Spanning across most of 2013, the Locked & Reloaded Tour is an action-packed event featuring two of country music's hottest artists; and for this Reade needs a powerful, reliable and rock solid system to control the show.
First introduced to the Jands Vista platform in 2008, Reade was immediately impressed with its simple, powerful operation - quickly adopting the technology as his preferred choice of control. Since then Chris has purchased his own Vista T2, S1 and M1 consoles, and hasn't looked back since!
Reade's lighting design perfectly complements the set design by Bruce Rodgers of Tribe Inc, which is both large and ambitious - incorporating custom designed Chroma-Q LED lighting filled set pieces, video wall, video projection and moving pantographs, as well as a large quantity of profile, spot, wash and strobe fixtures.
Dierks Bentley's design had to be versatile in order to switch between Locked & Reloaded Tour dates, solo headlining tour dates and the summer's biggest fairs and festivals. Vista's powerful v2 software made this complex task much more simple by offering 'rock solid' functions such as Fixture Swap, which allows Reade to easily swap and clone programming between different fixture types, and Timeline, which allows him to get in at the finest details quickly and accurately.
Using his Vista T2 for main playback, Chris also utilizes his S1 which provides him with extra control to make adjustments outside of the programmed design - this is "really useful" for live takeovers during the set.
Commenting on Vista's innovative Timeline function Reade explains, "I can't say enough positive things about Timeline - being able to see everything, every parameter of every instrument per cue is huge."
(Jim Evans)
