LD Breck Haggerty has worked with Tool since 1998 - initially as lighting crew chief before graduating to the design hot seat. His main lighting consideration for this tour was designing something floor-based and optimised for easy rigging and de-rigging. The concept is that this toured to festivals throughout the summer, enabling them to have as much of their show as possible with a minimum of fuss.
Onstage, there's four screens held up by five vertical Pre-Rig trussing towers on custom bases. Each tower features three High End Studio Colors and a Martin Professional MAC 700. On the downstage part of the floor are four X.Spots, MR16 batten strips along the amplifiers and six PixelPARs under a Plexiglas topped riser.
The downstage overhead truss features three VL3000 washes, while the upstage one has seven VL 3000 Washes, another four X-Spots and four antique 'Scoop' Mole Richardson Rifle Floodlights - a giant reflector containing huge 1000W incandescent light bulbs. Haggerty runs the lights and an extensive video show through Entec's newly-purchased GrandMA lighting console, along with two digital media servers and four Christie Digital 20K Projectors.
Front-of-house engineer Nobby Hopkinson's and babysitter Erik Sanderson-Evans are joined by Entec's Stefano Serpagli and Guy Gillen. Entec is supplying a d&b C4 system, touring a total of 32 tops and 36 C4 bass cabinets, four C7s, two Max's and 12 B2 subs - which has been enough to fill all spaces so far to the required volume and power.
Nobby mixes on a Midas XL4 and is running 44 mono and 4 stereo channels. The outboard rack contains a TC220 delay, used for modulation, and a selection of classics including a Roland SDE 3000, a Lexicon 480L and a Yamaha SPX900 . There's also a TC Helicon digital vocal effect and a dbx 120 XP sub bass harmoniser. Valve compressors include an Avalon 737 and a pair of Summit DCL 200 stereo channel devices. There's 10 channels of dbx 160A compression, five Drawmer DS201 gates and the system drive/control is via 3 Lake Contours. There is also a new KT DN370 'engineer's grabber E.Q.' which Hopkinson likes because of the bigger more tactile knobs than on the last version!
Amplification throughout is by d&b P1200s, with the subs driven by d&b A1s - one per unit.Sanderson-Evans, a.k.a. the 'FOH butler' describes the sonics in creative terms as "How I imagine a fully loaded B52 sounds during taking off - smoke, sparks, grunge, pure power - with maximum devastation to follow."
He also comments that Entec have been an excellent service company to work with: "Highly efficient, friendly and knowledgeable," he concludes.
(Lee Baldock)
