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“The Phil Collins Story” on tour with DiGiCo and Klang
“The Phil Collins Story”, a docu-concert celebrating the life, career, and music of performer and songwriter Phil Collins, debuted February 3, 2026, at the Landmark Theatre in Syracuse, New York, and then embarked on a 50-city North American tour.
Chronicling Collins’ time from Genesis to his solo career, “The Phil Collins Story” brings the artist’s music to life with audio, dynamic projections and lighting. Audio for the show is delivered through a DiGiCo Quantum225 console, provided by Clair Global, managing both front-of-house and monitor duties, with the latter critically utilizing a DiGiCo DMI-Klang card for signal distribution and control, paired with iPads running Klang:App for the musicians on stage.
“It’s not really a film or just a concert, it’s a multimedia experience with live music”, explains Theodore “Ted” Woolsey, who did the sound design and mixes the live sound for the project, working with A2 Ethan Ginsburg-Margo. “It’s the story of Phil’s life and it goes through a lot of the stories and all the hits, including with Genesis, with live musicians onstage. It’s pretty spectacular.”
The show is true to Collins’ sonic signatures, including the Sennheiser 421 microphones that captured his heavily-gated tom-tom fills on songs like “In the Air Tonight”. Woolsey also points out that the show is live in more ways than one: while a click track is used for the musicians, the entire production is very analog: sound, lighting, and video all operate independently of each other, relying on their respective managing engineers to keep the show together.
“The show starts with the music director running a Logic session with a click track off of his laptop next to his keyboard”, Woolsey explains. “That goes to the six musicians in the band through the Klang:App on their iPads, and it also cues the lighting and video operators, who have their own Klang mix as well as the click. When they hear the click, they start the show manually.”
The DiGiCo Quantum225 console is the hub for all of this, paired with some choice, authentically-vintage Phil Collins outboard gear like Bricasti reverbs and the Yamaha SPX2000 multi-effects processor, as well as some more modern Waves plugins.
“The Q225 lets me manage everything from a single surface”, says Woolsey. “And I designed the setup so that there’s no need for a monitor engineer - I’m using Klang so that the musicians can mix themselves. It’s really cool how I can split up audio in so many different places through so many different ‘languages’, like through MADI, Cat5, and over fiber. In this case, the whole system is one Cat5 line with the DMI-Klang card out of the console into an access point that drives all the iPads.”
“Typically, if you were going to split up monitors, you’d have to have a split snake where you would drive all the inputs in a secondary way into another rack that goes and distributes into the in-ears”, he continues. “But with the DMI-Klang, it’s all shared off a single SD-Rack, so there’s no split. It’s all digital through the one Cat5 line. That’s it, that’s the whole system - there’s no split snake rack, no networking rack. It’s just shared off the same I/O and it’s all going through this access point into the Klang.”
In addition, the entire show is programmed with snapshots so that during the initial rehearsals each of the musicians dialed in all of their individual mix levels per song. “Then I saved that data with the snapshots, so when I hit the next song, it changes their mix automatically to the mix that they dialed in for each song”, says Woolsey.
“The combination of the Quantum and the Klang is like having a monitor engineer that knows the whole show, but each musician is handling it themselves”, he concludes. “I like giving control to the musicians - they can make their own monitor tweaks through Klang:App, focus on their playing, and be fully immersed in the show. And that also lets me focus on the live show and my front-of-house mix.”
Pictured (left to right): Ethan Ginsburg-Margo, Ted Woolsey. (Photos: DiGiCo)
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