Co-Headliners Enrique Iglesias, Ricky Martin and Pitbull Extend the Successful Tour
The Trilogy Tour lives up to its name at every angle: Not only does it feature three of the biggest acts in music, but it comes with the individual teams of stars Enrique Iglesias, Ricky Martin and Pitbull.
“Each artist has its full team of audio engineers, production and tour managers, and lighting people,” explains Iglesias’ FOH engineer Brad Divens. And all the audio and lighting crewmembers are all on their own consoles, so “front of house is pretty big.” They only share system techs and a stage manager. These stars are truly co-headlining, rotating the first, second and third position every night, so there are a lot of moving parts, which are greased with extreme professionalism and cooperation from all parties involved.
Ricky Martin’s FOH engineer Jorge Frontera insists that the three full team configuration for each artist is less complicated than at first glance. “In my case, sharing FOH space with Brad and Wil [Madera/Pitbull] is really cool. We help each other when needed.”
Gear-wise, there are plenty of other stars on this 22-truck tour, too. The tour’s audio features a “monster JBL rig, and the lights and video are over the top,” Divens adds. The stage is clean — no wedges, no sidefills — all IEM. The audio vendor is Sound Image, a Clair Global Brand.
Competing with the Crowd
Brad Divens, Enrique Iglesias’ FOH engineer, hails from McConnellsburg, PA and was a professional musician before sitting behind the console. In 1995, he got an offer to move to Los Angeles to play with Back Alley Gators. When that group stalled, his manager asked if he’d consider being a tour manager. Divens shrugged “sure” and in 1997, he went to work with Agnes Gooch just as they were on the rise. Soon he was doing that and mixing as well for the likes of Kilgore, System of a Down, Machine Head, Slayer and Monster Magnet — among others. A big break came when he got a call to mix Linkin Park until they’d find somebody else — and that week they sold 50,000 records. Jane’s Addiction, Cyndi Lauper and Garbage followed.
Interestingly enough, Divens made the leap to Iglesias through Garbage. “His team found me online doing a tutorial with Waves talking about my mixing layout and flow with Garbage,” he explains. An audition and an offer followed. “My approach to mixing is as a rock mixer. I didn’t know how else to approach Enrique’s music, but I must have done something right, because I’m into my tenth year with him.” (Not exclusively — he also mixes Disturbed regularly.)
Prior to 2021, Divens was on the Avid S6L. But on a visit to Nashville’s Blackbird Studio, he first listened to a Yamaha
Rivage PM10, was immediately smitten and made the switch. His outboard toybox includes a Rupert Neve Designs Shelford Channel mic preamp, Empirical Labs EL8 Distressor and SSL Bus+ stereo compressor. “I send all my groups out of the desk through Rupert Neve Designs analog summing mixers, and then a went a little ‘mad scientist’” with some other components.
The band Divens mixes consists of Iglesias, a drummer, a percussionist, two guitar players, a bass player, keyboards, a DJ, two background singers and a few tracks thrown in — percussion loops and soundscapes that can’t be reproduced live. It’s almost exclusively DPA mics, all run on Shure Axient wireless. Iglesias and his background singers are all on d:facto supercardioid 4018V capsules. The drums are all DPAs. Two of guitarists are on Shure Beta 58 capsules.
Divens’ biggest challenge is dealing with the enthusiasm of the audience. “My mix sits around 98-99 dB — that’s where I’m comfortable. But the crowd can sometimes get between 105-110 dB, and I’m never gonna compete with that.” What is not a challenge is that 40-foot thrust where the artist, mic in hand, spends most of the show in front of the P.A. “I have this little trick that seems to work, which is pulling the low-pass filter to 10k. That works, because I’m not trying to get 12k or 14k out of the vocal mic — what is the point?”
“There’s Nothing That’s Slow”
Pitbull’s FOH engineer Wil Madera was born and raised in New York City, though he spent significant time in the Dominican Republic, the birthplace of both his parents. In high school his music teacher turned him on to audio engineering, and he took to the technical side of music. That same teacher recommended him to the Institute of Audio Research (now part of Five Towns College). After that, Madera started working off-Broadway shows and various New York theaters. After being hired by a local sound company, he worked bigger theaters, including the Blender Theater at Gramercy and Irving Plaza. “Sometimes, I was mixing 10 metal bands in one day,” he says. “That’s when I really got experience in music and understanding audio workflow.”
In 2008, he made friends with then-Pitbull drummer Omar Tavarez. Madera was mixing for a Venezuelan artist, Jeremías, at a little club where Tavares was. “He fell in love with the mix, introduced me to Pitbull. I worked Pitbull’s first solo tour and have been with him ever since.” Along the way, Madera also worked with Colombian artist Sebastián Yatra, Daughtry and Karol G, among others. But Pitbull has always been his main act. “It’s been a great experience — I’ve learned so much from him — and he keeps us all on track, too.”
Pitbull was an opening act for Iglesias in his early days, and this is their fourth tour working together. “As the three artists are truly co-headlining, there are so many elements going on — it’s a big show for all three.”
Madera is mixing on a Yamaha Rivage PM5, which he began using on the tour he did with Pitbull last summer. “I fell in love with it,” he says. There was a learning curve, and he admits there was a bit of a “rough start,” but “now I don’t want to change.” He is in the process of making some changes with his outboard gear, and just starting using the Mäag Audio EQ4-500 series Air Band EQ for his mix box. He also has an SSL G Comp 500 Series Stereo Bus Compressor at work and has just added a Kush Tweezer Compressor 500 for drums, which, “I gotta tell you, I’m in love with it.”
Pitbull’s backing band — The Agents — consists of drums, percussion, bass guitar, keys and a DJ. Here too, there are some tracks involved to give it that “pop/hip-hop show feel,” Madera says. “His tracks are very house-y and EDM-ish and everything is at a super-fast tempo. There’s nothing that’s slow.” There’s nothing terribly quiet either: “Everything is like above 110 dB.” Pitbull’s mic of choice is the Sennheiser 9000. “For drums, we’re using the sE Electronics microphones with some Sennheisers in that mix, too.” Some DPA 4090s and 2011s are put to work as well.
“The entire crew — audio, lighting and video — is so good,” Madera says. “And the System Tech [team]… sometimes we don’t even need to do a sound check. They do such an amazing job every night that the place sounds the same.”
FOH III
Jorge Frontera, Ricky Martin’s FOH engineer, was born in Puerto Rico, where he still resides. “I got into music first by playing the guitar,” he says. “Then, at 12 years old, my father bought me my first audio console.” (This rockets his dad high up on that “Coolest Dad Ever” list.) Frontera began spinning as a DJ at parties, then graduated to mixing small bands. “At 16, I got the opportunity to work in Wichie Sound Performance, the biggest audio company in the Caribbean. I’m still an employee at Wichie Sound to this day.”
At 19, Frontera took the opportunity to tour with Latin singer Luis Fonsi as his monitor engineer. Since then, he’s also worked with Ricardo Arjona, Romeo Santos and Carlos Vives, among others. One of his mentors, Carlos “Coco” Martinez, was Martin’s FOH engineer for years, and passed away in 2014. Martin’s team elected to move Frontera over to that spot, and in 2020, he got the spot permanently. “For me, it’s been a big honor to try to fill Coco’s shoes.”
Martin’s band has nine musicians, some playing multiple instruments. Frontera is taking care of drums, percussion, bass, guitars, keyboards, brass section and background vocals. Despite his experience with the group, this Trilogy tour is a big show for him. “At the beginning you feel the pressure, but then everything runs smoothly. We have a 30-minute changeover between each one, and usually they do it in less than 20.” New is Frontera’s choice of desks: he has mixed on DiGiCo consoles his entire time with Martin and last year he moved to the Quantum 338 with two 32-bit SD Racks. He’s quite fond of that board, from the three big high-resolution screens to the Quantum processing. “I like to use DiGiCo at FOH because you can do whatever you want with it.”
Outboard-wise, he’s using Waves Soundgrid plug-ins with two Extreme Servers in the system. Added are a Rupert Neve Designs Shelford Channel and 5045 Primary Source Enhancer for Martin’s vocals. “There’s a Briscasti M7 Effects processor for Ricky’s vocal as well,” he adds. The latest addition is a Sonic Farm Creamliner III that is inserted on his master bus — and Frontera credits Divens for the tip on that, as he uses it as well.
Microphone-wise, “Ricky is a long time Sennheiser user. When I got here, he was using a Sennheiser 5200 with the Neumann capsule, and we changed to the new Sennheiser 6000 system with the MM435 capsule. With the MM435 capsule, we have more control of noise.” Frontera says his biggest challenge is that long runway. “Ricky is singing most of the time in front of the P.A.”
Teamwork
The trio of audio engineers are happy with the JBL VTX system being used, which Divens first heard on tour in Turkey. “I run Pink Floyd as my system music to test the P.A. I ran the music up and thought it sounded incredible,” Divens says. A year or so later he got a call from his fellow FOH engineer Ken “Pooch” Van Druten talking about the new VTX A12. He flew out with his Iglesias tracks and was sold. For this tour, Madera was already using the VTX rig, and it was easy convincing Frontera to do the same. “All the engineers agreed that this is what we were going use — it’s been great.”
Despite the three very different teams, they all have at least one thing in common: “Everybody gets along,” Madera says. “Sometimes on a tour, it can be hard, but not on this one. It’s like a big family.” Frontera also is grateful for the crew. “Working with all of these great techs and musicians is the best — the entire crew is really awesome!”
Monitorworld Goes High-Tech
With three headliners and three FOH engineers, the tour also has a trilogy of monitor engineers. Each has a different approach, yet all are employing KLANG:konductor to impart an immersive feeling into their monitor mixes.
Eddie “El Brujo” Caipo has been in the Enrique Iglesias camp as monitor engineer for a dozen years, and has also worked with Gwen Stefani, Matchbox Twenty, Christina Aguilera and Tears for Fears — among others. He’s “an Avid user, and I truly love what they offer,” and is currently on an S6L-32 desk augmented with two DSP cards, Waves and Titan servers. Plug-ins include Waves, McDSP, Empirical Labs and Oeksound Soothe.
Caipo started using KLANG:konductor last year. “It works well,” he reports. He’s sending pre-fader/post-mute direct outs via MADI to retain all his plug-in processing, and creating his mixes — 21 in total, with several of them within the KLANG:app — then routes them to a stereo pair of inputs, which are sent to the desired aux mix to the IEMs. His console receives timecode to trigger snapshots, simultaneously sending MIDI to the KLANG:konductor to trigger the snapshots in KLANG. “I work around a few things to not disrupt my workflow, as KLANG was mostly designed to be used on DiGiCo platforms.” That aside, he says the advantage is it makes the sound more open and “less in your head, which allows for running lower overall volume.”
César Benítez has been mixing monitors for Ricky Martin since 2021 and recently upgraded to a KLANG:konductor loaded with two MADI-B DMI cards connected to his DiGiCo Quantum5 console, as well as adding an onstage KLANG:kontroller giving the drummer quick hands-on access to his own IEM mixes. “The KLANG:konductor and Quantum5 can easily handle this amount of processing and still leave me room for more,” says Benítez, who controls his immersive mixes both natively on the console and via KLANG:app running on an external computer screen.
Matt Holden has been an integral part of Team Pitbull since January of 2015 and is using a DiGiCo Quantum5, recently upgrading from a DMI-KLANG card to a KLANG:konductor with the optical card. He primarily controls KLANG via his console, using the external touchscreen monitor for setup and the visual representation. “Using KLANG has made my job easier, by providing a great-sounding mix naturally without having to use more plug-ins to enhance the stereo image, and by using less EQ to clean up the muddiness of the mix.”
The Trilogy Tour wrapped up March 10, 2024 at Amalie Arena in Tampa, FL.
AUDIO CREW
- Sound Company: Sound Image/Clair Global
- Enrique Iglesias Crew: Brad Divens (FOH engineer); Eddie “El Brujo” Caipo (monitor engineer); Ben Gordon (monitor tech)
- Ricky Martin Crew: Jorge Frontera (FOH engineer); César Benítez (monitor engineer); Carson Chambliss (monitor tech); Caleb Wetenkamp (A2)
- Pitbull Crew: Wilberto Madera (FOH engineer); Matt Holden (monitor engineer); Alex Martinez (monitor tech)
- Additional Crew: Stephanie Van Ravensway (audio crew chief/RF tech); Justin McIntyre (lead P.A. tech); Bill Chase (systems engineer); Tucker Arbuthnot (SR P.A. tech/FOH tech)
P.A. GEAR
- Main Hangs: (96) JBL VTX A12
- Front Fills: (12) VTX A8
- Side Fills: (12) VTX A8
- Subs: (42) JBL VTX B28 (24 flown, 18 ground)
- Power: Crown HD 12K
FOH GEAR
- Enrique Iglesias: Yamaha Rivage PM10; Rupert Neve Designs Shelford Channel preamp, 542 Tape Emulator, 535 compressor; Mäag Audio EQ4; Empirical Labs EL8 Distressor; Sonic Farm Creamliner III
- Ricky Martin: DiGiCo Quantum 338, (2) 32-bit SD Racks; Waves Soundgrid;
- Rupert Neve Designs Shelford Channel, 5045 Primary Source Enhancer; Bricasti M7; Sonic Farm Creamliner III
- Pitbull: Yamaha Rivage PM5; SSL G Comp 500 Series Stereo Bus Compressor; Rupert Neve Designs Shelford Channel; Mäag Audio EQ4 500; Kush Tweezer compressor 500; Cranborne Carmen preamp 500; Sonic Farm CreamLiner III
Mon Gear
- Monitor Consoles: Avid S6L-32 (Enrique Iglesias); (2) DiGiCo Quantum5 (Pitbull, Ricky Martin)
- IEM Processing: KLANG:konductor
- Vocal Mics: Sennheiser 6000 with MM435 capsule (Ricky Martin); Sennheiser 9000 (Pitbull); DPA d:facto 4018V capsule (Enrique Iglesias)
