All Photos Courtesy Hothouse AV
Co-Founder of Fort Myers, FL-based Hothouse AV, Lighting Designer Corey Easterbrook just wrapped up the multi-platinum selling Neon Tree’s successful Fall 2023 The Favorite Daze Tour. We caught up with Easterbrook and asked him to speak about his design with PLSN.
In His Own Words: Corey Easterbrook
The overall design for Neon Tree’s The Favorite Daze Tour stemmed from talking with Tyler Glenn, the lead singer, about their new single. He’s a real creative force; a lot of talking back and forth conceptually with him. My head went to the old music video for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit;” a lot of burnt amber, tungsten colors, whites, but also just blow through was ringing in my head. You see a lot of that in the whole design. Everything was very open, open grid truss, open grid stage deck for Elaine Bradley, the drummer. I had lights firing through the drum decks and through the band from the back. A lot of silhouetting. With that whole idea, I just started galloping from there. It’s all lighting with no video.
Stage Design
Once I figured out the linchpin needs for the tour, I whipped together the napkins sketch with the new stage setup. Since I’ve been with them, they’ve had a dual-riser design, one for Elaine and one for guitarist Dave Charles. Some of the backline would have a split opening down the center of the stage, almost a little runway for Tyler. We’ve been doing that for a few years now, but I felt it wasn’t giving Elaine much because she lends a lot as far as vocals go for backing. She’s got a great voice and she and Tyler do a lot of duets. I wanted to put her back to center and be the focus point of the stage design. That’s where the diamond design for the drum deck facing knife edge forward to the crowd, with blow through grating for the deck top. I placed TMB Solaris Flares under her deck so that when all those pixels are blasting through, highlighting her and the rest of the band.
Dynamic Color Palettes
I think the main challenges are the ones that we give ourselves. On this one, I had given myself some really great toys to play with, but like the beginning of the concept and design, I wanted to keep true to a lot of that gritty 90s rock and roll feel. Not being too pronounced with heavy uses of beams and special effects. Trying to use newer technology and newer fixtures, but with a nice hat tip to the traditional PAR can rigs. Especially when you have a lot of different toys in the arsenal, it’s very easy to just run away with it. I was pretty happy that I was able to not zoom all the way in and have a laser light show effect, but to keep it very washy, because I think that lends really well to the rock and roll vibe that the show had. I took that time and really invested it coming up with really cutting color palettes that were dynamic, because the main thing that we were trying not to do was use any front light whatsoever. We wanted to do everything in sidelight, contrasting shadows and colors to really make it so that everything was very poignant and moody. That was something that we were able to deliver on, which I’m very proud of.
For any fill, I used two downstage pods consisting of [Martin] MAC Ultras and Vari-Lite VL2600 Profiles. They pulled double duty, A. for the wash, and B. for texture. The Profiles were a go-to fixture to where I could really home in on Elaine for her vocal numbers; give her a little bump over the top so she wasn’t lost. Then to be able to do some cool things, like their big song, “Animal” using the tiger print gobo across the entire band from the front. Just little tongue in cheek stuff like that, which’s always fun.
Key Gear Choices
I knew I needed some punch, some output, so right off the bat, it was great being able to have the [Robe] Spikies in the rig. It could be affordable for the tour, but also I had to be very careful on power draw because we were playing some venues that didn’t have a whole lot of power to spare. The Spikies really came in clutch for that. Then, the Wildfire VioStorm UVs for a secret message reveal with the UV-painted backdrop that Sew What? made for us. It was my first time using the VioStorms; they came highly recommended. They looked good on paper, but I was pretty impressed with them in person. I used four of them on the downstage edge. During the song, I popped the UV, while the whole rig is going full tilt, and you can still see it and read it, which is just very impressive. Those have been super, super great. The mainstage rig was built with Tyler Truss’ GT Truss and also had four CHAUVET Strike Arrays and two Robe Patt 2017s. I had two Utratec Radiance hazers as well.
Full Control & Vendor Support
I am a big ChamSys fan, and I’ve just now stepped up to the MQ250. The footprint is great, and the screen space and button layout has been absolutely excellent. It’s super-fast to get around. Two button pushes get you pretty much anywhere you need, and it’s just not taking up a whole lot of space a Front of House. PRG was the shop for this tour, and they were really great! Obviously, you’ve got a big company behind you for tours, which I think is really cool. They’re really trying to step into support some of the smaller tours now. They’re really interested in learning how they can facilitate those better because obviously, the gear is really great. They’re set up to doing some of the biggest tours in the world, but they also want to care about the small guy, which has been really great. Their support’s been awesome. Whenever I needed a spare fixture or something, they were immediately drop shipping one in. I do not have anything but grateful thanks for them and the team over there. Grace Hudson was our Account Rep at PRG. All Access did the staging and their equipment, man, it showed up and you could have eaten off it. It was the most gorgeous brand new looking staging. I felt bad that we were about to take it out on the road. And as I mentioned, Sew What? created our UV drape. They did a great job with good quality. I’ve been a fan of theirs for a while now.
Standout Moments
In terms of a song that really captured what I was trying to do with my design, I’d say it was the band’s new song “Losing My Head”. When I designed the rig, I hadn’t heard the song yet as they were still recording it. When we got into pre-production I fell in love with that song. Right off the bat, I knew that this song was just going to rip! I started heavy programming on it and used the Solaris Flares to blast right through. I worked on that song for a good few hours to get the correct pixel map to make it happen, and then finding a slow enough speed because of all that intense strobing going through, so it wouldn’t be too much. The first night that song got played—it had just dropped that day—every head was just bobbing. The lighting is fitting the music, pushing it along, but wasn’t overshadowing it. At that moment, I felt I was just part of the crowd because I was just banging my head away to it too. It was a fun night, and it happened every night because I really do enjoy the song and I loved the programming in it.
It was a very adaptive design to able to go into multiple venues and still stand out on its own because it was very modular. I like to look at designs as accordions, or LEGOs. If I’m in a small cap room, I want to give the audience the same feel of the show that they would have in one of the bigger markets. I really feel like I was able to accomplish that. This rig could easily go onto a big festival stage immediately and it would still perform well. That’s what I really wanted; to have a design and a rig set up that could facilitate all size rooms and make it so everybody felt like we brought the biggest show that we possibly could to that space.
