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Dave Matthews Band summer tour lit with Robe

Production designer Fenton Williams and lighting designer/programmer Aaron Stinebrink work collaboratively to develop the lighting schemes for Dave Matthews Band’s annual summer tours. This year, they chose a range of Robe products to help their creative journey - 24 x iFortes, 36 x Spikies, 14 x MegaPointes and two iForte Follow Spots running on a pair of RoboSpot BaseStations, all supplied by rental company Theatrical Media Services (TMS) in Omaha, Nebraska. Overseeing the whole operation technically on the road was production manager Anthony Giordano.

Williams has worked with the band since their formation in 1991, and Stinebrink joined the team as an additional lighting programmer in 2002, when he was working full-time at TMS. Stinebrink has been freelancing since 2021, and TMS has also clocked up a client relationship with Dave Matthews Band’s production over many years, all adding to the family vibes. In January this year, TMS entered a new chapter, being run by a new management team, comprising three longtime employees - John Hansen, Michael Arch, and Jamie Hurst. The trio took over the company’s ownership, bringing over sixty years of combined industry experience to the table.

Williams created the production design for this year’s 15-week Dave Matthews Band tour, which included a 54 ft wide, 26 ft tall arched truss over the stage, large LED surfaces upstage and some 15-ft semi-circular truss pods that were filled with lights and moved. The lighting design was a joint effort between Williams and Stinebrink, and its starting point for this year’s tour was a regular acoustic gig in Cancun, Mexico, by Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds, which has been staged in January for around the last eight years. Williams and Stinebrink have always seized this as an opportunity to experiment with a few new visual ideas and concepts.

So, while a separate touring show design was already being developed, everyone loved the look, style, and atmos of the 2025 Cancun show so much that it was decided to adapt its essence as a base for the summer touring design. Williams specifically wanted “a design with smooth edges”, says Stinebrink, and this started with the upstage arched truss and one large LED screen surface. Williams also controlled and output six layers of video - including a pre-cut IMAG feed from live camera director Michael Lane - to screen via his lighting console, and worked closely with Aaron Farrington to create the playback content through his video company PXLField, which also supplied the LED and camera package.

The two visual entities were fluently merged into the show aesthetic. Williams wanted to continue the clean lines and contemporary feel through to the six 15-ft semi-circular automated trusses downstage of the main arch, which were fabricated by automation suppliers All Access Staging. Twelve of the iFortes were strategically positioned on the automated half circles, while an additional twelve were placed on the downstage truss to provide the bulk of the key light. The tour prompted TMS to double their previous iForte count. Their new fixtures were all supplied through Robe’s North America HQ in Florida.

The MegaPointes and Spikies were rigged along the inside of the upstage double arched truss used for numerous beam looks and effects. MegaPointes were chosen as a match for and combination with the iFortes, both visually and in terms of features, and the fixtures were hung at multiple different angles. TMS purchased their first MegaPointes back in 2018, also for a Dave Matthews Band summer tour and shortly after the fixture was launched by Robe. The Spikies lined much of the perimeter of the arch, effectively framing the video surfaces. They were positioned in groups of four and used for fan shapes as a throwback to the days of conventional ACLs - a vintage look that still has its relevance.

One of the challenges - and also one of the most enjoyable elements - of the tour is the improvisational nature of the show. The crew will usually receive the setlist about an hour before the band go on, and the list can be radically different. The opener one night could be the closer the next, or not even make the setlist, and the band has a comprehensively rehearsed back catalogue of over 130 - plus a trove of hundreds more on which to potentially draw. Whatever order rocks up, Stinebrink and Williams try to devise a “show progression” with the lighting. Utilizing a series of inhibitive masters to introduce specific groups of fixtures and video elements, automation cues operated by Ben Ullmann were added in, so the whole performance took on an organic flow.

“A big thank you to all the crew from TMS, including crew chief Josh Albright, Jerry Woiderski, Jerry Kaiser, Chris Tsuji, Bodie Tureson, Robert Chaize and Holden Fershee, and account handler Mark Huber”, says Stinebrink, together with All Access, and PXLField.

(Photos: Sanjay Suchak)

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