Wide Focus

Eric Church is out packing arenas on his “Holdin’ My Own Tour” with Butch Allen back as production and lighting designer and Rob Koenig and Scott Chmielewski as programmers. With close to three hours on stage, Church covers the bases and doesn’t disappoint the fans with his 360 end stage show, where he can get close and personal. We spoke with lighting director Gavin Lake about Allen’s production design. Lake took over LD duties back in February of 2015, as he explains.

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Lighting designer & director Alex Ares is out with Deadmau5 (producer and DJ, Joel Zimmerman) for the “Lots of Shows in a Row” tour. Alex came up with the lighting design, and programmed the show with fellow programmer Bobby Brooks. We spoke with Alex about the tour when it came through for a three-night sold-out crowd at the Fox Theater in Oakland, CA.

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Lighting designer and director Matt Guminski is out on the road with singer/songwriter JoJo. In 2004, “Leave (Get Out),” her debut single, reached number one on the Billboard pop songs chart, which made her the youngest solo artist to have a number-one single in the U.S., at 13 years old. We spoke to Guminski about JoJo’s current Mad Love tour during the artist’s sold-out Feb. 19 tour stop at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco.

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PLSN caught a look at Twenty One Pilots’ ongoing “Emotional Roadshow” tour, the band’s biggest tour to date. With a design that started just two short years ago, playing in club/theater size venues, the band has grown to play to sold out arenas, and their design has grown with it. We spoke to production, lighting and set designer Daniel Slezinger and lighting director/co-designer Tyler “Shap” Shapard about the current trek.

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LD Kendall Clark Keeps the Beat on the EDM Duo’s “Spring Tour”

In 2015, the EDM track, “It’s Strange,” from Chicago-based EDM duo Louis the Child scored 10 million SoundCloud plays, spurred in part by a fortuitously timed shout-out from Taylor Swift.

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Brian Setzer first hit the big time as the frontman for the Stray Cats, the band that burst onto the music scene in the early 1980’s with a rockabilly sound from the 1950s. PLSN caught up with Bud Horowitz, LD for the Brian Setzer Orchestra, a swing band ensemble that recently completed its 13^th annual Christmas Rocks! Tour. Today’s BSO shows include some of the classic Stray Cats songs with big-band accompaniment. Horowitz has also lit Setzer’s Nashvillians and Rockabilly Riot tours. He notes that, instead of getting too involved in the lighting specifics, Setzer turns to him for the lighting looks.

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John Dacosta and Daunte Kenner on “The King & Queen of Hearts” Tour

The “King and Queen of Hearts” tour with Maxwell and Mary J. Blige had the combined talents of production and lighting designer Justin Collie of Performance Environment Design Group (PEDG; now known as Nimblist); John Dacosta, the lighting director and programmer for Maxwell; and Daunte Kenner, the production and lighting designer for Mary J. Blige. PLSN got some time with Dacosta and Kenner for some words about the tour.

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Ricardo Ortiz Lights Elaborate Shows for Grammy-Winning Artist

Pepe Aguilar, the son of music and film stars Antonio Aguilar and Flor Silvestre, is an American-born singer who has made his mark in the Ranchera, Mariachi and pop genres of music.

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[caption id="attachment_273481" align="alignnone" width="800"]Accurate Staging provided the set. Photo by Steve Jennings[/caption]

Michael Apostolos on the Design for the Artist’s 2016 “Magnificent Coloring World Tour”

Starting off as a freshman in high school interning at Performance Lighting out of Chicago, Michael Apostolos first started working in the shop prepping gear. Moving forward, he then got into designing and programming for his high school theater and upon graduation, pursued a career as a production and lighting designer.

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Kevin “Deuce” Christopher has worked with the band Journey since 2004 on 10 tours, domestically and internationally, as both lighting designer and director. He’s developed a great relationship with the band, both personal and professional, tackling the challenge of representing the band’s “persona” with his visual design.

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Trevor Ahlstrand Lit the Band with a Gemini LSV Rig for its Tour with Marilyn Manson

American heavy metal rockers Slipknot hit the road this summer with Marilyn Manson on a tour lasting from June through September. Trevor Ahlstrand of Ahlstrand Productions provided the production and lighting design with lighting, audio and video elements for the tour supplied by Gemini Light Sound Video out of Dallas. Both have worked with Slipknot on several tours.

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“My goal is that the audience can’t tell when I’m going from the pre-programmed parts of the songs to the improvised ones,” says Andrew Cass, LD for String Cheese Incident (SCI). 
Indeed, he has 90 or so songs programmed in his grandMA2 console, but with this band, there is a section in every song where they go on an improvised musical tangent, and the lighting needs to follow along. He has developed a system that lets him stray from his song cuelist during the “jam” sections and return to the song looks as smoothly as possible.

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