SYDNEY – The John Butler Trio One Way Road tour, which has recently finished touring Australia, adopted a carbon-neutral stance, calculating the carbon "footprint" and emissions generated during the tour and balancing those costs with an investment in renewable energy. Showgoers could opt to support that initiative with an extra 50 cents tacked onto the price of a "green" ticket, and those funds were donated to renewable energy projects.
With the environmental impact of the tour on the front burner, the energy consumed by the lighting gear was never far from LD Dave Jackson's mind. He found a way to light the band effectively using 16 Martin MAC 301 LED moving head wash lights – eight on the front truss and eight on the back.
"I was a little bit hesitant to use them but they proved to be quite good," said Jackson. "They have nice color saturation and are great as front truss profiles. I needed to design a rig that ran off one 32 amp, and we did."
Twelve Martin MAC 250 Beams were also in the rig: six on the back truss and six on the floor. Added to that were eight Martin StageBar 54 LED fixtures to light the cyc and four Kupo 8 Liters.
"It was a fairly standard setup, as John doesn't like a lot of movement or flashy stuff," Jackson noted. "It's all about setting scenes, and the MAC 301 fixtures were perfect for that, as you get a really nice beam out of them that contrasts well with the narrow beams out of the MAC 250s."
For the show at Sydney's Enmore Theatre, pictured here, Entertainment Installations provided the gear, sourced through Martin's Australian distributor, Show Technology.
For more information, please visit www.martin.com.
Photos: Zac Shenker
