Bandit Lites is honored to once again be working with Academy Award-winning and two time Grammy Award-winning American rock singer-songwriter and musician, Melissa Etheridge. Her current tour, The Revival Tour, features dates throughout the United States and Canada through early September 2008.
Lighting designer David Hamilton is in his fifth year working with Etheridge and he says that for this tour the majority of his design is LED-based, and they are carrying a lot less lighting than in previous years.
The Tibetan prayer flag set design was created by tour manager Steven Girmant, and reflects Etheridge’s desire to share her life story and spiritual awakening with her audience. The set consists of five strings of Tibetan prayer flags strung in front of a white cyc and black scrim with 5 to 7 vertical prayer flags on floor stands stage right and stage left. There are two risers for drums and keyboards. Etheridge and the guitar and bass have Persian rugs in their positions.
Hamilton explains that the lighting and set designs have been kept minimal to both reflect simplicity and reduce power consumption. “Melissa is widely known as an advocate for environmental issues and we wanted to use as many LED fixtures as we could this time out,” he notes. “So we have 20 Pixeline 1044 LEDs to use as cyc lights, 10 Elation Impression LED wash fixtures, and 6 Color Kinetics Colorblast 6 LEDs. The only non-LED lights are 8 Mac 2000 spots and 5 Coemar Mini Cycs. The entire lighting rig draws less than 50 amps per leg with everything full on.”
They wanted to go minimal with the number of fixtures and started with a 40-foot “E” shaped truss upstage and ended up reducing that to an asymmetric “L” shape with a total of 15 fixtures on it. “I went with no front truss after using the Colorblast 6s as the only front light on the Ryan Adams tour,” Hamilton adds. “They work well for fill light from the floor downstage without being overbearing and they take up a very small footprint, which works well because Melissa uses the entire front of the stage and they help keep it uncluttered. Having only one side truss was a bit of a challenge, but I put 3 of the Impressions on the floor on the opposite side and they cover the stage very well.”
Crew List:
Steve Girmant - tour mgr.
Stephanie Gordon – tour accountant/prod. assistant
Jon Schimke - prod. mgr/monitor engineer
Don Wise – FOH audio
Marcus Douglas – audio system tech
David Hamilton – lighting designer/director
Michael Stanley - lighting system tech
Robie Willard - guitar tech
Chip Carter - backline
Kevin O’Conner - drum tech