcast and postproduction industries and is exclusively distributed in the US by Group One Ltd. of Farmingdale, New York. For more information, go to www.DiGiCo.biz.

Photo Credit: Grace Tom / @gracet0m