The rock band's tour began last fall and extends into 2013. In support of their tenth studio album, I'm With You, the tour is playing dates across North America this summer with shows in stadiums and arenas.
Lighting designer Scott Holthaus of Happy Machine specified 96 Sharpys in a full octagon grid for the band's indoor shows, 78 for the stadium shows plus a compliment of Alpha Beam 1500s for the outdoor performances. The lights were supplied by Premiere Global Productions.
Holthaus says he uses the Sharpys "to fill the arenas with chopsticks of light - it's a really cool effect. I don't use smoke in the stadiums and the trick for working outdoors is to get any beams from the lights. With the Sharpys I can also cover the audience at great distances where most lights fail. For their size and weight, the Sharpy's power and output is amazing. They're the coolest light of the decade, and everyone knows that."
He opted to add Alpha Beam 1500s to his stadium inventory when travel restrictions called for a limited number of fixtures and easy transport by plane. "I had to have a great tracking beam," he says. " I had used the Clay Paky 300s for a TV show and had such success with them that moving to the 1500s was a no brainer," he reports. "I needed the coolest and most powerful lights I could find."
Holthaus has been so pleased with the performance of the Alpha Beam 1500s that he eventually wants "to replace more of my lights with them. They're very fast at pan and tilt. They're a great telephone pole of light - like a giant Sharpy! They've also held up in bad weather - it's been raining a lot, almost every day, and we haven't had any failures."
(Jim Evans)
