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JACOB COLLIER The GRAMMY Award-winning musician updates his live set up with the help of long-time engineer, Ben Bloomberg.
Making his start by uploading YouTube videos in 2011, the young Jacob Collier caught attention of non-other than Quincy Jones. After signing to the famed music producers’ management company, Collier has gone from strength to strength, scooping two GRAMMYs, releasing two albums and becoming a force to be reckoned with as a live performer. Since 2015, Collier and Ben Bloomberg, a PhD student from MIT Media Lab, have become a live tour-de-force. After seeing his videos online, Bloomberg put himself forward to produce a one-man-show unlike another with custom vocal harmonisers, and instruments. With a new album, Djesse Vol. 1, Collier set our on a new tour with a whole new live set up in collaboration with Bloomberg. “This latest tour covers the world of Jacob’s newest album with some favourites from In My Room as well,” began Bloomberg. “For the first time, Jacob is touring with a band which includes Rob Mularkey on bass (and among a litany of instruments), Christian Euman on drums and Maro Secca singing, playing guitar, keys, harmoniser, percussion.” Moving away from the one-man-band concept of prior tours, Bloomberg explained how the team has upscaled in recent years. “Previously Jacob stood in a circle of 14 instruments, playing and looping them all. Now we have four people on stage playing almost that many instruments each,” stated Bloomberg. “The setup has become increasingly
complex and this puts a huge demand on the audio team. We’ve added a monitor engineer to help manage the increased responsibility along with our own mics, wireless and desks to maintain some consistency.” For this run, both the band and crew wanted to avoid playback and click tracks for the audience to experience the talent of all four musicians. For Collier’s latest album, he employed the services of The Metropole Orkest, which presented an interesting challenge to recreate some of tracks live. “This requires everyone to have access to a staggering number of sounds and textures in quick succession,” explained Bloomberg. He furthered: “We achieved this with two complementary technical goals. First was to make all the technology needed for the performance run on a single laptop. This helped to lower costs, but also meant we could provide complete redundancy for the whole rig by adding a backup laptop. Second, we wanted a system that would work with both Dante and MADI based mixing desks, as these are the most commonly found digital audio protocols.” At the core of Collier’s live set up was a range of Focusrite products which the audio department would be “stuck without,” according Bloomberg. He continued: “The Rednet The D64R Dante to MADI conversion allows us to replicate our computer IO flexibly to both desks with essentially zero latency. This is critical because we are looping for parts of 08
