Everyone in the music industry feels the crunch of the digital revolution. Used to be a band would tour the world in the hopes of attracting interest in their new album or latest creation. These days, however, it seems up-and-coming artists who circle the globe place less emphasis on earning royalties from record sales than in racking up revenue from concert tickets.
Live productions have become the lifeblood of many modern artists, who’ve grown aware of the fact that delivering a spectacular light show is a virtual necessity in this current business climate.
The industry’s “new normal” has shifted the fortunes of nearly every musical act, especially those of rising stars operating on a limited budget. Take Brooklyn, New York-based X Ambassadors, whose anthemic Top 20 track, “Renegades,” provided the soundtrack for a recent marketing campaign promoting the Jeep Renegade. Thanks to a lucky break and the power of mass media, the band has made the jump from indie obscurity to mainstream consciousness.
Yet, despite their newfound success, X Ambassadors were faced with a common dilemma befalling most young recording acts. Before embarking on their 2015 summer/fall multi-city North American tour, X Ambassadors calculated that carrying a massive rig was simply not financially feasible. By the same token, skimping on lighting wouldn’t make “dollars and sense,” artistically or commercially.
“These days, if you don’t have lights on stage, it can be the most boring thing to watch,” says X Ambassadors frontman Sam Harris, who is credited with co-writing Rihanna’s “American Oxygen.”
Ready to Roll
Nashville-based design firm, Cour Design, founded by Gordon Droitcour and Erik Anderson, devised a solution to alleviate some of the band’s tour-related stress. Ensuring that X Ambassadors have an arena-quality but budget-conscious show, Cour paired X Ambassadors with one of their most ingenious designs: three easy to load-in/load-out rolling set carts.
Manufactured by Accurate Staging & Productions, each cart is a matrix of two-inch metal piping measuring two by six by six feet (WxLxH), securing a mixture of eight Elation SixPar 200s, two Elation Platinum Beam 5Rs and a single Philips Showline SL Nitro 510C color LED strobe. (In total, X Ambassadors rolls with 34 SixPar 200s, five Platinum Beam movers and three Nitro strobes.)
“These lighting racks can be adjusted to be as low as six feet in height or as high as 12 feet, depending on the venue,” says Droitcour, who trained the crew as well as band members on the functionality of the carts. “The crew can have [carts] up and running in 40 minutes. Everything lives on the cart and is wired, good to go. The timesaving is huge.”
And while Droitcour confesses that the carts are heavy, he says, “I’d rather have heavy than spend an hour and half putting up lights every night.”
When PLSN caught X Ambassadors at the Bowery Ballroom in New York, the band employed only two set carts due to space limitations. Augmented by in-house venue lighting, the duo of carts achieved surprisingly big looks via beamage, strobing and chases.
“We saw that the band liked a lot of dramatic looks,” says Droitcour, lighting designer/programmer. “A lot of backlighting, silhouettes.”
“I’m a minimalist in many ways,” says frontman Harris, who studied theater in college. “I think you can do much with a minimal amount of lighting.”
Drumming Up the Looks
For all of its streamlined efficiencies, the production has also attracted — some might even say courted — controversy. Drawing the ire of critics, X Ambassadors does not carry a dedicated lighting operator, or lighting console for that matter, in the traditional sense. Instead, the tour operates with Cour Design’s so-called “self-triggered” lighting system.
“We’ve had some people give us negative feedback,” says Droitcour, the mastermind behind the system. “People have to understand that without this system, young bands wouldn’t be able to carry lights due to the cost of an LD.”
How does this “self triggering” function actually work? When drummer Adam Levin strikes his Akai MPD18 MIDI controller pad, Ableton software is activated, effectively controlling the lighting.
“As the band plays, MIDI notes trigger [commands] in sync with the [Ableton click],” says Droitcour. “Ableton sends information via a MIDI driver over to Jands Vista software that outputs to an Ethernet node,” communicating with a DMX node over Art-Net protocol. “In between each song, the drummer can trigger the lights to stop” by striking a pad on the Akai controller, “and the lights will stay on its last look. The lighting will rest in this transitional mode until the band decides to start the next song and trigger the next cue.”
Droitcour hatched this triggering idea while working as an audio tech with Clair Global. After months of developing and tweaking the design, Droitcour had procured a growing roster of clients. By January 2015, Droitcour and business partner Erik Anderson established Cour Design, and in March the company hooked up with [electro-rockers] Magic Man, making them “look like an arena band in a club setting,” Droitcour says. “That’s when we first made the set carts.”
Droitcour, who technically still works for Clair, was surprised by the reaction he received from company bigwigs when they caught wind of the erstwhile audio specialist’s illuminating business model. “I thought they’d say, ‘You need to choose between your company and ours,’” says Droitcour.
To the programmer’s surprise, that conversation has yet to occur. In fact, Clair has even given Cour access to its Nashville rehearsal space and nurtured what can be described as a symbiotic relationship: Cour develops tech-savvy and cost-effective productions for ambitious artists who, theoretically, will evolve into arena acts — the very same ones Clair may someday partner with on an international scale.
Cour hopes X Ambassadors will undergo a similar transformation. As all signs seem to point to such a progression, Harris and Gordon envision future multi-media productions featuring the interplay of video and lighting. Of course, there’s plenty of raw material with which to work. X Ambassador’s full-length, conceptual debut, VHS, produced by Grammy-winning producer Alex da Kid, contains audio snippets of the band’s own home videos, which demonstrate the quartet’s brotherly bond and shared experiences.
“We’re incorporating some of the audio clips that you hear on the record into our live show,” says Harris, who appears in these home movies with keyboardist/brother Casey, guitarist Noah Feldshuh and drummer Levin. “Eventually I’d like to get a bunch of TV screens on stage to show some of the clips.”
“When X Ambassadors first approached us, they were playing 300 to 500 capacity rooms,” adds Droitcour. “Since the record and Jeep commercial came out, they’ve been growing really fast. Going forward we dream of incorporating video and more of a storyline throughout the show. Talk of video has occurred and it may very well happen soon.”
As to whether X Ambassadors will ever replace their self-triggered lighting system with someone focused exclusively on lighting, Cour Design’s Droitcour doesn’t rule it out. “This year, X Ambassadors will not have an LD,” he said, in late 2015. “But by the time they’re opening for some arena band, next year, there very well may be a need for that. You need people updating focus positions; you need people who know how to be flexible. In those situations, we want to have LDs out there; otherwise, the band will be struggling.”
