Brett Eldredge on the road with impactful, multi‐purpose Elation rig
Bobby Glowacki does a bit of everything on country music artist Brett Eldredge’s current “Songs About You” U.S. tour and lights the singer/songwriter using a versatile lighting rig from Elation Professional. Production design, lighting design, lighting programming, lighting operation, even lighting tech, he’s a virtual jack‐of‐all‐lighting‐trades working behind the scenes to make sure the show runs smoothly and looks its best.
Glowacki, who shares production designer duties with Bryan Bobbys, has been working with Eldredge for the past few years. He lights the current show using an Elation lighting package of 32 DARTZ 360™ narrow beam moving heads, 12 Paladin Panel™ flood and effect lights, 8 ZW37™ beam/wash moving heads, and a pair of SixPar 200 IP™. Lighting supply is by Christie Lites North America (account rep Rod Gibson).
With music that ranges from high tempo to laidback, Glowacki says he wanted to give the music a place to live while allowing the artist to continue to tell his story. The design, a semi‐circle setup backed by four 16‐foot towers, gives the artist room to play while engaging with his audience. Each tower houses eight DARTZ fixtures along with three Paladin Panels and linear LED bars. “It’s a layered backdrop and is very multifaceted,” the designer comments. “It creates the really big looks for his big songs but can also be very quiet and purposeful for his ballads and acoustic numbers.”
As far as the DARTZ, the designer says the narrow beam fixtures were always the front‐runner in the design. “The caveat was that it needed to fit into 22 feet of truck space, had to be deployable by me every day, and it needed to look big. The groups of DARTZ with their big punchy beams along with great prism looks and gobo patterns accomplish that.”
Glowacki says the backdrop ties in well with the variety of house rigs they see day to day on tour. “It’s really fixture de jour and is different every day depending on where we play. It ranges from a purely PAR CAN rig with no movers to shows at the Venetian that have over two hundred movers. The Elation products we’re touring with fit right in there seamlessly.” Glowacki says he layers in fixtures and features as the show moves along, building momentum throughout the show. For the more upbeat classics it’s ‘all hands on deck’ but for others it can just be a static look.” The designer also uses the DARTZ for what he calls ‘architectural framing’ such as big fan outs and big sweeps, and even accesses the fixture’s linear frost filter for a punchy wash feel. In fact, he uses just about every feature the DARTZ has to offer. “The band keeps evolving and the show is ever morphing, and so do I with the lighting,” Glowacki states. “That allows me to create new looks and incorporate even more features.”
Seeking a fixture to complement the DARTZ on the backdrop towers, the LD looked for something punchy that could also do pixel effects. “We wanted a fixture that could stand alone on its own and create a mood for a song, but then also blend in when we put it all together.” He found what he was looking for in the Paladin Panel, an outdoor rated floodlight with 50x15W RGBW cells that serves a number of roles for the LD.
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