Production News

Robe iFORTE LTXs Connect with Meridian

Mexico – German Sevillano, owner and CEO of Mexican technical production and rental company Meridian, is a shrewd operator with a keen eye for spotting trends and listening to what the market and his customers want and this has driven his steady investment in Robe moving lights over the years, with the latest purchase being 50 iFORTE LTX fixtures.

These are added to his four RoboSpot systems, also purchased in the last year, together with a fleet of older but still active Robe products, including 124 MegaPointes, Spiider wash beams and Pointes, all working on Meridian’s full range of shows and events, which are centred around concert touring, music festivals and corporate and business events.

All projects are serviced from their two busy warehouses in the Iztapalapa district in Mexico City, co-ordinated by around 50 full-time staff plus freelancers.

“iFORTE is a very popular fixture here in Mexico, primarily in demand for its power and versatility,” explained German. Before purchasing, he noted that several major rental companies already had stock of the original iFORTE – thanks to the proactivity of Robe distributor SHOWCO – so he decided to get the iFORTE LTX version, which is a more recent and even brighter model.

With a smile, he also admits to liking being the first with a specific product and at the forefront of steering the industry. “I already knew that I would have plenty of work for the iFORTES,” he stated.

In addition to their own projects, he cites the healthy cross-rental market in Mexico, which works both ways. The Robe fixtures are utilised for Meridian’s own highest-profile shows and tours, but if they need to ramp up the numbers, there’s a good supply of the most frequently specified models. Conversely, reversing that rental direction, if fixtures are available, they are frequently out supplementing other events.

He feels that having a premium brand onboard has certainly helped Meridian’s business model evolve.

The rental market in Mexico sees a healthy amount of co-operation between the major players, so they all tend to deal with one another at some stage.

Meridian’s iFORTE LTXs have recently been on cross rentals to some high-profile shows including The Weeknd, Ricky Martin and many more on the vibrant Latin music scene. At the end of last year, Meridian supplied over 120 iFORTES to legendary Mexican rock band Zoé, who played six sold out shows at the Estadio GNP Seguros.

German sees high-powered fixtures like FORTE as a savvy investment, especially as LED screens, video elements and pixels on most shows are getting bigger, brighter and more prevalent, so high-intensity lights are needed.

The IP rating of the iFORTE LTX was also important, as there are many outdoor shows and music festivals across the country and in other parts of Latam and the rain is often unpredictable.

Meridian was among the first Mexican companies to invest in Robe’s game-changing Pointe multi-functional moving light when it was launched in 2013 and these and the MegaPointes are still working constantly, out on almost every project from festival to golf tournaments and recent tours with Argentinian rappers Paulo Londra and Cazzu.

“They have been an incredible investment and I expect the iFORTES LTXs to be the same,” he commented.

Meridian is a house technical supplier at the famous Teatro Metropólitan in Mexico City, a much-loved art deco theatre in the city centre, with its 3,000 capacity regularly sold out with people enjoying music events, jazz, theatre, dance and other genres of performance. The house lighting rig there includes 22 MegaPointes and 22 Spiiders.

He concluded by saying that the support, service and training offered by SHOWCO as a distributor has been “fantastic” and another solid reason for enthusiastically embracing Robe, which he believes is currently the leading moving light brand.

photo: Louise Stickland

2nd October 2026

Steve McCracken and Mac-Events Power Lighting Narrative for Callum Beattie at Belladrum

UK – The most memorable music festivals often seem to spring out of the land in which they take place. Such is the case with the iconic Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival. Located on the historic 1,150-acre Belladrum Estate in the highlands just west of Inverness, the three-day event is rich in Scottish traditions from late night Ceilidh dancing to vibrant story telling.

Steve ‘Mac’ McCracken of Mac-Events drew on the latter when lighting the 2026 festival headliner show by the multi-award-winning local legend, Callum Beattie. Given that Beattie’s set was 90-minutes, McCracken had ample time to unfold what he called a “visual story” that moved in unison with his client’s music.

“The aim was to create a lighting show that was energetic, powerful and really connected to the music,” said McCracken. “We wanted a strong visual identity with intense reds, ambers and fiery tones creating a feeling of heat and aggression. The lighting was to feel like part of the performance, rather than simply illuminate the stage.”

To do this, McCracken and his team worked their ChamSys Magic MQ250M Stadium console to conjure up programmed sequences and live busking looks from their Limelight Event Services rig.  “Our lighting followed the music and energy of the performance,” he said. “We could build looks gradually, strip things back and then hit the bigger moments with maximum movement, colour and intensity. The MQ250M was ideal for this because we could have a large number of programmed looks and effects available while still retaining full live control.

“We also used our floor package to create a specific look for Callum while still having the festival rig to complement the design,” continued McCracken. “The festival rig was the main structure for the larger-scale lighting system, particularly the overhead coverage and fixtures already installed in the rig. Our own hanging and wheeled pre-rigs were then integrated into that system to give us the specific looks we wanted for Callum. Limelights Event Services provided a great platform for us to build the show around with their festival rig, in addition to giving us great support all around, Festivals like this are always a team effort and having a good relationship between the artist, lighting team, production and festival supplier makes a massive difference.”

Not only did McCracken and his team benefit from being with a supportive festival crew, but they also relied on the MQ250M to make the production process easier. “Even under the best of circumstances, there are always challenges when taking a pre-programmed show into a festival environment because the available rig can be different from what you originally designed around,” he explained. “The MQ250M made that process much easier. We could adapt the patch, fixture selection and programming quickly and integrate our own hanging and wheeled pre-rigs with the festival system.”

McCracken says that “flexibility” was one of the biggest advantages of using the MQ250M on this project. He also listed “speed of programming,” and playback as key features. On the latter, he noted: “Playback and busking capabilities were critical, allowing us to have programmed looks ready to go while still being able to react live to the music and performance. The MQ250M allowed us to build a large part of the show in advance and then adapt it once we knew exactly what the festival rig looked like. That saved a huge amount of time.”

Having saved this time, the Mac-Events team was able to focus more on the creative story-telling aspect of the show. And oh, what a story there was to be told, full of energy, surprises and passion; qualities right at home in this corner of the world.

2nd October 2026

Ayrton Veloce Profiles illuminate Gaurav Gupta’s Haute Couture Collection

India – Gaurav Gupta’s Haute Couture Collection was showcased in July 2026 at the Jio World Pavilion 3 in Mumbai. The avant-garde Indian couturier’s work has featured internationally, including at Paris Haute Couture Week and is noted for its defined sculptural style.

The responsibility for delivering a lighting design to match the drama and tone of the couturier’s collection fell to lighting designer Harshavardhan Pathak, who’s remit was shaped to fit the fashion show’s exquisite concept of Lunar & Solar.

Harsha Pathak used 118 Ayrton Veloce Profiles, supplied by SSL Media, Mumbai, to create two concentric oval runways for the collection presentation. The overhead truss was custom-built and positioned to give Harsha Pathak the ideal starting point to rig the Veloce Profiles. “The SSL team rigged the Veloces exactly how they were shown in my design,” he says. “This enabled me to focus them from the perfect position in every case, then fine-tune each one using a combination of Veloce’s shutters, focus and zoom to create the perfect oval shaped runways.”

The result was two circles of soft, ethereal light whose precise angles highlighted the collection’s details to perfection. The stylised, clean lines continued into the performance given by two aerial dancers at the epicentre of the circles, choreographed by international artistic director and founder of the highly acclaimed performing arts company Natya Nectar Circus De India, Guari Devi.

“I used gobos from the overhead Veloce Profiles to create an orbit effect around a pair of suspended dancers,” says Harsha Pathak, “and illuminated them from above in tight circles of light that enhanced the sense of drama and isolation, and introduced a contrast of warm and cool colours to emphasise the Lunar & Solar theme.”

The show was programmed on a grandMA3 full size which Harsha Pathak says “helped me adjust the 118 Veloce Profiles in just 90 minutes! My thanks goes to the SSL Media team, led by Mr Ulhas Sahasrabuddhe, who were extremely professional in their support and did a fantastic job without any fuss or drama. And to Mr Kekul Sheth from VMT (Vardhaman Mega-Tech, Ayrton’s exclusive distributor for India) who was very prompt in his response, providing me with excellent technical support from the start.”

“We have done many shows with Harsha Pathak in the past years,” comments Mr. Ulhas Sahasrabuddhe. “It was an exciting opportunity to execute this unusual design suggested for the Gaurav Gupta Show. The Ayrton Veloce performed flawlessly (as expected) and a special mention must be made for its Blade function, which was the centrepiece of this design. We look forward to adding more Ayrton fixtures in the immediate future.”

“At VMT we strive to be associated with the best of the best,” adds Mr. Kekul Sheth of VMT Enterprise Sales, “and Ulhas Sahasrabuddhe, team SSL Media and Harsha Pathak resonate the same. The Ayrton Veloce lived up to their billing as amongst the best in the business, delivering a spectacular show. We look forward to our continued successful partnership with Ayrton for sales in the Indian Market.”

“We are immensely proud to see the Veloce Profile play such a pivotal role in bringing Harshavardhan Pathak’s breathtaking vision to life for Gaurav Gupta’s Haute Couture collection,” says Vijay Thaygarajoo, regional sales manager APAC for Ayrton. “Harsha’s creative use of the Veloce’s framing and gobos perfectly captured the ethereal drama of the Lunar & Solar theme. Our sincere thanks go to our trusted distributor VMT, along with Ulhas Sahasrabuddhe and the outstanding team at SSL Media, for their flawless execution and continued dedication to pushing creative boundaries with Ayrton fixtures in India.”

photos: Rohit Harshavardhan Pathak and Harshavardhan Pathak

1st October 2026

Robe SVOPATTs Score for NBC’s Sunday Night Baseball Opener

USA – Lighting designer Nick Whitehouse used Robe SVOPATT multisource LED luminaires for NBC Sports’ 2026 Sunday Night Baseball show open, starring Zac Brown Band. The inventive lighting created the scale and energy of an epic stadium performance.                                                                  

Filmed at American Family Field, home of the Milwaukee Brewers, the show open features Zac Brown Band performing a reimagined rock classic. Nick needed high-impact sources that could evoke the power of stadium lighting across multiple camera angles.

Eleven SVOPATT units, supplied by lighting rental vendor Clearwing, were rigged vertically on five self-climbing towers behind the band. Nick worked closely with DP Jordan McMonagle and production designer Evan Rohde to create the specific look and feel required by director Tripp Dixon.

“The SVOPATTs worked brilliantly for the effect we all wanted,” commented Nick, who has also lit other NBC Sports show opens and interstitials.

Each SVOPATT contains nine individual light source modules, each fitted with seven 40W RGBW multichip LEDs. The centre module also incorporates a 200W white LED strobe. The fixture generates more than 75,000 lumens in an integrating sphere, offering an aesthetic inspired by the look of classic 20th-century tungsten beam or floodlighting.

“The SVOPATTs were ideal for the job. They were extremely bright and versatile, providing excellent ‘eye candy’ and back-of-camera fill, which was exactly what I needed,” Whitehouse said.

With limited time to make the band look great and deliver the scale envisioned by the director, Whitehouse needed fixtures he could trust. The production also had to capture material that the visual-effects team could extend into a packed stadium. The SVOPATTs delivered the required impact while running at only 20 to 30 percent intensity.

The promo was captured on large-sensor cinema cameras, supporting both image quality and the production’s distinctive colour treatments.

Nick recalled using original Svoboda fixtures while designing Kylie Minogue’s tours with the late Bryan Leitch of UK-based Art of Darkness in the late 2000s and early 2010s. He had always appreciated their distinctive styling.

“The SVOPATTs did exactly what I wanted for this project. They looked great and offered a wide range of useful features,” he added.

Nick also deployed 12 Robe MegaPointes at the back of the field, a long distance from the stage, to create powerful back beams.

The creative producer for the 2026 Sunday Night Baseball show opener was Ellie Wright, with Matt Van Buren as executive producer and Jon Goldberg as producer. Jordan McMonagle was director of photography, Scott Quimby was gaffer, Kenny Somerville was key grip and Sam McKeown led the lighting crew.

The show debuted on 12 April, 2026, ahead of the Cleveland Guardians vs Atlanta Braves game on NBC and Peacock, and continues to open Sunday Night Baseball throughout the season.

Nick also recently lit NBC’s Sunday Night Football show open with Carrie Underwood, using Robe FOOTSIE2s among other luminaires.

photos: Evan Rohde 

30th September 2026

GLP JDC Burst 1 and JDC2 IP head a 223-fixture deployment across both stages at CLOUT Festival 2026

30th September 2026

Elation Lighting Powers Historic UFC Freedom 250 at the White House

USA – When UFC Freedom 250 brought a seven-fight UFC card to the South Lawn of the White House on 14 June, 2026, it created a production unlike any other in the sport’s history. Staged as part of the United States’ 250th-anniversary celebrations, the outdoor event placed a temporary arena against one of the USA’s most iconic and recognisable backdrops.

The event extended to a massive Fan Fest on The Ellipse, where tens of thousands of fans gathered for live entertainment, ceremonial weigh-ins and an outdoor watch party. Elation lighting played a key role in both event environments, with Tom Sutherland using Proteus fixtures for the televised fight card, while André Petrus used Proteus and Paragon fixtures to illuminate the expansive Fan Fest.

The fight card aired live on Paramount+ and reached more than 170 countries, with approximately 4,000 invited spectators attending on the White House lawn. Felix Lighting supplied lighting for the fight-card event, while 4Wall supplied lighting for the Fan Fest.

Sutherland, CEO and designer at DX7 Design Inc., joined the project at creative director Jesse Blevins’ request to create a lighting environment that could match the scale of the occasion while remaining respectful of its historic setting.

At the heart of the design was a massive overhead truss structure, ‘the claw’, that housed the lighting gear. The claw was built around four main legs, with large X-shaped trusses spanning between them. A series of progressively smaller arch trusses filled the spaces between the legs of the X, creating a layered, symmetrical overhead structure that had to stand up visually against both the grandeur of the White House grounds and the extraordinary visual scale of the wider area.

For Sutherland, the challenge extended beyond technical requirements. The design had to deliver the energy and entertainment spectacle expected of a major UFC broadcast while ensuring that the White House remained an integral and appropriately treated part of the visual composition.

“We wanted to create something people would remember, but we also had to be very conscious and respectful of where we were,” said Sutherland. “We were working alongside architecture that bears such enormous historical significance, so regardless of what we placed in front of it, the two had to blend rather than compete. The design needed to hold its own against the scale of the setting, while the White House itself was always treated with the utmost respect. Everything we did worked back from that.”

Elation lighting played key roles in illuminating the fighting ring – the Octagon – and enhancing the structure’s visual impact. Sutherland used linear pixel fixtures along the inner and outer edges of the curves to define the structure, while 66 Elation Proteus Excalibur beam fixtures provided the aerial component. Mounted primarily along the upper X trusses, the Excaliburs projected powerful beams into the sky, with additional units positioned on top of the video screen facing The Ellipse.

“From the very beginning, I knew the Excalibur was going to be one of the fixtures we needed,” says Sutherland. “We had to make the structure read from every angle, including all those helicopter shots and we needed a beam that could cut through the environment and the weather. When we first turned them on, they were incredibly impressive and when we started seeing images appear online from all around Washington, DC, that told me we had made the right choice.”

The Proteus Excalibur is an IP65-rated beam moving head with an ultra-narrow 0.8-degree beam, designed to produce long-throw aerial effects with the visual impact of a searchlight. Its weather protection was particularly important for a production that required fixtures to remain exposed outdoors for an extended period.

While the Excaliburs gave the production its aerial scale, 60 Elation Proteus Maximus moving heads provided the primary keylighting for the Octagon.

Mounted above the fighting area on the claws curved sections, the 50,000-lumen Maximus fixtures were focused downward to create consistent illumination across the Octagon. Lighting the fighting area presented a significant challenge, as the fencing surrounding the Octagon could easily create unwanted shadows.

“The Octagon is a surprisingly difficult thing to light because of the fencing,” Sutherland explains. “We had to think very carefully about how to light it from the inside out and how to use the framing to shape the light without creating shadows. At the same time, the fixtures were mounted so high that we needed a lot of intensity.”

Beyond the Octagon itself, the lighting design extended into the White House grounds. Each fighter made an extended walk to the arena beginning inside the White House, with some walks lasting approximately five minutes. The production therefore required lighting to extend through the architecture and along the routes used by the fighters and their entourages.

While pleased with how the project came together, Sutherland also knew a production of such a unique nature at the White House was likely become a memorable part of its history. “For me, this was very much a once-in-a-lifetime experience. This is imagery that will be seen and remembered for a very long time and that was always at the forefront of my mind.”

While the UFC fight card took place on the White House South Lawn, a second large-scale event took place immediately to the south on The Ellipse. The 13-14 June Fan Fest gave the much larger general audience an opportunity to experience the event through athlete appearances, live entertainment, weigh-ins and a large outdoor watch party.

On Saturday, 13 June, weigh-ins took place on the Ellipse, followed by a Zac Brown Band concert. On Sunday, 14 June, the Fan Fest continued, culminating in a huge outdoor watch party where tens of thousands of fans followed the fights simultaneously on giant viewing screens.

Lighting designer André Petrus designed the lighting for the entire Fan Fest site, including the stage used for the weigh-ins and the Zac Brown Band performance. To create an immersive fan experience with an outdoor festival atmosphere, Petrus designed the site so the audience was part of the action.  

“The scale of the site meant we needed lighting everywhere and everything had to be IP rated,” he said. “Safety was my first priority, and stylisation and the stage were a close second. The concept for the fan zone was to surround the entire site with 40ft tall ladders dressed in lighting and with lighting on top. We wanted the fans to feel like they were within the UFC experience as opposed to just watching it.”

With a site more than 1,000 feet wide, Petrus distributed fixtures throughout the fan zone, with weather protection being a fundamental requirement. His Elation package included 152 Proteus Maximus for large-scale site wash lighting, along with 26 Proteus Lucius to illuminate signage throughout the site. Eight Maximus fixtures were mounted on each of 18 40-foot site lighting towers, with 14 of those positioned around the perimeter of The Ellipse.

Needing a powerful fixture that could maintain punch with solid colour rendering, Petrus turned to Elation’s 50,000-lumen Paragon LT with TruTone variable CRI engine. Forty-four Paragon LT profile moving heads were positioned on 60-foot keylight towers and used for stage keylighting.

“The Paragon LT was particularly useful for the key lighting, where we had 150ft throws from those towers. The fixtures performed exactly as expected. We were able to use the Elation package across the different elements of the event, from the weigh-ins through the live performance and the watch party.”

The overhead stage structure incorporated separate broadcast and musical-performance trims. “For the weigh-ins, we wanted the backdrop of the stage to be the White House, so we left the back wide open. During the Zac Brown Band performance, we closed the stage to give a different feel for the show by lowering in the upstage side of the truss to create a ‘wall of light’.”

Together, the two event environments demonstrated the versatility of Elation’s IP-rated moving lights, from the high-intensity keylighting and long-throw aerial beams of the White House fight card to the extensive site coverage and stage lighting of the Fan Fest on The Ellipse.

Sutherland extends his thanks to creative director Jesse Blevins for bringing DX7 Design onto the project, while Petrus acknowledges Robby Kurtz and the 4Wall team for their support, as well as Blevins and programmers Dane Kick, Clay Joiner and Luke Carver.

photos: courtesy UFC Freedom 250

30th September 2026

Nico Riot Supports Skip The Use Fan Experience on Festival Tour

France – From Pic du Midi standing over 9,400 feet in the Pyrenes, to the more earthbound Terres du Son tucked away in the Touraine River Valley, punk rock heavyweights Skip The Use have been tearing up the French and Belgian festival circuit this year. The settings may differ vastly from event to event, so too do the size of the stages and the festival rigs, but in Nico Riot’s view one thing should be consistent: the fan experience; an experience that one fan described as enjoying “an all singing, all dancing band backed by incredible instrumentalists.”

Riot is working to ensure that the high-energy persona of his clients with their explosive stage presence and genuine audience connection is coming across in vivid fashion at every stop on the festival tour. Helping turn this vision into a reality show after show, is a floor package that features 16 Chauvet Professional Color Strike M motorised strobe-washes supplied by MPM of Lorraine.

“I needed powerful fixtures to match all the festivals’ packed rigs, so my shows look consistent everywhere and the Color Strike M is certainly powerful,” said Riot. “Keeping every look as stripped-back as possible while fitting everything into the budget, I am striving for a timeless, elegant aesthetic in a design that’s distinct enough to be consistent even when festival stages vary.”

Riot positions his Color Strike Ms evenly, having eight units upstage and eight downstage. He relies on the upstage fixtures for backwashing, to saturate the stage’s red curtains with colour and to illuminate the band’s heart backdrop at the appropriate moments. The downstage units are used to “clean up key looks,” in addition to providing low-angle frontlighting on the band and creating classic strobing effects.

As part of his plan to create consistent looks that instantly connect to audiences, Riot is keeping his colour palette simple. “There are actually only five colours in the entire show: open white, CTO, CTB, red and a pale red,” he said.  “I wanted to build a cohesive theme around red to mirror the album artwork and visual identity Skip the Use created for this cycle. It really was as simple and focused as that.”

Adding an extra and particularly evocative element to Riot’s design is his artful use of dark space, which he describes as playing a “huge role” in setting the gripping aura on stage. To add to the power of these shadowy looks, he often accompanies them with dimly lit fog.

The interplay of light and shadows is particularly effective in accenting the design’s giant heart prop, which is open and empty in the middle of the stage. “I carried that heart concept as far as I could across the rest of the rig,” said Riot. “The band has immense stage presence, so my goal was to deliver high-impact moments, while using the lighting and not distract from their performance.”

As this year’s festival season ends, Skip The Use, will be kicking off a club tour at the Zenith in Paris. When they do, Riot will continue to balance lighting and the band’s performance to deliver the kind of experience fans expect.

29th September 2026

Martin Audio WPS with Timax Processing Powers Major Montreal Festivals

Canada – This June and July, two of Montreal’s flagship festivals took place back-to-back in the heart of the Canadian city: Les Francos de Montréal, celebrating French-language artists and the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal, renowned for its diverse jazz-focused programme. As a partner of both festivals, L’Équipe Spectra equipped the outdoor stage at each event this year with a Martin Audio WPS Wavefront Precision sound system, optimised by TiMax spatial audio processing.

The popular free-admission stage, which regularly attracts audiences of thousands of people, is known as the Desjardins Stage during Les Francos de Montréal and the Loto-Quebec Club Montréal Stage during the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal. It is located at Terrain 66 in the Quartier des Spectacles, at the centre of downtown Montreal.

Given the stage’s proximity to residential and commercial buildings, along with the corresponding strict noise regulations governing the site, Martin Audio’s renowned optimisation capabilities have proven essential.

“One of the key reasons the production team for the festivals were keen on the Wavefront Precision system is because the stages are right in downtown Montreal,” explained Claus Frostell of Canadian distributor, Erikson Pro. “With the optimisation that WPS provides and also particularly with Martin Audio subwoofers, we’re able to localise the sound very specifically to the audience area.”

“One of the big concerns we have is noise management,” confirms Dan Meier, senior technical co-ordinator for both festivals. “The city rules are very strict and we need to keep good relationships with our neighbours. Good coverage, clarity and punch at medium to low volumes is crucial. The Martin Audio PA delivered very well, maximising the audience's experience within the noise control constraints.”

The deployed PA comprised eight Martin Audio WPS line array elements per side, supplemented with four TORUS T820 constant curvature arrays as front fills and two TORUS T1230 models serving as delays. Low-frequency reinforcement was provided by three SX218 dual 18 inch subwoofers and six SX118 single 18 inch subwoofers, all powered by Martin Audio iKON amplifiers.

“We had the three dual 18 inch subs positioned across the front of the stage in cardioid mode, with one facing backwards and two facing forwards, while three of the single 18 inch cardioid subs positioned on each side,” Frostell explains. “With this cardioid set-up we were able to reduce SPL to the rear of the stage by around 30dB and were also able to narrow the coverage so that it is focused primarily on the audience area.”

The entire system was modelled and optimised using Martin Audio DISPLAY 3 software. “For the WPS arrays, we used the Hard Avoid feature for the stage area and optimised the system to concentrate coverage on the audience,” he notes.

Frostell also highlights the consistent sonic performance across the system: “Both WPS and TORUS are extremely clear and well defined, and we’re able to maintain consistent frequency response and level from the front of the audience area right through to the back.”

For the first time, the festivals’ audiences will also experience the benefits of TiMax spatial audio processing, extending the stereo image across a much larger listening area.

“This is the first use of spatial audio at the festivals, but with the reputation of Martin Audio and our own experience, the organisers were happy to explore it,” says Frostell. “Their main concern was that because they host a lot of guest engineers, they didn’t want excessive spatial movement or localisation that could detract from the engineers’ mixes. We explained that we’re simply enhancing the stereo image across the audience area and once they understood that, they became very excited about the possibilities.

“Traditionally, a left-right loudspeaker configuration creates a relatively small stereo sweet spot in the centre of the audience,” Frostell continues. “Using TiMax with the WPS system and TORUS front fills, we’re able to expand that stereo image significantly, allowing more of the audience to experience the mix as it was intended. The engineer doesn’t need to do anything differently, they mix as normal and we simply extend what they are already doing.”

Hugues Bourque is the head front of house engineer for the Martin Audio-equipped stage at both the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal and Francos de Montréal.

“I really enjoyed the tone of the WPS system,” Bourque comments. “I found it very musical compared to other systems. This year the stage featured a wide variety of bands, from standard jazz ensembles requiring a more intricate mix with a grand piano, to really loud and bassy hip-hop artists, all of which sounded great on the Martin Audio system.”

The engineer particularly praises the vocal tone and sub performance, noting the positive feedback from guest engineers. “The mid-range is rich and makes mixing vocals easy,” he says. “That was actually the first comment I had from other engineers: ‘Vocals sounded really great in the Martin Audio PA’. I also found the subs to be articulate and precise – I loved them – and they received plenty of favourable comments from guest engineers.”

Bourque concludes: “We have had bad weather with lots of rain followed by scorching heat, but I never felt it affected the PA. It was a tricky area, but the system provided great coverage and performed very well for the duration of the two festivals.”

 

28th September 2026

KV2 Audio plays a starring role in the 25th anniversary of The Lion King in Hamburg

Germany – As the highest-grossing stage musical of all time, The Lion King has been seen by a global audience of over 100 million people. The German version of the production has become the nation’s most successful musical show, having welcomed upwards of 700,000 spectators each year since opening at the Stage Theatre im Hafen in Hamburg in December 2001. As it celebrates its 25th anniversary, producer and live entertainment company, Stage Entertainment, has undertaken a significant technical upgrade to ensure the production continues to deliver the same impact to future audiences. A key part of this upgrade is a comprehensive KV2 Audio sound system designed to support the show’s dynamic sonic environment.

The theatre’s existing sound system was beginning to show its age. Stage Entertainment decided to upgrade the system to meet audiences’ growing expectations for high-quality, immersive entertainment. A like-for-like replacement would have presented a costly investment without delivering a comparable step forward in performance. Working closely with Stage Entertainment on the system specification was renowned sound designer, John Shivers, who has worked with KV2 Audio across various stage musicals worldwide.

“In honour of the 25th anniversary of The Lion King in Hamburg, the audio upgrade was part of a broader strategy to enhance the show’s quality for the next 25,” says John Shivers. “Vocal intelligibility was a critical consideration for such a globally recognised story and soundtrack. Each member of the 2,030-seat theatre should experience every word or musical note without compromise. Having used KV2 many times in past musicals, including the Broadway productions of The Lion King and Pretty Woman, I specified the brand’s point-source loudspeakers for the Stage Theatre im Hafen. They deliver exceptionally natural, detailed sound at any level, with superb coverage and minimal listener fatigue.”

A total of 78 KV2 loudspeakers were deployed throughout the theatre. “The installation was carried out by Stage Entertainment’s technical production management team with help from the theatre’s local sound department,” Shivers explains. “For the main PA, each side of the auditorium features two VHD2.0 mid-high loudspeaker systems, arranged as upper and lower PAs to deliver the primary programme audio, from the soundtrack and effects to clear, intelligible spoken word. The lower VHD2.0 works alongside a VHD1.0 downfill enclosure to extend coverage into the lower seating areas and maintain an even listening experience throughout the auditorium.”

Two VHD2.16 subwoofers per side add controlled upper-bass extension, working with the VHD2.0 to deliver the output and tonal balance required by the production. An EX12 on each side provides additional left and right infill, maintaining even coverage and clear, detailed vocal reproduction across the seats closest to the stage.

At floor level, six VHD2.18J subwoofers are positioned as three ground-stacked cabinets on each side of the stage, providing additional low-frequency extension and high-output impact. “These subs deliver exceptional output when working in conjunction with the main PA to ensure subtle sonic detail and effects can be heard,” reveals Shivers. Flown centrally above the auditorium is a pair of VHD2.21 subwoofers, positioned upstage and downstage, operating in a cardioid mono configuration, providing controlled low-frequency energy from the centre of the room.

“Extensive effort has been made to pull vocal imaging all the way to the back of the audience,” Shivers reveals. “Two centrally positioned SL412 systems deliver wide-dispersion vocal reinforcement, with one serving as the centre downfill and the second as a centre delay.” Under the balcony, 17 CS6 ultra-compact two-way loudspeakers are configured in two rows of eight and nine respectively, providing dedicated coverage to the seating below. “These delay lines help fight high-frequency compression under the low ceiling of the balcony. The compact and discreet form factor makes the CS6 well suited to maintaining consistent coverage in this more acoustically challenging section.” Working together with the under-balcony delay lines, the SL412 systems help keep the vocal image focused through the depth of the auditorium, supporting clear spoken word and vocals beyond the central seating area.

A further 34 CS6 loudspeakers create the surround system, with 18 positioned around the sides and rear of the orchestra level, 12 covering the sides and rear of the balcony and four mounted overhead. “Their exceptional speech clarity in such a compact enclosure allowed us to place them throughout the auditorium to ensure even the subtlest details of the jungle soundscape can be heard.” Four full-range, active EX10 loudspeakers, split between the orchestra and balcony levels, provide additional outfill coverage, using their compact, high-output design to supplement the main system where wider peripheral coverage is required.

Finally, four ESD25 loudspeakers are integrated into the front lip of the stage as frontfills, providing discreet close-range coverage for the first rows. Their low-profile design allows them to provide discreet front-stage coverage without compromising the theatre’s sightlines.

“With the 25-year celebration approaching, KV2 has exceeded all expectations for sound quality and reliability,” says Shivers. “Countless details in the arrangement can now be heard that previously went unnoticed. Due to the system’s exceptional resolution, you can hear every keyboard texture and layer within the arrangement. The full complexity of the musical concept comes to light and suddenly you can place the vocals clearly above the powerful orchestral levels in the mix, with remarkable ease.”

Further cementing the success of the new system, The Lion King will also feature in an exclusive behind-the-scenes experience as part of this year’s LEaT con on 7 October. An exclusive technical tour led by Stage Entertainment and KV2 Audio will explore the workflows, systems and technology that deliver one of the most globally recognised musical productions. The tour will give sound designers, engineers and production specialists the opportunity to meet members of the technical team and explore the infrastructure behind the show, including how its audio system has evolved. The new KV2 sound system will play a central role in the experience, offering visitors an opportunity to see how the system was designed, installed and integrated into the production.

“After 25, The Lion King continues to demand the highest level of performance from every part of the production,” concludes Shivers. “The new KV2 system gives us the clarity, consistency and impact to preserve the character of the show while bringing a new level of detail to the audience experience. It is a system built to carry the production forward for the next 25 years.”

28th September 2026

Robe Gets into the System

Europe – System of a Down’s 2026 stadium tour featured a large Robe moving light rig which was specified by Rob Sinclair, who created the initial lighting design and concept in early 2025.

On the previous incarnation, programmer Andre Petrus had created the strong backbone to the current show file together with Meg Sinclair, Daniel Richardson and Matt Arthur, who added extra finesse once on the road.

This time round, the show was further embellished by Matt – as lighting and show director – who oversaw the implementation of the new design. Matt was also out on the road in Europe this summer, operating lighting for the tour.

On the rig were 128 Robe iFORTES, 12 iFORTE LTXs and 96 iESPRITES with iESPRITE LTLs offered as a substitute for standard iESPRITES in Europe and chosen after a shoot-out at lighting supplier Neg Earth Lights’ warehouse in London.

The iESPRITE LTLs were picked for their power and versatility, which matches the band’s incendiary live shows.

“These latest generation Robe products are simply amazing!” declared Matt, who admits that it is only recently that he has had the opportunity to properly maximise these Robe fixtures.

The visual look of the tour saw a close alignment between lighting and video.

Over the stage were four straight 18-metre trusses complete with LED borders, all on an automation system that enabled them to create different architectural looks throughout the performance and each of these was rigged with 18 iFORTES.

These were used for all the essential band lighting and effects.

The stage wings were each up lit by another eight iFORTES per side on the stage deck. Deployed on short sections of pre-rig truss positioned all around the band as a floor package were 25 more iFORTES, together with 15 on the front truss, making up the impressive total.

A fifth roof truss upstage of the four automated ones was used to position four of the iFORTE LTXs, while the other eight were rigged each side on downstage ladders. From these positions they neatly and unobtrusively framed all the front of stage action.

Nine of the 12 iFORTE LTXs were controlled via Robe RoboSpot systems and these were used for keying and highlighting the three front band members, with the drummer illuminated by the other three locked off in position and with various positions programmed for the different architectural looks created by the automated truss moves.

Matt is a big fan of RoboSpots, commenting: “Being able to pre-determine when followspots change colour, turn on / off, strobe, etc is a massive leap forward and everyone benefits from using this system! Not having to call nine followspots means I can be super focused on the show and getting all those cues bang on, every night.”

He also highlights other practical benefits like it being generally safer without people having to work at heights during the show and if there are any issues with comms not being audible, the operator can simply continue following the target. “No more fade ins and fade outs, blackouts and restores or live colour changes. RoboSpot makes both of our jobs more straightforward, ultimately benefitting the show,” he elucidates.

In addition to the intense brightness and all the iFORTE dynamics and features, the luminaires were chosen for their high-quality output, high CRI and excellent skin tone rendering.

Further upstage, behind a 60ft wide 30ft high block of blow-through LED screen, were the 96 iESPRITE LTLs in a 12 by eight matrix pattern on 12 ladder trusses (eight fixtures per ladder), which looked extremely cool and created some retina-burning signature looks, as well as more subtle fluid kinetic effects: a mix of raw hard-hitting big-metal rock show attitude and flowing kinesis that matched or contrasted with the video.

The rig also included 104 strobes and 12 blinders (the latter beneath the ego risers), but the backbone was the three types of Robe luminaire.

Matt likes many features of these new Robe products, noting how Robe has further refined the colour mixing, which he describes as “extremely good and smooth,” while also highlighting “a nice gobo set and a really flat field of light with their LED engine.”

He has been working with System of a Down since 2017 and is a big fan of having large quantities of fewer fixture types, rather than a miscellaneous collection of many, explaining that as they tour across different territories, this is always their biggest ask from local suppliers.

He feels the FORTE range in particular has been a “game changer” for Robe. “They are bulletproof and as bright as the sun,” he quips with a smile. “Seriously, they have plenty of punch and have proved super reliable and I just love the big ‘full-faced’ spot aesthetic! I will definitely spec them in the future.”

Brightness is obviously an issue when competing with large LED surfaces and both iFORTES and iESPRITE LTLs delivered. iESPRITE LTLs were a good physical size to make up the back wall of lights.

The tour started in Stockholm and ran for a month, preceded by production rehearsals at Fly by Nite in Redditch. They played two highly anticipated London dates at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and Paris’s Stade De France amongst others, with all shows sold out. Overall, it was a massive success as the band remains an all-time contemporary metal favourite.

There will be another show in the US in October and the tour visits Australia and New Zealand in January and February 2027.

Last year, System of a Down played the US and Latin America using the same system, with the lighting and video kit supplied by Gateway Production Services.

Lighting crew chief Dan Arnold came to Europe with the production to work on this European tour, together with Neg Earth’s crew of six: distribution / dimmer technician Mark Cooper, FOH / lighting technician Graham Feast, lighting technicians Martin Strods, James Butler and Chloe Boucher, plus RoboSpot and network architect George Pitt, all chiefed by Harry Smith. “They were all fantastic!” declared Matt.

Video for the European leg was supplied by 4Wall, System of a Down’s disguise programmer was Matisse Desmedt and their live camera director is James Duer. Keeping everyone and everything organised on the road was production manager Paul Binder.

photos: George Pitt

25th September 2026

Projection with purpose: Pixel Sharp brings the Bayeux Tapestry to the White Cliffs of Dover

UK – When the British Museum wanted to mark the forthcoming return of the Bayeux Tapestry to England with a message of thanks to France, the White Cliffs of Dover offered an unusually appropriate canvas.

Nearly 1,000 years after the events depicted in the Tapestry, imagery inspired by the historic work appeared across the cliffs alongside a simple message: “Merci”.

For Pixel Sharp founder and director Jon Sharpe, however, turning that concept into a successful projection involved much more than pointing high-brightness projectors towards a large white surface.

The project had to be delivered at a remote location with no mains electricity, limited access and a narrow night-time operating window. The cliffs themselves presented an irregular natural canvas, while fog and an approaching electrical storm added variables that no amount of advance planning could completely remove.

For Sharpe, that made predictability in the areas the team could control particularly important.

Pixel Sharp became involved after Anthony Pickles, director of communications at the British Museum, came across Sharpe’s portfolio and contacted him about the concept.

The British Museum had already developed the creative idea. Pixel Sharp’s role was to translate it into something that would work at the scale and distance required by the cliffs.

Over several meetings, Sharpe worked with the Museum’s content team to establish the usable projection area and advise on the practical limitations of treating a natural landmark as a display surface.

Unlike a conventional screen, the White Cliffs are neither flat nor consistently white. During parts of the year, areas of chalk can be covered by moss and vegetation, creating variations in colour and contrast across the surface.

That had implications for the content itself.

“Projection is light,” Sharpe says. “You have to make sure that the colours are going to give you enough punch.”

Some of the darker colours initially considered for the content therefore needed careful handling, while typography had to remain sufficiently large and clear to survive the scale, distance and texture of the projection surface.

Pixel Sharp also advised the content team to prepare alternative arrangements, including versions with imagery and text positioned differently across the available canvas.

The objective was not simply to create a design that looked good on a monitor, but one that remained legible and visually coherent once projected onto the cliffs.

The physical location added another layer of complexity. The projection position was on land rather than on a boat, but reaching it required travelling through terrain where transporting large quantities of equipment was impractical. There was also no local mains power available. That meant the entire projection system had to be planned around what could realistically be transported to the site, installed within the available timeframe and powered from portable batteries.

For Sharpe, these considerations are fundamental to equipment selection. “When I choose technology, I’m always thinking about the logistics of installing it and how many people I’m going to need,” he says.

A projector may offer impressive performance on paper, but if deploying it requires significantly larger vehicles, lifting equipment or additional crew, the practical cost of a project can increase rapidly.

For the White Cliffs activation, equipment needed to be powerful enough to illuminate the large projection area while remaining manageable for a small production team working in a difficult-to-access location.

Four Panasonic RQ35K 4K laser projectors were deployed in two double-stacked pairs, with the overall system operating from portable battery power.

Sharpe and the wider Pixel Sharp network already had extensive experience working with Panasonic projectors on large-scale projection and immersive productions.

That familiarity was an important part of the decision.

“We always use them. We love them,” says Sharpe. “They’re super easy to use and we’re very accustomed to Panasonic projectors.”

He highlights several factors that become particularly valuable when equipment has to be installed quickly in challenging environments, including straightforward lens handling, familiar controls and a consistent operating approach across different generations of Panasonic products.

For large-scale mapping applications involving multiple projectors, Sharpe also favours 3-Chip DLP technology because of the importance of maintaining consistent colour and image uniformity across the complete projected canvas.

“If you’re doing a mapping job with multiple projectors, we’ll always choose 3-Chip DLP,” he says. “The colours are going to match, the adjustments are going to be better and the uniformity throughout the image is going to be cleaner.” That consistency can save valuable time during commissioning.

On the cliffs, the Pixel Sharp team had only a limited evening window in which to position the projectors, align and map the imagery, test the system and capture the final result.

The physical design of the projectors mattered as well. “For the power of that projector, three people can pick them up, put them on a desk and move them around,” Sharpe says. “Everything is quite straightforward.”

For Pixel Sharp, this relationship between output and portability is increasingly important as projection moves into more unusual locations.

“People always want smaller units,” says Sharpe. “It’s about more power in a smaller package.”

Once on site, the physical installation itself was comparatively familiar territory for Sharpe, who had previously worked on several projections at the White Cliffs. The projectors could be positioned within a couple of hours, with approximately another hour and a half required for mapping.

Nature proved less predictable. A thick bank of fog drifted across the cliffs while the team was preparing the projection. Besides reducing brightness and clarity, the fog temporarily obscured the surface that the team needed to see in order to complete the mapping. Fortunately, conditions eventually improved.

Then another problem appeared. An electrical storm was moving towards the coast.

With the Pixel Sharp team operating electrical equipment and large portable batteries in an exposed location, the approaching lightning changed the calculation quickly. The team captured the required imagery before shutting the system down earlier than originally planned.

The situation reinforced an important principle behind Sharpe’s approach to outdoor production: environmental conditions cannot always be controlled, so preparation, experience and dependable technology become critical.

“You make sure you’ve got cover, you make sure you’re protected and you have backup plans,” he says.

A message that travelled far beyond Dover.

The completed projection combined imagery inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry with the word “Merci”, creating a highly visible gesture of thanks to France ahead of the historic work’s return to England.

Images of the projection subsequently travelled far beyond the cliffs themselves, including being shared by French President Emmanuel Macron.

For Sharpe, the scale of the public response reflected the unusual place the Bayeux Tapestry continues to hold in the cultural imagination.

“It’s something we learn about when we’re kids,” he says. “We all learn about 1066. It’s such an incredibly important piece of history.”

The project was also significant for Pixel Sharp, a young specialist studio built around a collective of experienced technical directors, project managers, creative producers and artists who have previously contributed to major projection and immersive projects across the industry.

Rather than maintaining a large inventory of its own equipment, Pixel Sharp draws on a network of specialist talent and technology partners according to the requirements of each production.

The White Cliffs project provided an opportunity for that expertise to appear under Pixel Sharp’s own name.

For Sharpe, projects like the Bayeux Tapestry projection also demonstrate something broader about the role of projection technology.

Audiences are surrounded by digital imagery every day, much of it encountered through familiar rectangular screens. Projection can break that pattern by placing content directly into a physical environment and allowing the location itself to become part of the message.

“The whole value is that you can take your message and give it context by placing it on a location, or by changing the shape of how it’s viewed,” Sharpe says.

That ability is particularly powerful when technology is used to interpret culture and history. Rather than replacing the object or story at the centre of an experience, Sharpe believes the most successful technology can almost disappear behind it.

“When you present something in a unique way, people are going to remember it,” he says.

It’s hard to imagine a more fitting illustration of that principle: a story nearly a thousand years old, cast in new light on the White Cliffs of Dover and shining across the Channel as a vivid reminder that, however technology changes the way we tell our stories, the future remains illuminated by the past.

24th September 2026

Hippotizer turns HECHT’s spontaneity into live visuals at Hallenstadion

Switzerland – Swiss band HECHT took to the stage at Zurich’s Hallenstadion with a visual production as energetic and spontaneous as the band itself. Combining live camera feeds, real-time Notch effects and programmed content across a large-scale LED canvas, the production used Hippotizer media servers from Green Hippo, an ACT Entertainment brand, to put video at the heart of the live experience.

Designed by Roger Staub, creative director at Leap of Faith, the visual concept brought lighting, video and the band’s performance together as a single, highly dynamic environment. Rather than treating video as a fixed backdrop, the system was designed to react to what was happening on stage, allowing the visual team to manipulate the live image and respond to the band in real time.

“I find the technical aspect of a show so exciting because it forms the foundation for the creative, musical and artistic parts,” says Staub. “Ultimately, we can only execute what is technically feasible. That is precisely why I am fascinated by using modern technology to continually push the boundaries of what is possible.”

A key part of the production was its extensive use of live camera feeds. Four operated cameras, alongside several fixed cameras captured the action, with the footage integrated into the visual system and enhanced using real-time Notch effects.

On stage, a 16 by seven metre LED backdrop provided a 2048 x 896-pixel canvas, built from 224 AR7.8 panels. Two additional four by seven metre LED IMAG screens, each comprising 56 AR7.8 panels, extended the visual experience across the Hallenstadion.

Behind the system, two Hippotizer media servers were deployed in a main and backup configuration, with Barco S3 systems handling the main and backup switching. The Hippotizer systems were supplied by menzi ebz ag, Green Hippo’s official Swiss distribution partner, with product specialist Michael Kuhn providing network and technical support.

Kuhn has worked with HECHT on a number of productions over the years, helping to establish the relationship between the band’s production team and menzi ebz. For this show, the technical requirements were particularly demanding, with the production relying heavily on live video processing and real-time effects.

“Since we rely heavily on live camera feeds for this production and use Notch as well as real-time effects, we needed a media server with immense processing power to keep the latency as low as possible,” says Staub.

The workflow combined pre-programmed visual content organised in cue lists with live camera feeds and real-time manipulation. Using Hippotizer and ZooKeeper, the team could trigger cues and dynamic backgrounds, adjust colours and apply effects, while retaining the ability to override the programmed content whenever the performance demanded it.

That flexibility was particularly important for HECHT’s on-the-fly stage interactions. Several key moments in the show relied entirely on the band’s live energy, with the visual team reacting instantly to what was happening on stage rather than following a predetermined sequence.

For Staub, that responsiveness is central to the role technology can play in a live show.

“I am extremely happy with the whole show, the band is simply great. You can literally feel their energy and the wave of enthusiasm they ride on stage,” he says. “For passionate showmakers, it’s not just about playing the music: our goal is to support the performance through technology in a way that creates an unforgettable overall experience for the audience.”

24th September 2026

Christopher Pratt brings in the shutters on Dear Evan Hansen with Ayrton Stradale at The King’s Theatre, Portsmouth

UK – Receiving excellent reviews for its outstanding performances and production values, the recent amateur production of Dear Evan Hansen performed by CCADS (Corpus Christi Amateur Dramatic Society) in The King’s Theatre, Portsmouth saw some highly original uses of Ayrton Stradale fixtures in an imaginative design by lighting designer Christopher Pratt.

Pratt, who has a long-established working relationship with CCADS, incorporated 15 Ayrton Stradale into his design, utilising the shutter sets to carve out precise areas of action and track the actors across the stage.

“Our director, John-Paul McCrohon, wanted to set the mood as an overarching sense of isolation,” says Pratt. “The idea was to light the minimum amount of space needed for each scene which is where the concept of the hard line shuttering came in. I therefore insisted all the movers overhead should have shutter blades and, being familiar with Ayrton Mistral spots and Diablo profiles, was keen to explore the new Stradale. Stradale combines the features of Mistral and Diablo with no compromise on the second gobo wheel or the shutter set.”

Pratt approached the show’s lighting supplier, ITP Lighting Ltd, with his request, who increased its investment in more Stradale units which has increased their hire stock.

“This allowed me to have three bars of five Stradale profiles overhead, which worked perfectly in the 9.5 by 6.5 by six metre performance space. The amount of hanging set was minimal which left me with lots of freedom to hang lighting bars and rig the Stradales where I wanted. It gave me a nice balance between keeping the movers hidden and covering the full expanse of the stage. I had complete freedom to work with different angles, create different looks and get as much from the Stradale as possible.”

With only two days of technical rehearsal – and with amateur actors only available in the evening – Pratt had to work fast. “It was a brand-new set, so we were going in blind,” he says. “On day one we set out the boundaries of what each scene needed and because of the lack of time, I used only one Stradale to light each scene. This gave me the square/rectangular space I needed to ensure we covered every location needed as we blocked through the scenes.

“On day two, I filled in the details using the rest of the Stradale fixtures, sometimes using as many as six for each square. I was able to make fine adjustments with the actors in place, adjusting angles and perfecting timings, smoothing and blending the overlaps and pauses, achieving smooth graduations.”

For the more complex effects such as creating a moving corridor that would open in front and close behind an actor, Pratt says it was: “Rather like tracking the actor with shutter blades. I set up a preset for the corridor of light I wanted. Then I brought a shutter in to cover the entire beam path. Then recorded each step taking out that shutter blade as a cue and used follow-ons to have them blend into one another. I then repeated it the other way if I was closing the corridor. The Stradales have a nice smooth movement, especially when used so subtly, which really worked well for these effects.”

Pratt says that Stradale’s rotating frame assembly made ‘a big difference’ in the speed and ability to achieve the precise angles he required: “Most of it was at 90 degrees where not much adjustment to the angle of the shutter blades was required.

“But in several scenes the angle was offset, so I would bring in the shutter blades, rotate the assembly plus or minus 90 degrees and adjust the shutter blades until I could cover all the awkward angles to achieve a perfect square. Stradale gave me great flexibility to have plus or minus 90degrees of rotation plus the angle adjustment of the individual blades was a great help. It is a really nice development of Diablo’s feature that was essential for this production.”

Pratt also found Stradale’s gobo selection to be ‘very theatre-friendly’ and the richer blue to be a lot deeper yet still visible, even over seven to ten metres. “I’m a big fan of blue so having that deep blue for some of the sadder moments was great. It was also my first time trying out the CTO filter (which is also in Mistral and Diablo) for face light and warm colour temperatures. I’d previously used the colour flags and it’s always difficult to reel in colour filters to get a nice face light. But the CTO filter’s sole purpose is for precisely this function. It’s really easy to get a nice repeatable colour from Stradale and by using one filter instead of a mix of three CMY flags, I got the punch I needed without having too much in the gate.”

photos: © Tony Neil 

24th September 2026

Tiziano Ferro Stadi 26 Tour Enchants with Help from Zalight and Chauvet Professional

Italy – The legendary Tiziano Ferro began his performance at San Siro Stadium with a heartfelt rendition of  “Sono un grande,” (I Am Awesome). Fans at the sold-out stadium would whole heartedly agree with that assessment as far as the star’s show was concerned. So too would those who packed every other venue of the multi-Grammy winners ten-city Italian summer tour.

Reaching deep into his heart and life experience, Tiziano Ferro enthralled crowds as he performed beautifully balanced, evocative songs in Italian, English, Spanish, Portuguese and French. His show retraced 25 years of great music, closely intertwined with the artist’s intense relationship with his audience.

Providing a visually rich visual backdrop that matched the depth of the artist’s performance was a beautifully textured lighting design by Giovanni Pinna that integrated closely with the Comix created video content that was displayed on a 1,000-square-metre screen.

Pinna worked closely with creative director/stage designer Gio Forma, video director Cristian Biondani, associate LD Marco De Nardi and programmer Marco Zucchinali, to collaborate on a show that flowed seamlessly with Tiziano Ferro’s music and dynamic stage presence. Critical to this creative fusion was a collection of 26 Maverick Storm 3 BeamWash moving heads and 55 Color Strike M motorised strobe washes from Chauvet Professional, imported by Zalight and serviced by Agora.

Discussing how the concept of the show came together, Pinna said: “The content and all interactions with the LED walls were meticulously crafted and carefully planned from the start. Thanks to our direct contact with Comix, the English company that created all the content, we already had a clear vision of the work they were preparing six months in advance. With this in mind, we reviewed the content for each song, but above all, we worked on the interaction between content, automation and lighting.”

The lighting set-up featured five ten-meter-long in-line truss systems, all automated, arranged across the entire width of the stage. The fixtures on this truss continuously interacted with the LED wall content. For many songs, automation was used to frame the content, creating a multitude of different looks and video matrices. This dynamically defined new spaces and greatly accentuated the interaction between content, lighting and automated truss systems.

“The video component of Stadi 26 wasn't that invasive,” said Pinna. “Of course, we’re talking about a huge screen, but it was used with great care and also very well calibrated, leaving a lot of space for the lights compared to many other situations in which you have such a large LED wall as a backdrop so, I absolutely can’t complain; in fact, the result in many cases was exceptionally good, both in terms of balance and light output.

“In this balance between LED walls and lights, the Maverick Storm 3 BeamWash and Color Strike M were fundamental,” he continued. “The Mavericks did a tremendous job. I dedicated them mainly to lighting the choreography, which was one of the central motifs of the show; keep in mind that there were ten dancers on stage and more than half the show was choreographed. I used 18 Mavericks alternating on the front of the stage for backlighting and another eight, always on the ground, for the dance floor area: three plus three external and two plus two internal. They were almost always dedicated to the choreography, with cuts to Tiziano and the dancers, used constantly.”

Pinna used the Maverick fixtures for audience lighting in addition to accenting the dance routines, explaining that he called on them in situations where he needs “high-quality colours,” and a zoom wide enough to guarantee widespread coverage of the stage and the catwalk. “In short, I used them in their essence as washes – colour and power – and they really gave me a lot,” he declared.

Already familiar with the Color Strike M through his work designing for Vasco Rossi, Pinna praised their performance. “The Color Strike Ms were another key piece of the show,” he said. “They covered the entire width of the stage and always worked at 100 percent. They were the real ‘hard core’ for illuminating the audience. Beyond that, they did a lot of graphic work, both in effects and colour, with an extremely strong impact on the show.”

A strong impact? Yes indeed, the show had that and much more, providing fans with an experience they will remember for a very long time. In the words of one music critic in Bologna, “it was a night filled with music and emotion alongside one of the most beloved Italian artists,” accompanied we would add by a stunning lighting and video production.

24th September 2026

Technical Elements Scores with Professional at FIFA Fan Festival Atlanta

USA – Technical Elements served as the production partner for FIFA Fan Festival Atlanta, installing, operating and maintaining the technical infrastructure that transformed Centennial Olympic Park into a temporary outdoor broadcast and entertainment venue for FIFA World Cup 2026. Across the 38-day production run, Technical Elements’ systems supported 19 public operating days and more than 536,000 guests through live match broadcasts, concerts, sponsor activations and community programming, making Atlanta one of the most attended FIFA Fan Festival locations throughout the tournament. They relied on a complete Harman Professional ecosystem featuring JBL Professional loudspeakers, Crown amplifiers and Martin Professional lighting.

Unlike a traditional concert or sporting event, FIFA Fan Festival Atlanta operated as a temporary outdoor broadcast and entertainment venue for more than five consecutive weeks, with changing audience sizes and programming that shifted from live match broadcasts and sponsor presentations to concerts, DJ performances and nighttime celebrations. Technical Elements designed the production to capture the energy of the tournament while adapting to each use case throughout the day. The audio system needed to maintain speech intelligibility for hosts, commentators and presentations while providing the impact required for live music and match celebrations, with consistent coverage throughout the audience area. Lighting needed to transition from broadcast applications during the day to dynamic concert and celebration looks after sunset. Across both systems, continuous operation through Atlanta’s summer heat, humidity and rain made reliability a central requirement.

“For us, success wasn’t measured by one great show,” said Brandon Montgomery, sales director for Technical Elements. “The primary objective was to create an immersive environment that matched the excitement of one of the world’s biggest sporting events by delivering the same world-class experience daily, from opening ceremony through the final whistle.”

Technical Elements designed the main PA around JBL Professional VTX A12 line arrays, selected to provide the output and vocal clarity required across the audience area for programming ranging from match commentary and presentations to concerts and DJ performances. JBL Professional VTX A8 loudspeakers provided front-fill and supplemental coverage to maintain consistent SPL and frequency response throughout the venue, while JBL VTX B28 dual 18-inch subwoofers supplied controlled low-frequency reinforcement for live music, DJ sets and match celebrations.

Extending coverage across the festival site, JBL Professional VTX V20 loudspeakers paired with VTX G28 subwoofers served as delay systems, while JBL Professional VRX932LAP loudspeakers covered site entrances. On stage, artists were supported by JBL Professional VTX M20 monitor wedges and VTX A8 side fills paired with VTX B18 subwoofers. With multiple listening areas spread throughout Centennial Olympic Park, maintaining consistent levels across the site was a key challenge and the range of JBL Professional systems allowed Technical Elements to create a cohesive mix for audiences throughout the venue.

Crown I-Tech 4x3500HD and I-Tech 12000HD amplifiers powered the system, providing the headroom, integrated DSP and system monitoring required throughout the 38-day production. Managing delay directly within the Crown amplifiers also streamlined equipment deployment and saved set up time, while the combination of JBL Professional VTX loudspeakers and Crown amplification gave the production team a consistent platform for everything from spoken-word programming to high-energy live performances.

Lighting throughout the festival was built around Martin Professional MAC Viper XIP, MAC Aura Raven XIP and MAC Ultra Performance fixtures. MAC Viper XIP fixtures provided the output and versatility required for keylighting, aerial effects and long-throw applications, while MAC Aura Raven XIP fixtures delivered colour washes and dynamic beam effects across the site. MAC Ultra Performance fixtures supported audience lighting and high-energy visual moments during concerts and goal celebrations. Operating daily through Atlanta’s summer heat, humidity, rainstorms and rapidly changing weather conditions, the lighting system delivered consistent performance throughout the 38-day event. The weather-resistant design of the MAC Viper XIP and MAC Aura Raven XIP fixtures was particularly valuable in the outdoor environment, helping reduce maintenance requirements and minimise operational interruptions throughout production.

“When you’re operating outdoors in Atlanta for more than five weeks, reliability isn’t just an equipment specification, it’s part of the production strategy,” said Zach Sturino, senior director of events for Technical Elements. “We chose systems we knew could deliver at this scale day after day. The consistency of the JBL, Crown and Martin platforms allowed our team to spend less time troubleshooting and more time focused on the audience experience.”

The response from organisers and attendees reflected the experience Technical Elements set out to create. Guests consistently commented on the energy of the festival, from the excitement surrounding live match broadcasts to the impact of concerts and nightly programming. Clear, intelligible audio ensured announcements and commentary remained understandable throughout the venue, while the powerful concert sound and dynamic lighting elevated every celebration. Internally, the production team appreciated the consistency of the Harman Professional systems throughout the festival’s extended schedule

“Reliability was one of the greatest successes of this project,” Brandon said. “The equipment simply performed and proved to be an excellent demonstration of the durability and reliability of the Harman Professional ecosystem.”

By combining JBL Professional VTX systems, Crown amplifiers and Martin Professional lighting, Technical Elements created a flexible production platform capable of supporting one of the world's largest public watch parties throughout the FIFA World Cup 2026. Across 38 consecutive days of operation, the system delivered the consistency, reliability and operational flexibility required to support more than 536,000 fans while adapting seamlessly to the Fan Fest's changing daily programming.

24th September 2026

Pierre E. Roy Molds Looks to Fit 13 Rock La Cauze Acts with Chauvet Professional

Canada – It takes a versatile lighting rig to meet the needs of 17 different bands over three-day outdoor festival. It also takes a talented LD with a deft, flexible touch to run the shows for 13 of them. Rock La Cauze 2026, a fundraising event that took place at the spacious Parc Terre-des-Jeunes, was fortunate enough to have both!

Well-known designer Pierre E. Roy set up the festival rig and ran it for all but four of the festival’s headliners, lending his considerable skills to bands that included two-time Grammy-nominee August Burns Red, as well as an eclectic mix of punk, rock, metalcore, alternative rock and local Québécois acts.

Roy’s formidable FOH skills were critical in helping him navigate his way through this widely diverse mix of musical styles and stage personalities. However, he also benefited from the same advantage that the visiting LDs for Killswitch Engage, I Prevail, Machine Head and Hollywood Undead enjoyed: a powerful and very flexible rig featuring Chauvet Professional fixtures supplied by DGM Sonorisation in Victoriaville, Quebec.

Confident that he could work with virtually any fixtures specified in the headliners’ riders, Roy polled the visiting LDs before setting up his festival rig. “I reviewed each band’s technical rider to get as close as possible to their own touring rig,” he explained. “I also designed the rig so it could be cloned easily. This way, when the visiting LDs arrived it was quick and easy for them to adapt their show. Time is a major factor at a festival since we don’t have much time between bands.

“As far as the fixtures, I selected go, the Chauvet Maverick MK1 Hybrids, COLORado Solos, Color Strike Ms and Rogue Outcast 1s in FOH are all well-known fixtures among LDs,” continued Roy. “This means that there weren't many concerns or surprises.”

Even though he describes the weather during the festival as being “perfect,” Roy was relieved that these fixtures were all IP65 rated, since this gave him one less thing to worry about. He also appreciated that the fixtures were compact, which made set up easier.

Fixture placement was a key part of Roy’s plan to create a versatile rig. He arranged his 22 Maverick MK1 units in pairs across the rig and drew on their versatility to have them fill a variety of roles. His COLORado units were placed SL and SR to be used for side washing. The Color Strike Ms in the rig were flow four-each on three stage trusses to provide crowd lighting, sidelighting and specials.

As one media report noted Rock La Cauze 2026 offered “one of the strongest line-ups in the festival’s history.” Thanks to this talented designer and his versatile rig, it was also one of the most artfully lit.

23rd September 2026

GLP JDC2  IP debuts firmware 2.0 on Spiritbox’s North American tour

23rd September 2026

Elation Paragon and Rebel Deliver Power, Versatility and Protection at Italian Summer Festivals

Italy – Elation lighting fixtures took centre stage at two major summer festivals in Italy’s Veneto region in July, with the Paragon S, Rebel Wash 12 and Rebel Line 16 delivering dynamic looks and reliable performance at Bassano Music Park and Mirano Summer Festival. Elation is distributed exclusively in Italy by Prase.

The two events presented very different production environments but shared a requirement for high-performance, versatile fixtures capable of delivering impactful looks in demanding outdoor conditions. At Bassano Music Park, lighting designer and project manager Marco Renica of rental company Cipiesse selected 36 Paragon S profile moving heads alongside 32 Rebel Wash 12 fixtures. At the Mirano Summer Festival, Mazzon Service handled audio, video and lighting and deployed Elation’s Rebel Line 16 tilt bars on the main stage.

Now in its third edition, Bassano Music Park brings national and international artists to the city of Bassano del Grappa. Organised by DuePunti Eventi in collaboration with the City of Bassano del Grappa, this year’s festival featured Italian artists and international stars including Tommaso Paradiso, Rod Stewart and Sting.

Cipiesse deployed 36 Paragon S moving heads across four trusses along with 12 additional units positioned on the floor. A further 32 Rebel Wash 12 fixtures were mounted on side and rear trusses, providing powerful, colourful wash coverage and aerial effects.

For LD Marco Renica, the award-winning Paragon S was a proven choice. He had previously used the fixture on a tour where the production presented particularly challenging conditions and was impressed enough to specify it for the festival.

“I had already tested the Paragon S on a tour where we were working in very unique situations and I was very satisfied with them – we were using all profile luminaires on a very complex show – so I chose to use them for this festival as well.”

The fixture’s output was another major attraction. With up to 20,500 lumens, the Paragon S provides the intensity needed to compete with the scale and brightness of a major outdoor festival production. “They have excellent light output and they’re IP-rated, another crucial factor given the outdoor venue and the fact that the show must go on even in bad weather.”

The Paragon S combines its high output with a compact, lightweight design, an important consideration when building large temporary structures. At 22.5kg, the fixture helped Renica and the production team manage the structural demands of the festival’s truss system. “I also chose the Paragon S because of its weight, which was a key consideration from the start when performing the engineering and structural calculations for the trusses, load-bearing capacity assessments and so on.”

The Rebel Wash 12 full-spectrum moving-head luminaires complemented the profile fixtures with broad, even washes, rich RGBL colour, high output and mid-air beam effects, giving the lighting system a versatile combination of profile and wash capabilities.

Only a short distance from Venice, the Mirano Summer Festival transformed the city of Mirano into a 20-day destination for concerts and live performances. Now in its 20th edition, the multi-genre festival featured a diverse line-up of Italian artists.

Mazzon Service was responsible for the event’s audio, video and lighting and selected Elation Rebel Line 16 fixtures as a dynamic visual backdrop for the stage. The latest addition to Elation’s linear tilt bar range, the one-meter Rebel Line 16 combines 16 individually controlled RGBL cells that materialise beautifully in haze. Added white SparkX LEDs generate striking cool-white crisscross aerial effects over the RGBL background, opening up new creative possibilities for dynamic looks.

The Rebel Line’s continuous lens system maintains beam continuity across the fixture’s full length, while a 4°–35° zoom range and 210° of tilt movement allow designers to quickly shift between tight aerial looks, wider washes and sweeping movement effects. With an IP55 rating, the fixture is also suited to the demands of outdoor festival production.

Together, the Elation Paragon and Rebel fixtures gave production teams at the two Veneto festivals the output, colour versatility, dynamic effects and weather protection needed to create impactful looks: important qualities for demanding large-scale outdoor productions.

23rd September 2026

AV Stumpfl Vario 64 carries Sam Wiehl's live Unreal Engine visuals through Super Furry Animals tour

UK – Super Furry Animals returned to the road in 2026 with Taith Supacabra, the Welsh band’s first UK tour in more than a decade. The band chose a deliberately compact run of dates in intimate rooms, playing at Glasgow’s Barrowland Ballroom and the O2 Apollo in Manchester before closing at O2 Academy Brixton in late May. PRG supplied video for the tour, with an AV Stumpfl Vario 64 frame system as the show’s primary projection surface.

The tour had a small number of dates in smaller venues, leaving little truck space and budget for a bespoke projection surface. Still, the shows content demanded a screen that could hold detail and colour under a full projection rig.

“The screen had to pack down into a very tight space and our proposed solution had to be modular,” says James Hancocks, technical account manager of music for PRG. “The small number of dates and the choice to play more intimate venues led to a budget that didn’t allow for a custom solution for the projection surface. We knew the screen needed to be a proper surface to get the most out of the projectors and it couldn’t be a gauze or another material.”

Vario was the answer. The system is built around a basic frame that can be sized to almost any format and it’s manufactured at AV Stumpfl’s facility in Austria. Surfaces stretch onto the frame with press studs and pack flat for transport alongside the frame components. AV Stumpfl offers close to 30 surface materials as well. For Taith Supacabra, the specification was Flex White CI, a premium front-projection vinyl with a matt white face and a grey, fully lightproof rear layer.

The particular frame PRG carried on Taith Supacabra is an unusual size and that is precisely what keeps it in the inventory. “The unique size makes it a surface that keeps being useful for clients that want something a bit different from the usual 16:9 stock that everyone has,” says Hancocks. “It allows us to offer something a bit different.”

On this tour, that translated into a screen running the full width of the stage. This was used sparingly for monochromatic designs across the opening songs before the show opened out into colour.

Beyond format, the decision came down to what a touring frame has to do every day. Vario systems are designed for repeated assembly over long service lives, with global parts availability behind them. That’s a real practical consideration on a tour working with different local crews in different rooms every night. The screen itself is part of that picture too. The material is flexible enough to fold down into the same tight transport envelope as the frame components, it washes clean with water and it is flame retardant for venue compliance on both sides of the Atlantic.

“The way it can go together night after night and you know it will work; that’s great,” says Hancocks. “And the ability to get spare parts easily wherever you are in the world is a plus too.”

That consistency showed in the load-ins. Since every Vario screen follows the same assembly scheme regardless of size, crews new to the system got up to speed quickly.

“It went together like a dream,” says Hancocks. “The modularity of the components means it is quick for any local crew to put up or tear down.”

The projection design placed a pair of Panasonic 13K projectors in a side-by-side blend to fill the full width of the Vario surface. A Panasonic 31K was also in the rig but worked exclusively as a front of house keylight on the band rather than onto the screen, leaving the blended image on the Vario surface uncompromised by spill.

The content came from visual artist Sam Wiehl, who has worked with Mogwai, Yann Tiersen, Forest Swords and more. His art direction also shaped the visual world of the Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia. Wiehl was brought onto Taith Supacabra by production company Neon Black, working with the band and production manager Shaun Kendrick. The group developed the show through storyboards, test runs and a rehearsal period at PRG. Across the set, Wiehl manipulated 3D visuals live in Unreal Engine, building a three-act structure that opened in monochrome and escalated toward the finale.

“The show wanted to slowly introduce the AV element and build up to a production crescendo,” says Sam Wiehl, visual artist. “The set was broken into three sections: monochromatic black and white including lighting, then a colour introduction, the more psychedelic section and then a third section with a more frenetic approach towards the finale. We played with a mixture of recognisable elements of the Super Furry Animals visual world and introduced a detailed, audio-driven particle world, all run in Unreal Engine. We described the colour moment as a kind of Wizard of Oz moment, as everything including the lights hit a technicolour burst.”

Running the show live rather than to a timeline was a deliberate choice and one the setlist demanded. “We wanted the flexibility to produce a show that felt different each time. The setlist would change from show to show and we wanted to adapt accordingly,” says Wiehl. “I’m controlling the camera in Unreal live, with the audio affecting the worlds I’m in. I could generate the right energy to suit the tempo of the tracks each night. I love performing live and being able to react in the moment.”

The surface choice did a lot of work to keep those visuals popping night after night. AV Stumpfl’s Flex White CI is a diffuse screen with a gain of 0.96 and a recommended viewing cone of ±55°, so brightness and colour rendition hold for the audience at the edges of the room as well as those square on to the stage. This is a real consideration in venues where much of the crowd is both close in and well off-axis. The screen’s totally lightproof backing keeps stage wash and rear spill from lifting the blacks, which matters in a show that opens on monochrome designs. And the material is rated for 8K-plus content, resolving the detail in Wiehl’s renders rather than softening it.

“The fact that the lighting also increased in the opening meant we needed a real punch on the screen for it all to feel right and in balance. The Vario 64 screen was great and totally gave us the definition we needed,” says Wiehl. “The hit was ‘Hello Sunshine’ and after a few tweaks on my side, we got the spectrum of sun colours ranging from golds and yellows to purples and pinks to create the right effect.”

The rooms themselves also shaped how this psychedelic content was built. “The widescreen set-up created an unusual ratio for the audience, especially as we performed in venues with low ceilings. Maintaining the scale of the show was absolutely key,” says Wiehl. “We also utilised projections onto the band and the audience to create additional immersion, allowing the show to spill out of the screen in certain moments. The content was designed to be organic and in places abstract, utilising the spaces we were in.”

For a surface asked to hold that range of content, through haze and shifting lighting states, the first real test came in rehearsals. “It really popped,” says Hancocks. “When we had it set up in rehearsals, the creative team walked in. And they were really blown away with how the image looked on the screen.”

Wiehl had been waiting a long time for that moment. “It was great to see months of work finally on a large screen,” he says. “The image looked great and I think there was a genuine excitement between all of us that once we were rolling, we’d have a great show.”

Taith Supacabra is a great demonstration of what a modular projection screen is for. Working within a tight transport envelope and a modest scenic budget, PRG was able to put a distinctive, full-width, projection-grade surface in front of a returning band and their audience. And with a frame system that assembled the same way every night and that could be supported anywhere the tour went, it kept the work seamless. Vario has been in the AV Stumpfl range for more than 40 years and it continues to earn its place in touring inventories for exactly those reasons.

photos: Dylan Swann, courtesy of PRG

22nd September 2026

Joker Out Celebrates Ten with Karneval Extravaganza

Slovenia – Robe’s new GigaPointe moving lights made their Slovenian debut with popular indie rockers Joker Out, who celebrated their tenth anniversary with a massive special show: Karneval, a festival-style, circus-themed extravaganza including special guests, staged at the outdoor Kardeljeva ploščad venue at the university in capital Ljubljana.

Tasked with designing lighting this landmark event was visual design agency Blackout, who have been working with Joker Out since 2021. The lighting design team was led by Klemen Krajnc with Crt Birsa taking care of keylighting and they chose to work with a large rig of Robe moving lights.

This included a set of 32 brand-new Robe GigaPointes, which had just been delivered to rental company Event Lighting. Also on the rig were 13 Robe FORTES, six iFORTE LTXs, 37 MegaPointes, 49 iSpiiderXs wash beams and 14 Tetra2 moving LED battens.

The band picked the spherical-shaped stage and worked with set designer Maja Moravec on creating various circus props, intricate draping and other scenic elements to evoke the big top look, including the band risers on stage. The central arched stage was flanked by wings dressed to resemble circus tents and some of the guest performers were aerialists and other circus acts.

Klemen added the lights to this stage layout, which were overhead and around the sides of the stage structure and on eight independent scaffolding towers, six behind the stage – graduated in height but all taller than the stage and wings so they were visible over the top – plus left and right PA towers framing the central section just in front of the stage.

The GigaPointes were on the deck, positioned along the full width of the front edge of the 70-metre-wide, two-metre high stage, including the two wings and the wing returns at each end. All of these sat on a ledge half a metre below stage level.

These were used primarily for creating dramatic effects and reaching out across the arena with their super-bright narrow piercing beams with huge impact for the epic wide-look visual aesthetic.

Klemen – using GigaPointes for the first time – declared: “They are fantastic!”

In a programming context, he mentioned that it is “extremely handy” that they can be exchanged, swapped or paired parameter-for-parameter with MegaPointes, which will also continue to be a favourite fixture for many for some time. “This makes it a very smooth and seamless transition from MegaPointes to GigaPointes,” he confirmed.

Twenty-seven of the 37 MegaPointes were rigged on nine over-stage finger trusses running in an upstage/downstage orientation with different heights following the curvature of the roof arch and the other ten were upstage in a straight line.

Klemen worked these and the GigaPointes together to create some of the show’s most memorable lighting scenes.

Fourteen Robe Tetra2 LED battens were used to illuminate the stage wing set elements, rigged on the floor for optimal up lighting of the vertical parts of the set.

Twenty-seven iSpiiderXs were also on the finger trusses, three per truss. Another 18 were used for lower sidelight across the sphere stage, nine per side, running front to back on low parts of the stage structure.

Four iSpiiderXs were used for front keylighting for the static members of the band in two high cantilevered positions on the downstage sides of the stage structure: two for the drummer and one each for the keyboardist and backing vocalists on their risers.  

These were under Crt’s control for the show. He additionally layered in more keys using a combination of the six iFORTE LTXs and 13 FORTES for lighting the mobile band members plus several guests.

The side keys on stage utilised four FORTES, two each positioned on the far stage left and right (of the eight) towers and throwing onto the front of the stage, covering the performance areas at the front of the wings, the central stage apron and thrust area.

This was a long throw, perfect for the power of the FORTE.

On the two delay towers left and right of FOH were eight FORTES and the 13th FORTE was rigged in the mid front position on the sphere stage to backlight performers as they sashayed down the central catwalk.

Above the FORTES on the delay towers were six iFORTE LTXs, three per side, programmed to catch all the onstage, forestage, wing and runway action. The six iFORTE LTXs were running on five RoboSpot systems (the BaseStations were under the stage) and Crt notes that most of the time he only needed to run the LTXs at 50% intensity to be effective on camera and live.

Klemen’s main task was to make the show look spectacular and celebratory, while giving it the sense of scale and occasion that everyone was expecting and that’s why he chose these Robe products plus several other lights for the show: for their flexibility and dynamics. Also, naturally because Event Lighting – one of the busiest rental companies in Slovenia – had these in stock.

Everyone was then super excited when they realised the GigaPointes would be delivered in time!

Klemen and Crt pre-vizzed the show as much as was practical and on site had two days of intense programming with the full rig.

However, the main challenge for this show was nothing technical or artistic, it was the weather! Ljubljana is situated in a wide, flat basin known as the Ljubljana Basin (Ljubljanska kotlina), surrounded by hills and mountains, and this has its own microclimate.

An extremely violent thunderstorm complete with torrential rain unleashed itself a couple of hours before Joker Out were due to take the stage, resulting in extensive flooding and emergency adaptations being needed on the site.

Some elements of the kit were drenched and waterlogged and some of the upstage back drapes were ripped off by the high winds and had to be reattached as best as possible.

Thankfully, in the spirit of ‘the show must go on’ and some outstanding teamwork, everything was deemed safe and 17,000 Joker Out fans were able to enjoy a spectacular show with eye-popping visuals, thanks to a combination of determination, great production talents and imagination, ambitious design and solid products. 

photos: Sasa Krajnc

22nd September 2026

Outline P12 at Elden, Norway’s largest historical outdoor theatre

Norway – Elden is the largest historical outdoor theatre production in Norway and it has been staged every summer since 1994.

Its setting is unusual by any measure. The performance takes place on the slag heaps above Røros, the old copper-mining town in central Norway inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, with the industrial landscape itself forming the set. Around 400 volunteers take part each season.

The story is a local one: the winter of 1718-19, when General Armfeldt’s Swedish army marched on Trondheim and was destroyed by the cold on the retreat.

This year’s run, from 22 July to 1 August, drew between 11,000 and 12,000 spectators. Technical delivery was handled by rental company Pro Systemer AS, which deployed Outline P12 coaxial loudspeakers as stage wedges at key positions across the arena.

The P12 arrived at Elden at the end of a long search, against a precise brief.

Frode Trondahl, project manager at Pro Systemer AS, explains: “We have been looking for a new 12-inch coaxial wedge monitor for some time to replace our existing monitors. They needed to be lighter, to sound at least as good as what we already had, to offer flexibility in terms of rigging and set up and to provide better protection for outdoor use in rainy conditions – IP54 – than our current monitors.

“We tested a wide range of different wedges and of all the models we evaluated, the voicing of the P12 was the closest match to our existing monitors. At the same time, the P12 offered a little more low-end, giving the impression of a slightly larger and more substantial sound. We see this as a definite advantage.

“We handle more than 1,000 projects every year: theatre, revue shows, concerts, festivals, sporting events and corporate events. That requires an inventory which is both highly flexible and exceptionally reliable. So far, we have had nothing but positive experiences with the P12.”

On site, the first difference showed up as headroom.

Fredrik Hagland, sound designer for Elden at Medhør AS, reports: “The new Outline P12 wedges delivered better gain before feedback than the ones we deployed the previous year. We didn’t notice how loud we were running them until we went through actor monitoring one day without the PA and realised the actors’ omni headsets were playing back at rock-concert levels without any issue.”

Ten consecutive nights on an exposed mountain site tested the rest of the specification. “The Outline P12 wedges generally performed well and stood up to the harsh conditions that outdoor theatre in Norway is,” Hagland adds. “They delivered the same monitoring even when there was rain straight into them.”

The P12 belongs to Outline’s P-Series, a range of portable point-source systems built exclusively around coaxial transducers, spanning models from a single 4-inch to a double 15-inch configuration.

21st September 2026

Skan PA Powers Biffy Clyro's 'Futique', World's First HELA-Certified Tour

Worldwide - Following a sell our arena tour on home turf at the start of 2026, Biffy Clyro’s international appeal saw them head to Australia, New Zealand and North America before European festivals called them back for some (responsibly loud) rock & roll this summer, including their biggest- headline show at London’s Finsbury Park.

Skan PA has supplied audio services to the band for the past 14 years, seven of which have seen engineer Jon Burton crafting the band’s huge FOH mix.

“I have had great support over the years from the team at Skan,” he begins. “It’s been nice to reconnect with the company where I started my own career many years ago. Attention to detail has been key to Skan’s success and I’m glad to see that it has been maintained as they have integrated into the Clair Global ecosystem.”

Jon, who is also an esteemed academic, is helping to challenge what responsible sound means in live events. As a senior lecturer for the University of Derby’s BSc (Hon) Sound, Light and Live Event Engineering degree, his passion for all things live benefits the wider community, as his status as a founding member of the HELA (Healthy Ears, Limited Annoyance) initiative demonstrates.

The Futique tour is the first in the world to achieve certification under the initiative, which was launched to promote responsible sound management and hearing health across the live entertainment sector, providing online education for everyone involved in music events.

Jon furthers: “The initiative grew out of work undertaken by the Audio Engineering Society Technical Committee on acoustics and sound reinforcement. Speaker manufacturer d&b audiotechnik joined the initiative as a founding member and the tour’s production team embraced the training over the summer festival season last year. We hope this tour represents the beginning of a more responsible, better-informed and sustainable touring culture, demonstrating how live events can deliver powerful experiences whilst also prioritising long-term hearing health.”

Although he’s known for mixing on analogue desks, Jon chose an Allen & Heath dLive console in this instance due to the walk-in, no prep time nature of his initial festival gig with the band.

“It made sense to use an easily obtained digital board I knew and trusted. I felt confident it would both sound good and work for me, and up until this new tour, I used no external effects, and no plug-ins apart from desk presets. The great departure was adding a couple of external reverbs. I wanted a 'big tom' sound for a few tracks, so I added some old Yamaha reverbs: two Rev5s and a Rev7. I only use two, but they are 30 years old, so I carry a spare!"

He has an Eventide H3000 Ultra harmoniser in his rig too, not for pitch change, but for the plate reverb setting. “It’s great at giving a vocal a sense of place without being overly noticeable. It’s only there for the gigs with an overly dry acoustic. I also added a dbx 100 sub harmonic synthesiser, as you should always have something on the rig with wooden end panels,” he confirms.

Biffy Clyro is the first ‘rock’ act Jon had mixed in some time: “They’re great fun to work with. I’ve always tried to take guidance from the recordings and capture the feel for each of their tracks. For their album shows last year – where their first three albums were played across consecutive nights – I tried to re-create the ‘sound’ of each album. It was interesting as they all change in terms of production approach and how the band were developing as studio musicians.”

When it comes to PA preference, Jon says it was “always” going to be a d&b audiotechnik GSL gig, as he explains: “It’s a good-sounding box, but it really comes into its own at the back of the room. Combined with the d&b array processing, I find the sound from the furthest or harder-to-cover seats is the best I’ve experienced. Sound pressure level, frequency and transient response were prime considerations, especially further away from the source. We added a centre hang for this tour, primarily for vocals, which helps with clarity and sound source perception, especially given the challenging set design.”

Helping to navigate the tour’s FOH audio design is systems engineer James Coghlan, a graduate of the degree course Jon teaches. “I was so glad when he agreed to do the tour,” continues Jon. “We discussed what I wanted to achieve and how we would overcome the diamond-shaped stage and lighting rig.”

The FOH team set out to balance SPL variance from front to back, keeping it as low as possible, whilst not drastically changing the system tonality.

“To maintain system audibility in the back, the front to back SPL variance needed to be low to enable the PA to be heard above background chatter in the rear seats,” begins James. “Another element was working in our PA deployment around the show design, where Simon [Neil, lead vocals] has multiple mic positions. Working with Jon, who pays particular attention to the audience coverage in the sub domain, there was a lot of time spent finding a sub deployment that would work. We found a broadside array configuration worked well around the show design, supplemented by two hangs of flown SL subs to cover the far field, sides and the upper levels of the arena shows.”

Whilst not needed for coverage, a centre hang provided a central source, which brought the auditory image central to the audience, especially in the pit.

“From there, I designed the mechanical deployment around the set design and at each step, collaborated with Jon to make sure he was happy,” James adds. “During that design process, we added the flown sub elements to better the low frequency coverage and a fill system to cover the barrier line.”

For James, who has worked both with, and for, several brands within the Clair Global Group, he knew what to expect with Skan: “From the very start, I was able to supply a spec and they met it without a single hiccup. The support and communication from both Chris Fitch and Dan Foster, has been brilliant all the way through. It was my first time prepping out of the new warehouse in Weybridge, where they have clearly spent time to think about how and what we need to prep a PA deployment efficiently. The support from the technical team within the group has, as always, been brilliant and knowing that they are on the end of the phone for any support needed is a blessing.”

In addition to noting the equipment comes out to a very high standard, James says the tour had three “brilliant” PA technicians: “They made my job very easy! One of the techs is a recent graduate of Britannia Row’s Live Audio Technician Apprenticeship and this was his first tour, although you wouldn’t know it! This level of experience and professionalism from someone out on their first tour shows how comprehensive the training programme must be. We also had a group of four more apprentices at our London show, which again shows the emphasis of getting apprentices out there to get hands-on experience.”

Monitor engineer Dan Speed’s aim is to refine the mix for each musician to the point where few, if any, changes are requested, allowing them to concentrate on performing.

“I have seven musicians on stage, each with their own stereo IEM mix, four tech IEM mixes for backline crew and a general production mix for anyone else that requires it. I also have a few wedges and subs dotted about the stage,” says Dan.  

“For IEM mixes, it’s standard; everyone has a full mix of all the instruments and vocals with their own instrument and vocal louder in their mix. I try to make each mix sound as natural as possible by using a combination of stereo ambient microphones, panning and reverbs. At this level, the band frequently doesn’t soundcheck, so it’s vital that they have confidence that when they walk out onto stage, it will sound exactly how it should, night after night.”

Dan has swapped his “trusty” DiGiCo SD10-24 for a Quantum 326 from Skan’s inventory and has been using the brand on Biffy Clyro tours for 12 years at this point. “I like a small footprint console where possible and felt it was time to upgrade to a Quantum while sticking to a similar scale. It’s proven to be a worthwhile upgrade.”

Everything is mixed ‘in the box’ with no external outboard or plug-ins. “I’m using Shure PSM1000 IEMs, d&b audiotechnik C7 subs and M4 wedges, which run passive,” he adds, and we’ve been using d&b C7 for sidefills as long as I’ve been touring with Biffy Clyro, which is 18 years now. These days we only use the subs and they work perfectly in their chosen position as an extension cab of the guitar rig, reinforcing the lower octaves.”

Dan also says that Skan remains the “perfect fit” for Biffy Clyro due to the aforementioned attention to detail offered. “I know that the equipment they send us will be well maintained, well prepped, plug and play with no issues, which means I can actually concentrate on mixing the show. With Skan now part of the Clair Global Group, their ability to source – at short notice – anything we need from the global inventory, no matter how unusual, such as a Crown CM310a microphone, is a massive bonus to us.

“Thanks to everyone at Skan who plays a part in getting our gear out of the door and making our shows happen every day, as without them, my job would be a lot harder!”

Under the gaze of production managers Toby Johnson and Andy James, and tour manager Neil Anderson, the audio crew is completed by monitor minder and audio crew chief, Tim Miller, and PA technicians Lee Saddington, Conor McSherry and Patrick Boyd. The festival season ended with Mick Eggett taking over the reins from Dan Speed, whilst Adam Boole stood in for the European leg for Jon Burton at FOH.

Closing, Neil confirms: “We have worked with Chris Fitch and Skan for many years, they are now our longest-standing technical supplier and to this day, they have never let us down. That attention to detail is unparalleled and their constant push and desire to help us achieve the high standards we require, takes a great degree of work, which they always undertake calmly and professionally. Their integration into Clair has enabled our global touring to be simpler, yet they still retain the personal touch and degree of attention that they have always had.”

21st September 2026

Illuminate and Elation Light Mount Rushmore for Historic Freedom 250 Celebration

USA – Full-service production company Illuminate had a busy Freedom 250, providing lighting for two of the nation’s most high-profile celebrations. One of those was the Freedom 250 event at Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota on 3 July, where a dynamic Elation lighting system complemented a spectacular fireworks display beneath the iconic memorial.

The celebration was a powerful tribute to 250 years of American independence set against the backdrop of one of the nation’s most iconic memorials. It also marked the return of fireworks to Mount Rushmore for the first time since 2020 and featured keynote remarks from President Donald Trump, military honours, historical presentations and tributes, military bands, aviation flyovers and a patriotic fireworks and light show.

Pyro Spectaculars produced the fireworks design and production, while Illuminate’s Caleb Franke designed and programmed the complementary light show. Illuminate collaborated with Pyro Spectaculars on a 20-minute presentation that brought lighting and fireworks together in a carefully choreographed visual narrative, rather than treating them as separate elements.

“We really worked to make the fireworks and lighting complement each other,” says Franke. “It was a patriotic show with a storytelling element, with fireworks, moments with just lights and moments where they worked together. It all came together in one highly impactful show.”

Illuminate became involved in the project through its long-standing relationship with Pyro Spectaculars, which the company works with annually on the Space Needle New Year’s Eve show in Seattle. Pyro Spectaculars had also produced the 2020 Mount Rushmore fireworks display and its experience using lighting to complement fireworks at the Space Needle helped establish the concept for adding lighting to the Mount Rushmore event.

Working in one of the US’s most popular National Parks presented a unique set of challenges. Access, environmental considerations and the need to protect the memorial and surrounding terrain meant that Illuminate had limited opportunities to test the design on site.

“It’s complicated when you’re working in a National Park,” Franke explains. “Because Pyro Spectaculars had done it before, the Park really trusted them, which helped them to really trust us. It was a very smooth and easy process working with the Park.”

Illuminate made a significant investment in Elation equipment for the Freedom 250 projects and deployed a combination of high-output wash, beam, profile and panel fixtures across the Mt. Rushmore site.

Key to the design were 16 Elation Proteus Brutus fixtures positioned at various locations along the Presidential Trail, which leads down to the Grand View Terrace that provides visitors with a close-up view of Mount Rushmore. The powerful 75,000-lumen LED wash/FX fixtures were used to illuminate the four presidential faces from multiple angles.

“We had the Brutus fixtures positioned approximately 300 to 600 feet from the faces, so output was a major consideration during the design process,” says Franke, adding that with limited opportunities for advance testing, he had some initial concerns about whether the fixtures would have enough power at those distances.

“The math[s] seemed okay, but reality can be different,” he says. “I was a little bit concerned, but when we got them there and shined them up on the faces, I could see they would be fine. It was almost too much power. It was perfect, actually.”

Six Elation Proteus Atlas ultra-long-throw beam FX fixtures were also positioned along the trail, creating aerial beam effects that complemented the fireworks and interacted with the pyrotechnics’ smoke. With its laser-pumped phosphor light engine and highly concentrated beam, the Atlas gave Illuminate the reach needed to create visible aerial effects across the expansive site.

“The thing about the Atlas is the beam, it just goes on forever,” Franke says. “It comes out of the lens, and it just doesn’t stop.”

Illuminate also deployed ten Elation Proteus Lucius LED profile fixtures along the trail to light the rock surrounding the presidential faces, adding colour, gobos and animation effects to create texture across the memorial.

Getting equipment into position presented another logistical challenge, with a high-line rigging team enabling the crew to transport gear up the mountain. Four positions above the memorial each housed six Elation Proteus Excalibur beam fixtures and three Elation Pulse Panel FX fixtures, with pyrotechnic equipment interspersed among the lighting.

The Excalibur fixtures produced powerful aerial beam effects from above the presidential heads, while the Pulse Panel FX fixtures illuminated the smoke from the fireworks.

Behind the presidential faces is a small canyon where the larger aerial fireworks were launched. The lower, shorter fireworks were positioned on the mountain itself, meaning that smoke from the aerial shells frequently drifted directly in front of the lighting positions.

“All of the aerial shells were being shot in front of the lights and it created a lot of smoke,” Franke explains. “We were able to light the smoke really well with the Pulse Panel FX and highlight the really cool atmosphere above the heads in that space. That worked really well.”

The positioning of the fixtures also allowed Illuminate to create dramatic effects without distracting the audience from the memorial itself. “From most perspectives, you could not see the lenses of any of the lights,” Franke says. “It was just the beams in the air or the colour that was pushing off into the air. It worked very well.”

Obsidian Control Systems equipment was also used on the project, with Illuminate deploying Netron EN12 Ethernet to DMX nodes and DMX10-5 splitters to distribute lighting control data across the site.

Colour played an important role throughout the show, with Illuminate making extensive use of red, white and blue looks across the memorial. “We used a lot of red, white and blue on the faces, and being able to pull those colours directly from the colour wheel looked great,” says Franke, who adds that there were also CMY colour moments. The Proteus Brutus fixtures also provided animation effects, while the Proteus Lucius units added texture with gobos and animation.

The event lighting presented Mount Rushmore in a vastly different way than its everyday illumination. Rather than flattening the memorial with uniform illumination, the Illuminate design cast light on each face from multiple angles and controlled shadows to give the faces a more dramatic appearance.

“It was a bit more moody compared to the lights they have illuminating the faces daily,” Franke says. “It made it look a little eerie, I guess you could say, or theatrical looking, which I thought was a good thing. We were a bit concerned about the bottom-up lighting that can create some shadowing, but it all looked just fine.”

The entire show was created in pre-viz and tightly co-ordinated between Illuminate and Pyro Spectaculars’ fireworks designer Kevin Gilfillan. The collaboration allowed the two disciplines to create moments where the lighting enhanced the fireworks and others where it carried the visual focus on its own.

“We’re always looking for creative ways to use lighting to bring a concept to life and on this project worked to make it all come together with the fireworks,” says Franke. “Kevin and I worked really close together on making sure there were moments for both. It’s not just a million shells of fireworks for 20 minutes, it tells more of a story.”

The Mount Rushmore project represented one of the most significant and memorable projects in Illuminate’s history, combining an extraordinary location, a historical event and the technical and logistical challenges of working within a National Park.

Rick Franke, president at Illuminate, commented: “Being part of America’s 250th celebration at Mount Rushmore is an extraordinary honour for all of us at Illuminate Production Services. There are few places that represent the history, scale and spirit of this country quite like Mount Rushmore. Our team has spent decades helping bring ambitious ideas to life, but contributing our work to a moment of this significance is something special. I’m incredibly proud of the men and women of Illuminate who brought their talent, professionalism and commitment to this project, and grateful for the opportunity to play a small part in celebrating 250 years of America. I also want to give a special thanks to The National Parks Services and the State of South Dakota. This event would not have happened without their leadership and vision.”

Caleb Franke added: “We love our country, so being a part of such a historic day was both special and a real honour. There were probably five or six big, high-profile shows that happened over the 4th of July and for us to be involved on two of those is just a complete honour. On top of that, the Elation fixtures performed really well with no issues, and the client was super happy with how it all worked out, as well as how we took care of the National Park.”

In fact, Illuminate received strong praise for both the finished show and the care taken in working within the requirements of the National Park, with the company receiving a letter from the Department of the Interior expressing appreciation for the event.

21st September 2026

d&b Soundscape sets a new record with Silence Wang at Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Stadium

China – The power of d&b Soundscape has helped to deliver an unforgettable live sound experience for Chinese music superstar Silence Wang. During August, the performer’s Age of Romance World Tour played ten consecutive shows at Beijing’s iconic Bird’s Nest stadium, in what is believed to be the largest ever d&b Soundscape deployment in a stadium environment to date.

Supplied by OST Productions, one of China’s leading national specialists in sound solutions for large-scale concert touring, the system succeeded in bringing immersive spatial audio to more than 60,000 audience members on each night of the unprecedented run.

Silence Wang (‘Wang Sulong’) is one of China’s most successful contemporary singer/songwriters and music producers. With 12 studio albums since 2010, he has built a huge following across China and Chinese-speaking audiences internationally. He recently entertained his global fanbase with a series of major arena shows across Asia, North America and Oceania.

However, with this most recent landmark run of performances, Wang has set a new benchmark, becoming the first original singer/songwriter to undertake a residency employing Soundscape at this scale at Beijing’s National Stadium. Bringing this impressive system to fruition required close collaboration and trust between the d&b Greater China office, d&b’s local and global EAS teams, OST Productions and Silence Wang’s long-standing sound designer, Jin Shaogang.

As one of China’s most distinguished live sound designers and producers, Shaogang has many major concert tours, broadcasts and landmark national events (including chief sound design for the 2008 Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony) to his credit. As Silence Wang’s chief sound director, he is known for his commitment to premier sound systems, delivering mixes of exceptional detail and balance, while preserving vocal clarity.

Commenting on this experience, Shaogang says: “The d&b SL-Series is exceptionally beneficial when used with Soundscape. With its full-range directivity, there is remarkably little energy emitted from the rear of the cabinets. When 360-degree arrays and delay speakers share the same trusses, this precise pattern control prevents low frequencies from spilling backward into the delay zones, audience seating, or backstage areas, preventing unwanted bass bleed across the entire stage.”

Shaogang adds: “Soundscape dramatically expands the stadium sweet spot, from around a third of the venue to an impressive 60 to 70 percent of the entire audience area. Its performance in spatial imaging, layering and depth delivers an immersive experience that traditional stereo simply cannot match. The moment the lights come up and the music kicks in for the very first song, you instantly feel an overwhelming sense of grand impact and vast spatial openness. I believe artists will use Soundscape wherever venue conditions allow.”

Driving the system is, of course, d&b Soundscape’s central processing engine, the DS100. Highlighting its vital role, Sam Wang, head of mobile sales and senior system engineer at d&b audiotechnik Greater China, explains: “In a stadium-scale Soundscape 360 system, every listener should be able to follow sound in motion with precision. By optimising loudspeaker layouts through function groups and managing object latency with the DS100’s delay mode, we minimise phase interference across the system. This preserves accurate spatial positioning, smooth panning and consistent localisation throughout the venue. Audiences experience coherent dynamic movement and rotational audio effects that remain stable, clear and engaging across the entire listening area.”

Delivering this experience in such an environment takes a record-breaking SL-Series system design, beginning with a main frontal system of seven hangs of KSL8/12, with two hangs of SL-SUB flown behind. Providing the 360 Soundscape are 22 hangs of GSL8 strung along the ceiling bowl. Then come 22 groups of V10P providing two rings of fills and an additional SL-SUB array, while the system is completed by more than 150 KSL8 cabinets as outer fills, side fills, rear delays and side delays. All loudspeakers use ArrayProcessing to optimise performance.

Key to this implementation of Soundscape was d&b’s Create.Control software, which is designed to simplify and expand the creative use of the d&b Soundscape. “Create.Control lets us move fast,” explains Lucchi Federico Tobia, responsible for Soundscape Enablement at d&b audiotechnik Greater China. “With more than 400 snapshots and 300 animations programmed in just one month, speed and simplicity were essential. Songs can be built quickly, automation keeps the show running smoothly and offline programming means projects can be prepared in advance, then scaled to any venue. For touring productions, it makes complex Soundscape workflows efficient, flexible and easy to adapt.”

This was a milestone application for d&b Soundscape, demonstrating how immersive audio can scale from intimate performance spaces to the world’s largest concert productions in the most iconic stadiums. 

21st September 2026

GLP Creos and impression X5 give Peter Maffay’s Love Places open-air shows a consistent look across changing venues

Germany – Peter Maffay stepped away from conventional touring after his farewell run in 2023. Since then, as again in 2026, he has returned each summer with a series of individual concerts under the Love Places banner, playing venues that either hold personal significance for him or that lend a distinctive atmosphere to the evening. Lighting designer Günter Jäckle specified 16 GLP Creos and 80 GLP impression X5 wash fixtures for the 2026 shows.

Jäckle is once again responsible for the lighting design. Maffay’s long-standing designer has worked with the artist for many years and ranks among the most experienced live lighting practitioners in Germany. The Love Places shows present a different problem from a continuous tour with a fixed equipment pool. Every venue brings its own structural conditions, sightlines and distances. A compact core of equipment travels with the production, with further material added locally depending on the site.

For Jäckle, that means the central tools have to be powerful, quick to integrate and predictable in colour. It is precisely why he builds the open-air rigs around a substantial GLP element.

“On productions like these, a setup has to work in very different places,” says Günter Jäckle, lighting designer. “The less friction I have between different systems, the faster I get to a clean result. With GLP, I know the colour mixing and I know the colours will sit where I want them.”

Before a lighting design can take on any dramatic function at all, it has to solve a far more concrete problem: the people on stage have to be visible. That sounds obvious, but it becomes a genuine challenge on open-air productions. Front positions are often a long way back, truss heights and angles follow from whatever the site allows and the stage has to work not only for the audience in front of it but for the camera feeds on the large screens.

With Peter Maffay, there is a further complication. What stands on stage is not a compact rock line-up but a 14-piece band and all of them have to be lit under open sky in a way that is not merely bright, but modelled, cleanly separated and camera-ready.

This is where the GLP Creos comes in. Jäckle uses the IP-rated fixture as a multi-functional working light with visible design quality, covering wash light, side accents and side-stage positions, while also forming part of the stage picture itself.

“With Maffay, the first thing you have to do is get 14 people bright on an open-air stage,” says Jäckle. “That sounds banal, but it is often the decisive point. On open-airs, the front truss frequently sits further back than you would like. You need fixtures that genuinely help you. I can use the Creos conventionally as a flood. I can use them as side light. And on top of that, they look like something. I get a great deal of function and design in very little space, which is enormously valuable on productions like these.”

The Love Places concerts take Maffay not into standardised arenas but to places with a character of their own. Therefore, the lighting design has to stay recognisable without overwriting the venue, responding flexibly to different staging and rigging situations while still delivering a high-quality show every night.

Jäckle approaches that with a clear systems logic. Rather than combining as many different fixtures and manufacturers as possible, he works from a consistent GLP core. The 80 impression X5 wash fixtures form a familiar, colour-rich component of the set-up. The Creos extend that core as a tool that takes on important front, side and wash duties specifically under open-air conditions.

“I try to work with as few different manufacturers as possible,” says Jäckle. “Not as a matter of principle, but because it makes the work simpler and cleaner. When colour mixing, dimming behaviour and basic character all match up, I arrive at a good, reproducible result more quickly. With GLP, I know my own colours, and I know I can get to where I want to be very fast.”

That also plays into how the shows look on screen. As is standard on large open-air productions, a substantial part of the stage action reaches the audience through cameras. The lighting has to work spatially in the room while appearing clean, balanced and chromatically controlled in the camera image.

“These days, you think about the camera automatically as a lighting designer,” says Jäckle. “You see immediately when colours don't go together or when faces aren't cleanly readable. With GLP, I take my palette, adapt it, and I can rely on it working.”

For all the planning and technical demands, Jäckle understands light, above all, is part of the musical dramaturgy.

“At the end of the day, what I want is to play the lights along with a good band,” he says. “I don’t want to spend my time managing technical friction because colours won’t come together or fixtures behave differently from how I expected. I need tools that give me freedom.”

On the Love Places open-air dates, the Creos does exactly that. These fixtures solve central lighting tasks under demanding outdoor conditions, bring a designed presence to the stage picture, and sit chromatically within a GLP system Jäckle has known for years. Together with the impression X5, they form a compact, capable core for concerts that are framed differently in every location but have to look unmistakably like Peter Maffay every night.

“I feel a strong connection to GLP, and Olli Schwendke always supports me superbly,” Jäckle concludes. “The equipment has proved itself across many productions. When you’re working with a large band in special places, that trust is exactly what you need. Then, you can concentrate on what it's actually about: the music, the atmosphere and the moment.”

photos: Paul Gärtner

www.glp.de 

17th September 2026