Halestorm tear through Summer touring season with the help of Martin Professional lighting solutions

To provide Grammy‐winning hard rock band Halestorm with simple but impactful lighting for their 2022 US tour, Bandit Lites deployed a dynamic rig using Martin Professional lighting solutions.

With budget and gear constraints still affecting the live music industry following the COVID‐19 pandemic, the band wanted a lighting rig that heightened their classic‐meets‐modern rock sound and provided maximum impact for their fans despite the logistical limitations. To meet these goals, lighting designer Craig Richter worked with Bandit Lites and Scott Anderson from Martin to design a rig featuring Martin VDO Atomic Bold, Atomic 3000 LED and MAC Viper Profiles.

“Coming out of the COVID situation and the entire world being on tour right now, we really had to figure out something that was impactful, different

and still fit within the limitations that we had truck and budget wise,” said Richter. “I've always wanted to go back to an old‐school PAR can style system, but obviously I don't want to carry around 180 actual PAR cans because that would be a nightmare. So, I had been looking around for the past couple of years for a light that could pull off that look for when the band needed a full production system.”

Crucially for Halestorm’s tour, the Atomic Bold also faithfully emulates tungsten‐style lighting, which helped Ricther achieve visuals that harkened back to lighting from golden‐age classic rock shows. For additional authenticity, Ricther rigged the lights to an old‐ school, double‐hung PAR truss system, into which the Atomic Bolds fit seamlessly.

Along with the Atomic Bolds, the rig also included Martin Atomic 3000 LED strobes and MAC Viper Profiles for additional effects and visual flair. “I've been carrying the Atomic 3000 LED pretty much since they came out,” explained Richter. “I really think that the original Atomic 3000 was the best traditional strobe you could get. So when the LED version came out and I saw that it cuts your power consumption by more than half, and the output was more than double, I had to have them. Martin really improved upon a fixture that was already rock solid. I’m a big fan of the Viper as well. I like using a lot of gobos and textures within my designs, like dark color saturations with crisp edge gobos cutting through to add texture to the stage, or a super wide blowout to get that down‐the‐barrel look. The Viper is a rock‐solid fixture that can handle all of that.”

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