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Arena vibe brought to club stages for Beartooth with Squeek Lights and Chauvet

Early in the planning stages of American metalcore band Beartooth’s recently concluded 40-city North American tour, frontman Caleb Shomo told Victor Zeiser, head of Squeek Lights, that he wanted to hit the road with “an arena level production that works in clubs”.

To achieve this, Zeiser and lighting designer-programmer Ben Jarrett let the center stage video wall display a seemingly endless stream of multi-layered images from Shomo. Additionally, pyro effects and confetti cannons evoked powerful moods, laser patterns filled the air, and flashes of bold light from Chauvet Professional Maverick Storm and PXL fixtures transformed the stage.

“We had many ‘moving parts’ in this production”, says Jarrett. “We had to handle load in, lighting, lasers, the video wall, follow spots, cameras, cryo jets and confetti blasters. Our venue size would change from 850 capacity to 3000 capacity, so we rarely had the same load from one show to the next. Our team, Mel Lopez, the V2 Tech-follow spot operator, and Gabe Osborn, L2 tech and special FX tech, deserve a lot of credit.”

Among the challenges that Jarrett and the team had to master as they navigated their way through this tour was figuring out how to retain the essence of the show while adapting the rig to different stages. “Learning what aspects of the show were most important, and what would give us the most bang for our buck, was critical”, continues Jarrett. “The six side towers with three Maverick Storm 2 BeamWashes and Maverick Storm 1 Hybrid on top were ‘high value’, so we made sure to make it fit each day.”

In addition to its eighteen Maverick Storm 2 BeamWashes, the tour rig had six Maverick Storm 4 Profile fixtures, six Storm 4 Hybrids and six Colorado PXL Bar 16 motorized battens, arranged on the deck in line with the downstage edge of the drum riser.

“The Storm 4 Profiles were instrumental in delivering the ‘arena level production’ Caleb was asking for”, explains Jarrett. “The show would start in complete black with the sounds of a storm playing though the PA. Each night the audience would be snapped out of their preshow stupor with a blinding lighting crack from the Storm 4s pointed straight out into the audience. Then later in the first song ‘Sunshine’ I used them to fill each space full of ‘sunrays’ by utilizing its output power and zoom angles.”

“As for the Storm 2 BeamWashes, they were a lot of fun to program”, he adds. “They opened up a lot of split color looks and eye candy opportunities for me. We really loved making effects on these fixtures. I would frequently switch between my programmed effects to a macro. This let me switch up the pixel chases in a snap and get wildly different effects flipping back and forth.”

Jarrett used color to define moments based on the music during the show. “Beartooth has always had very solid colors define their album art, so that helped drive the overall ‘pink hue’ of the show”, he states. “When the band would play a known hit from another album, I would use that album’s color for the base color of that song. This color scheme matched up perfectly with the video content.”

In contrast to some previous Beartooth tours, which featured large guitar speaker cabinets as part of the design, this one had a more open stage, complemented by some evocative side lighting angles. “The band wanted a ‘clean’ stage this time around, which meant no big groups of cabinets and lighting fixtures off to the sides, so room could be made for the video element”, says Jarrett.

(Photos: Sarah Hess)

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