Maroon 5, Brian Jenkins and Elation find their groove on 2021 fall tour
Three‐time Grammy Award‐winning band Maroon 5 wrapped an early fall tour in Concord, California, the conclusion to an 8‐week return to the road lit by Brian Jenkins using Upstaging‐supplied Elation lighting.
Lighting designer/director Brian Jenkins is in his ninth year with the band, a collaboration he calls “my part‐time full‐time gig,” explaining that the band will “knock out a block of shows, and then retreat into the shadows for a bit.” It’s a schedule that has worked out well over the years, allowing him to work on other shows and with other designers. “We have a friendly, tight‐knit crew and mostly everyone has been with the organization for some time,” he says.
Being a pop show, Jenkins says there were a lot of “cues, pops, bloops, and occasional whistles” together with a number of beamy looks, high‐side sculpting, and silhouette moments speckled throughout the set list. “LEDs and strobes are loaded‐up and used frequently,” he said. “We generally lean into heavy color
saturation for the higher energy songs and then reset the palette for more of the slower tempo segments. For each song, I tend to create a base look that rides through the song and layer on top with effects and timecode hits. Once the guys start, they usually do 5 to 8 songs back‐to‐back so there’s a lot of energy and not much downtime with blackouts, talking, guitar changes, etc. After 25 minutes, they come up to take a quick breather and then go after it again.”
An integral part of the color and effects package consists of 14 Proteus Hybrid™ LED moving heads, 40 Fuze Wash Z350™ LED wash lights and 24 Volt Q5E™ battery‐powered LED wash lights. “We use the Proteus Hybrid primarily as key light,” Jenkins explains. “Considering that they’re occasionally exposed to the elements on the downstage truss, the IP rating was a key in choosing this fixture.” The Fuze Wash Z350s with their single source RGBW color mixing and non‐pixelated lens face the designer calls his “workhorse” fixtures. “The large aperture face with a homogenized LED color engine made this a new favorite light of mine. It’s nice to get a look out of the face of the fixture at 5%. With LED engines on fixtures, dimmer and color curves are certainly important and I was especially happy with the performance we achieved from the Fuze Washes. Great lights!” Meanwhile, the unobtrusive, battery‐powered Volt Q5E fixtures helped light all the floor set elements. “We added a bit of frost and they worked out nicely with the DMX transmitter. Our guys charged them during load‐in and we fired them up during setchange.”
Photos © Steve Jennings
Comentarios