It would be hard to argue against Saturday Night Live being among the most iconic and internationally known creations of US broadcasting history. The late-night live sketch comedy show embraced its 50th anniversary with a series of special events, culminating in SNL 50: The Homecoming Concert. The show was broadcast live from Radio City Music Hall, appeared at select IMAX theatres and can be streamed on NBCUniversal’s Peacock.
As much known for its musical performances as for its comedy, SNL has been a unique and progressive stage for music throughout its 50 years- with performances by icons of every era within those years, as well as a launchpad for new voices. Artists returning to recreate the magic for this singular event included Lady Gaga, Cher, Dave Grohl, David Byrne, Miley Cyrus, Jack White, Bonnie Raitt, Jelly Roll and Ms. Lauryn Hill. Appearances by SNL comedy alumni included Steve Martin, John Mulaney, Dave Chappelle, Martin Short and Robert De Niro, with the ensemble hosted by Jimmy Fallon, who performed The Blues Brothers hit, “Soul Man.”
“It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work on a show that has absolutely crazy amounts of music, and at the same time huge amounts of sketch comedy, musical comedy, and dialog,” says Mark Dittmar, VP of Sales for Firehouse Productions, which handled the live-sound reinforcement for the three-hour event. “Every note, every lyric, every word of every bit had to sound great and be totally intelligible to everyone in the house. And it was.”
At the heart of the event’s pristine audio delivery were four DiGiCo Quantum consoles, overseeing a sound system tailored specifically for the occasion.
Supporting the turntable-style stage setup were two DiGiCo Quantum338 consoles for monitor duties and two Quantum7 consoles for front of house, supported by twelve SD-Racks—collectively handling an impressive seven 56-channelsplitters between house and broadcast sound. The pairs of Quantum7 and Quantum338 desks were split between each half of the turntable, with the third stage sharing their worksurfaces. The DiGiCo consoles’ flexible workflows gave the mixers – FOH engineers Jason Crystal, Jamie Pollock, and Dan Gerhart, with Mike Bove and César Benítez mixing monitors – what they needed to mix a diverse range of music genres and performances on the fly.
“DiGiCo is the industry standard for a lot of performers, and the power of these desks is enormous,” Dittmar says. “The Quantum7 is unparalleled with the number of inputs and outputs it can handle. We had a total of seven 56-channel splitters feeding all of the I/O SD-Racks for this, so there was a huge amount of inputs and outputs that were being shared among these desks and at monitors, feeding over 40 in-ear mixes and 30 monitor wedge mixes, plus three sets of stereo side-fills. It was a huge amount of equipment, and it takes a very big desk to accomplish that. Our engineers who were mixing the show are all intimately familiar with the DiGiCo line, specifically the Quantum desks, and they’re very fast on them. That power is what allows them to work so fast.”
Dittmar notes that the DiGiCo consoles’ onboard processing contributed greatly to the production’s efficiency: “That’s what keeps us from having to patch in a lot of extra hardware, which slows the programming,” he explains. “The more you have outboard, the slower everything goes. The more stuff that you can keep in the desk, the faster they can patch and make changes and do what they need to do.”
As smooth as the final show production was, Dittmar says it was the rehearsals that were truly intense, and that was where the DiGiCo desks’ capabilities really shone. “The pace of rehearsals is tougher than the pace of the actual show because that’s when you’re building things, you’re figuring things out,” he says. “A band is telling you that their input list changed, so we have to be able to be very, very fast with our ability to integrate those changes. This is the moment when it all comes together. From that, we build the snapshots that will make up the final show, and DiGiCo excels at that- being able to route things quickly and successfully. If all of a sudden, we need dialog from a comedy act in the ears of someone on the upstage side, because they are going to have to react to the end of that comedy routine, we have to able do that quickly and accurately. So, it’s never just the band on the turntable at the moment- it’s the entire show and everything that’s going on around it. And DiGiCo lets us manage that.”
