"The band wanted to blow out the remaining five shows on the tour in Washington, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Boston and New York with a good light package," said LD Lenny Sasso. "There was a lot of enthusiasm for Basement in the early leg of the tour, and they wanted to play on this by engaging the audience even more with powerful lighting."
A Philadelphia-based LD, Sasso was contacted by Basement's manager and asked to create a new lightshow for the last five stops of the tour. Sasso, who worked with Basement in the past, instantly reached out to Squeek Lights in New York. Together they worked on putting together a quick and easy package that would give the LD the flexibility to jump right in on an ongoing tour, while delivering the power to create instant impact. The end result of this collaboration was a rig consisting of 12 Rogue R2 Washes and another LED fixture, the Shocker 90 IRC par.
"Victor and Steve over at Squeek Lights hooked me up with some great lights," he said. "This was important under the circumstance, since I was jumping on board mid-stream. The biggest challenge was definitely jumping right into this run without any rehearsal or prep days. So on day one, I basically built a good punt page. Then I programmed what I could during sound check over the next few days."
Sasso praised the user-friendly features of the Chauvet fixtures. "Setup wasn't bad," he recalled. "It usually took me about an hour or two to get up and running. You usually get into a rhythm and figure out how to quickly set up and tear down after a day or two. I didn't really run into too many technical issues on this run. The entire rig was LED so power was never a problem. The Gramercy Theatre stage in New York City was pretty tight so I had to condense the rig and improvise a little bit. Their power service is up in a loft above the stage and I only had 10' of feeder, so we ended up having to hoist my distro up a ladder which was fun!"
All in all, Sasso created between 7-10 different looks per show for Basement. Running his rig on an Avolites Quartz console with the new Titan software, he also created individual positions for each of the band's five members using different Rogues. Citing an example, he notes, "During the opener 'Whole,' in post-chorus two the entire band drops out and Alex Henry plays a guitar part solo, so I drop out the whole rig except for the three Rogues that I built a position on for him. This created a cool highlighted moment and made the lightshow more connected to the music."
After the fifth and final stop on the Basement tour, Sasso looked back on the project that came to him unexpectedly with little advance notice. "It was great how everything came together so fast," he said. "I was pleased and the band was too. After every show the band and I immediately hit to Instagram to check out what people were putting out there. Looking at their comments, we knew that the lighting went over big with Basement fans."
(Jim Evans)
