Bluegrass musician Billy Strings’ 2025 tour, built around his 2024 album, Highway Prayers, mixed headlining arena and amphitheater dates with festival slots and international shows.
Lighting was designed by Colorado-based Saxton Waller, who chose 37 Robe iFORTES and 26 MegaPointes at the heart of the lighting rig, which, for the Fall US leg of the tour, was supplied by Nashville-based Bandit Lites.
Saxton had been off the road for a few years immediately before this opportunity came up, although still busy lighting, programming, design engineering, and CAD drawing, but just not touring. However, he was recommended by several sources to the artist’s management team, who wanted a fresh and invigorating look to the lighting that created a presence but kept the focus fully on the music.
“They essentially wanted a proper rock ‘n’ roll light show,” Saxton explained. “Complete with all the drama, accents, highs, lows, and general energy. I knew that it was paramount to underscore the sheer musicianship onstage, and I also wanted to introduce a bit of mystery, surprise, and anticipation to the show to help keep fans engaged visually.”
Seeking to create an architectural framework for the stage, nine diamond-shaped pods, four mid stages flown up high, with five situated upstage at a lower trim, all made up from custom Tyler truss pieces, and with a projection surface skin stretched across the centres. They were outlined with a linear pixel product. There were four flown LX trusses, which were made up from general-purpose trussing, with LX1 through three having iFORTES and MegaPointes equally spaced out along them.
These were complemented with a section of GP truss upstage on the floor, along with another nine iFORTES behind the band on the deck, which were utilised for projecting gobos, colour, and texturing onto the diamond skins, in addition to back lighting the band.
With a certain amount of jamming involved in each performance, lighting very much calls for a busked style of operation with latitude for spontaneity, thinking on the feet, and going with the flow of the music, for which Saxton builds cue stacks that are accessible at any time. Whole sections of these cue stacks included iFORTES and MegaPointes, with around 130 or so looks available to create some complex signature eye candy scenes with all the iFORTES on the rig pointed upstage, complete with a gobo.
The MegaPointes with the frost filter in were used to highlight the band through these giant cyc looks. Saxton operates the console like he is playing a musical instrument each night, getting immersed in the rhythm and vibes, and he finds this style of operation extremely invigorating and a great challenge to enjoy, and of course a huge contrast to running the large timecoded EDM shows that he’s also done.
Before the start of the tour, Saxton conducted an exhaustive shootout between around 16 potential beam and long throw fixtures at Bandit’s Nashville shop, before finally deciding on the iFORTES and MegaPointes.
He knew both fixture types and their capabilities already, and he decided that they were still the best combination to create the right show ambience. “I love Robe’s colour mixing system for its consistency, as well as the rotating and indexable gobo packages in both fixtures, so everything else was edged out of the picture!” he said, appreciating the colour wheel layout, with the “right colours in the right places.”
In closing, Saxton said he “loves” working with musicians of Billy Strings’ calibre and is inspired by his “talent and dedication” to producing “incredible, breathtaking, and memorable” shows that are different every night.
