Guess who's out on tour? Yep, The Guess Who, with their Takin' It Back Tour, six decades after a dispute over their name with former band members. Finally resolved, veteran Canadian rockers Randy Bachman and Burton Cummings are out on the road again, celebrating with their 2026 tour, which kicked off in May and runs through the end of August, with stops in Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Atlanta, Fort Worth, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and more, and features support from Don Felder (formerly of the Eagles)
Chris Medvitz of Lightswitch chats with Live Design about the throwback lighting approach with a modern touch for this two-truck, multi-city tour.
Live Design: What was the band looking for in this revival tour - artistic aesthetic, etc - did they want an old-timey look from their earlier days?
Chris Medvitz: They started by thinking about an opening video to start the whole show off. They wanted it to be celebratory, nostalgic, and to really emphasize the heritage of the band and their music not just when they were recording and playing in the 60’s and 70’s, but also how so many fans discovered them through the 80’s and 90’s. They wanted to honor all that history and not pretend the show wasn’t going to be a trip down memory lane, but make it feel essentially timeless. When the conversation turned to what the show itself would look and feel like, we ended up with the idea that we would create a performance environment that felt like a throwback to rock-n-roll shows from the late 70’s and 80’s when pre-rig truss filled with par cans was the look.
Photo by Corey Kelly
LD: What was your process for designing the tour?
CM: For us, design is all about the balance of creativity with financial objectives and logistical realities. We started with some basic parameters of the types of venues, size of crew, and quantity of trucks. We established pretty early on that the show should be able to play casinos, festivals, sheds, and arenas, and wherever it made sense we should be leveraging in-house or pre-existing rigs. However, the band also wanted to maintain artistic continuity. For example, a festival headlining show shouldn’t feel drastically different from an arena date. The goal became how we can deliver this sort of continuity while not being wholly generic.
Circling back to the media design, we collaborated with a great media designer, Orrin Zucker at Ozone Animation, who built all the content for the show through a very collaborative process. We mapped out the emotional journey that we wanted the audience to take through the setlist, and divided the show into three acts. We were on a very economical budget when it came to content, so we devised ways to not resort to stock media while also keeping costs down and the show feeling bespoke.
Photo by Corey Kelly
Act I has the band’s current logo on the screen throughout, with the style, color, and backgrounds changing song to song. The second & third acts move past this motif to a mix of virtual sets, historical imagery montages, unique new content, and then going full IMAG on the main screen for the three songs from the band’s various solo catalogs. We also designed lots of easter eggs from the band’s history into the content. There’s the stylized Canadian flag they used on their 1972 tour as a backdrop. There’s the set from the 1970’s TV show “The Midnight Special.” We even made an animated version of a scenic element from their appearance on the Johnny Cash show!
LD: What is the architecture of the rig – what's where and why – what are your workhorses?
CM: The rig is designed in three layers. There’s an upper layer that’s designed to be easily replaced by a house or festival rig if the venue happens to have that. Profiles, wash lights, and blinders on four straight trusses. The second layer is a set of five lighting pods that are intended to resemble the old pre-rig truss with 6-lap PAR bars. We’re using Tyler GT truss with moving LED washlights, but the looks are the same. Then we have a floor light layer that includes two more pods in the upstage corners. Profiles and blinders across the back edge of the stage, some strip lights to cross through the band and uplight the soft goods, and smaller movers mixed into the backline for accents.
The touring lighting system is being provided by Christie Lites, so it’s a heavily Martin rig. The lighting pods are filled with MAC Aura PXLs, which do most of the work. The “house rig” part of the design is MAC Ultra Performance profiles and MAC Aura Ravens. There are some GLP Wildbar16 strips to sidelight through the band and to uplight some soft goods, and then there are Acme Ultra Binder IP scattered throughout the whole rig.
LD: You mentioned it's a two-truck tour – did you feel limited with that criterium or is it a result of the design?
CM: The original intent was for this to be a two-truck tour, but the design conversation led us in a direction that, when coupled with a routing that mostly visited arenas and sheds, ended up requiring 4.5 trucks. That’s because in most venues we have to bring in almost everything. When the show visits casinos and theaters that already have a house lighting rig, PA, and video screens, it fits into two trucks easily. To management’s credit, though, when this became evident, we asked if we should pivot the design direction toward the logistical objectives and they said no.
LD: What influenced your color choices?
CM: Color for the show mostly originated from the media content, but we also tried to restrict the show to looks that you’d be able to create with heavily conventional rigs from the past. We also set a lot of creative restrictions in the lighting programming to help maintain that nostalgic feel. For Act I, we don't move or change color live on most of the rig. We also always dim up and down. No zero count cues. Nothing we couldn’t do with an incandescent light rig. In Act 2 we start doing some live color changes and effects, but in Act III we take off the restrictions and let the rig do everything it can. This visual progression helps move the journey along, but also keeps the show looking fresh for the whole two hours.
Photo by Corey Kelly
LD: What makes this a successful design for you?
CM: I think successful design is balancing the creative with the logistical constraints and financial objectives. I think this show delivers the experience The Guess Who wanted to bring to their audience, while also being flexible so it can be executed efficiently and without pushing the limit of the budget or the crew. I also think we found the right balance of a heritage vibe for the overall visuals, keeping them on par with what audiences are used to seeing in modern shows. The band has been very pleased, and the audience response has been overwhelmingly positive.