Squeek and Elation Dartz light Chon tour
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“We’ve had an insane number of tours going out this summer, which of course is a good thing,” enthuses Steve Kosiba of Squeek Lights. “We actually had two tours out in June with rigs that featured Elation lights and just bought more Dartz so we’ve upped our inventory of those.” Kosiba programmed both those June outings with the Chon rig running off an M2GO lighting console running Onyx software and operated on tour by Colin Bennet.
Squeek Lights has been working with Chon on the California quartet’s last few tours. The band plays an appealing style of instrumental rock, a blend of interlacing guitar and rhythm that, when complemented with a dynamic light show, is richly captivating.
From looking at the band’s visual vocabulary of the past, Kosiba noted a good deal of pastel colours - cyan, magenta, yellow, lighter lavender. “A lot of fixtures with colour wheels don’t give you a lot of pastels to work with but with the Dartz you can mix any colour you want, which was really useful when reaching for those lighter pastel colours, which I did fairly often,” Kosiba explains. “Just having a colour mixing fixture that small with that tight of a beam is fantastic.” He adds that he generally turned to more saturated colours with the SixBars to provide more contrast and offset the pastels coming from the Dartz.
The compact Dartz moving heads lined the upstage on 2½ ft pipe and base to peek out from behind the bassist and drummer with other Dartz fixtures working from atop road cases. “They provided a line of beams upstage and continued to impress me as far as brightness,” Kosiba said of the narrow-beam LED moving head. “The fact that it gets all that output just from a 50W LED engine is impressive. It’s a great little fixture that you can get cool looks with.”
Working unobtrusively from the front as foot lighting onto performers were full colour SixBar 1000s, three-foot long LED battens with six-colour multi-chip and discreet, narrow profile. More SixBars worked from the side of the stage. “It’s a bright fixture so I usually ran them at 30-50 percent to avoid blinding the band too much,” Kosiba says. Four SixBars were used to light the downstage guitars with two pushed back to light the drummer and bassist.
(Jim Evans)
