Los Angeles, CA (June 10, 2026)—Anyone who attended NAMM 2026 and happened to be in the Hilton on January 22 can attest to the popularity of Charlie Puth. An estimated 3,000 fans crammed the ballroom level that afternoon, hoping to get one of the few hundred seats inside the artist’s “Mix With The Masters” panel, where he broke down his tracks for the audience. The explosive number of attendees who turned out was an eye-opener at a convention that has seen everything over the years—and it was also an inadvertent preview of the fan support that’s buoyed Puth’s Whatever’s Clever World Tour since it kicked off in April.
Carrying sound provided by Clair Global, the journey behind Puth’s fourth studio album finds him fronting a backing band with drums, bass, guitars, keyboards, and three backup vocalists. Putting the mix together nightly is FOH engineer/production manager Mike Schaeffer and monitor engineer Josh Cruz, each working behind DiGiCo Quantum5 consoles.
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 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 EQ, and a diode-bridge compressor that Schaeffer uses on 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,” said Schaeffer. “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.”
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Over at stageside, Cruz, who joined Puth’s crew in 2022, aimed to keep a straightforward workflow in monitor world. “I tend to take a very basic approach to monitor mixing,” he said. “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.
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“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,” he added. “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.”