August Burns Red tour with ADJ Jolt Bar FX
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Arranged in five continuous rows, which frame the musicians’ performance space, the Jolt Panel FX fixtures are used as the visual anchor for the production, generating a wide variety of distinctly different effects throughout the band’s energetic 1.5-hour headline shows.
Formed in 2003, and hailing from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, August Burns Red is a Grammy-nominated rock band that has enjoyed consistent success over its 20 year history, having released 10 studio albums and more than 20 singles, which is being celebrated on the current 46-date 20th Anniversary headline tour. Following a month-long first leg, the band is currently taking a break to promote the release of its 10th studio album, Death Below, but will hit the road again for a second leg that will begin in Philadelphia on 14 April and wrap up in Montreal, Canada on 13 May.
Lighting designer Carlos Katsurayama began working with August Burns Red in early 2020, although only managed three shows on that Spring’s tour supporting Kill Switch Engage before it was abandoned due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Fortunately, Carlos clearly made a good impression during that brief window, as the collaboration continued when touring was able to resume and he has designed the lighting for all of the band’s subsequent shows. They have built a solid working relationship to the point that Carlos is given wide-ranging creative freedom when it comes to his design work.
“The guys in the band pretty much trust me entirely at this point,” confirms Carlos, “they know that I understand their aesthetic and what they’re going for. For the past couple of tours, we’d used set carts. They were pretty cool, as we could reconfigure them in different ways, but this time I wanted to do something different. I felt like I was seeing a lot of set carts and pre-rigged truss, so I felt that for this tour I needed to do something big aesthetically with a build, and that led to the massive wall of Jolt Bar FX fixtures.”
“On a number of previous tours, for various different artists, I’d used a similar, smaller product that has motorised tilt and is very well known,” comments Carlos. “However, I realised that I was almost never using the tilt function, but I always wanted more – in terms of width – than my budget would allow. I’d be like, ‘can I have twelve of ‘em’ and I’d be told, ‘no, you can have three for the budget’! We then did a show on a secondaries run last summer where the house rig in one of the venues had some ADJ Jolt Panel FX fixtures and I was incredibly impressed. They are super bright and have really nice RGB pixels as well as insanely bright white LEDs. Right away I told the guys in the band they should buy some of the linear version, and they did.”
August Burns Red invested in 12 Jolt Bar FX fixtures, which they plan to use as part of their floor package for festival shows. However, for the 20th Anniversary headline tour Carlos wanted to go big. His design features a total of 32 fixtures which are arranged in continuous vertical lines. Two separate pairs of fixtures sit beneath decks positioned at either side of the drum riser, while three complete lines of eight fixtures – mounted end-to-end on an upstage pipe and base grid – run the length of the set, providing a versatile backdrop for the band. The extra fixtures for the tour were supplied by Squeek Lights in New Jersey, which invested in a substantial quantity of Jolt Bar FX fixtures for their rental department last summer.
“The idea of the Jolt Bar FX is very cool,” says Carlos. “It is really two fixtures in one. The RGB and the white LED elements are two completely separate things and when you dissect them and put them into different groups in your console it’s like working with double the number of fixtures – the possibility of looks you can create are pretty much limitless.”
