For Miranda Lambert, “it’s all about taking this rock persona of hers and running with it,” says LD Chris Lisle of the Nashville star’s current Locked and Reloaded tour with Dierks Bentley, a sequel of sorts to the Lambert/Bentley Locked and Loaded co-headlining tour of 2006/2007. “I tell everyone she’s a rock star,” he says. “That little five foot four gal just explodes on stage, making her fun to light.”
Lisle makes it fun for the audience, too, lighting the reigning CMA and ACM Female Vocalist of the Year with a mixed arsenal of Chauvet, Vari*Lite and Martin fixtures, along with a few fixtures from lighting supplier Bandit Lites.
Bandit, now a regular vendor for Lambert’s shows, has an association with Lisle that goes back even further. “I have known Chris since the early 1990s,” says Bandit VP Mike Golden, crediting the LD for his ongoing success.
A key guiding principle for Lisle is to make the lighting all about enhancing the artist, and not existing for its own sake. “I want
everything I do to be about her — her show. I don’t want it to be a ‘light show,’” Lisle says.
» “It’s All a Journey”
Lisle, who grew up in Nashville and hung out with a friend in a band, graduated cum laude from “Lighting a Friend’s Band for Free” University.
From 2003 to 2007, no longer working pro bono, Lisle was lighting shows for Keith Urban. Since then, he’s lit country artists Montgomery Gentry, LeAnn Rimes, Sarah Evans and Chris Young, and he’s gone beyond the country music genre lighting Robert Plant, Babyface and Back Street Boys.
“A lot of times, living in Nashville, you get pegged as a country guy, but I’ve worked hard to expand into the pop and rock world,” Lisle says. “I love it.”
Lisle first met Lambert in 2005, when she was opening for Urban. “I’m always keeping an eye on the opening acts and try to nurture them as best I can. Sometimes they are one-hit-wonders, but others, like Miranda, have real longevity. I kept in touch with the team, and worked with them when they could only have a small lighting rig.” How small? For his first trek with Lambert, the lighting gear took up 12 … not 12 trucks, but 12 feet in one truck. “Now we’re up to three trucks with just lights,” he notes.
When asked if it’s frustrating to go from a big headliner’s rig to a small one with an up-and-comer, he shrugs it off. “You just take yourself in a different direction, creatively,” Lisle explains. “It’s cool to take this journey and move from phase to phase with an artist,” he adds. “For me, going small is a good challenge. Some of the best ideas happen with a minimum amount of light. It also really trains you in getting the most bang for the buck when choosing gear.”
He does admit, however, that it can be “tough” when artists go from arenas to smaller venues. “When a lighting budget gets cut in half, it’s a bummer,” and the artist is naturally disappointed. “But we make the most of what we have – it’s all a journey.”
» “Some Fun Things”
The journey with Lambert is calling on all Lisle’s skills and experiences. “With this rig, we had some opportunities to do some fun things,” says Lisle.
Along with the 60-by-40-foot stage, with larger-than-life Plexiglas guitar appearing on a thrust jutting into the crowd, the rig featured a curved truss with three circle truss elements and mirror balls overhead.
The custom truss circle “chandeliers” were made with 10-foot circle truss inside 15-foot circle truss with a mirror ball in the middle of both. They would hang across the upstage area, flying in at different times and at varying heights. The arch truss, flown downstage, framed the tour’s video screen and enhanced the sense of depth in the design.
Lisle teamed up once again with lighting director Craig Richter, who spoke to PLSN last year about the challenges of wrestling with a Hog Full Boar for the first time on Miranda Lambert’s 2012 On Fire tour (See “Production Profile,” PLSN, June 2012).
This time out, it was Lisle who faced the bigger learning curve with the consoles of choice for Locked and Reloaded: two grandMA2 Lights. But Lisle isn’t complaining. “I love this console for its multiple levels of functionality — it can be simple when you need it to be, or handle intricate things as well. The effects engine is phenomenal,” he notes.
Programmer Scott Chmielewski also helped Lisle explore the grandMA2 light’s capabilities, which include networking and DMX merging features. “You can create the console you want,” Lisle noted — “lay it out the way you need it to be.” He credited the grandMAS for being “super easy to learn, but there’s so much more I can learn going forward.”
As for the choice of lighting fixtures, Lisle jokingly refers to the Locked and Reloaded rig as his “one of each” rig, because so many lighting manufacturers are represented. “I find things I like about each of them, and none have wooed me to the point” of being exclusive.
Many of his choices are analytical, calculating the greatest overall visual bang for the buck. When comparing Fixture X to Fixture Z, he’ll note that X might have a cool feature or two, but is it worth the extra $100 per unit more than the Z? If that answer isn’t a resounding yes, he’s happy with the less expensive alternative — especially if it means 36 Brand Z Lights instead of 12 X Lights.
Like most LDs, Lisle has his favorite go-to fixtures. “I’ve always loved the [Martin] MAC 2000 Wash, and I use it as a front light and to sprinkle around the stage. And for spot fixtures I love the Vari*Lite 3000, which is outstanding.” He also included some Bandit 5×5 Matrixes and GRN Pars.
If Lisle’s latest rig is reloaded with those favorites, along with Chauvet COLORdash Accents and COLORado Batten 72 Tours, the biggest difference between this year’s rig and the one used for last year’s On Fire tour is the addition of Chauvet’s new Legend 230SR Beam moving yokes.
“They shipped one to Bandit, and I fell in love with it,” Lisle says. “It’s amazing, quick, and I have 26 on this tour.” He uses them to create a wall behind the band which he says really cuts through everything else for what he likes to call that “Big Rock Moment.”
That moment, he adds, doesn’t hit the audience at the start of the show. “We don’t reveal that wall of lights until we’re three or four songs in,” Lisle says.
Other big visual moments for the current tour include the use of Chauvet’s Geyser Foggers and the rig’s circular truss sections and moving mirrored balls. “When that five-foot round mirror ball is hit with 26 beam fixtures, it’s an amazing moment,” he says, of the visual effects that accompany Lambert’s performance of her song, “All Kinds of Kinds.”
Apart from the powerhouse visuals, however, there are quieter moments that are no less memorable. During the ballad “Over You,” a song Lambert co-wrote with husband Blake Shelton about Shelton’s older brother, who was killed in a car accident, for example, Lisle mutes the rig’s firepower, relying solely on key and backlighting. “It leaves her in a powerful silhouette moment — it’s really emotional,” he says.
» Candy Store
“Chris, I don’t do lights, and you don’t sing,” Lambert once told Lisle, and for Locked and Reloaded, Lisle once again had fairly free rein to work out the details to Lambert’s broad-stroke preferences — but with an additional challenge posed by the need to incorporate a design that would also mesh well with the looks that Dierks Bentley’s performance required on stage.
“As Miranda was coming up, she went out on tour with Dierks and he took very good care of her, as a support act,” said Lisle. For this tour, “she gave me a very specific direction to make sure that he gets as much of the rig as possible. The toughest part was coming up with ways to make my vision work for her, but also letting Dierks’ team come in and do their thing and make that happen.”
Speaking of his relationship with Bandit, Lisle says he sometimes feels like a kid in a candy store — always mindful, however, of his limited allowance. “I’m always looking at what works with the budget, and won’t take up the crew’s time fixing lights every day.”
Lisle also credits the crew Bandit sent out with him. “They worked really, really hard. It’s a lot of work, especially when you begin a tour, working out the kinks. And the Bandit customer service is fantastic: If we need lamps, they get us lamps. They’ve been very supportive of the tour.”
@font-face { font-family: “Cambria Math”; }@font-face { font-family: “MyriadPro-Regular”; }@font-face { font-family: “MyriadPro-Bold”; }@font-face { font-family: “MinionPro-Regular”; }@font-face { font-family: “Serpentine-Bold”; }@font-face { font-family: “Serpentine-BoldOblique”; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 10pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }p.Crew-GearHdln, li.Crew-GearHdln, div.Crew-GearHdln { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; line-height: 11pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Serpentine-BoldOblique; color: rgb(185, 204, 70); font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; }p.BODYTEXT, li.BODYTEXT, div.BODYTEXT { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.15in; line-height: 11pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: MyriadPro-Regular; color: black; }p.BasicParagraph, li.BasicParagraph, div.BasicParagraph { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; line-height: 120%; font-size: 12pt; font-family: MinionPro-Regular; color: black; }.MsoChpDefault { font-size: 10pt; }div.WordSection1 { page: WordSection1; }
Miranda Lambert Locked & Reloaded Tour
Crew
Lighting Co: Bandit Lites
Video Co: MooTV
Staging: Accurate Staging
Production Designer: Chris Lisle
Lighting Director: Craig Richter
Lighting Programmer: Scott Chmielewski
Production Manager: Todd Ortmeier
Lighting Crew Chief: Dave “Gig Butt” Butzler
Lighting Crew: Tyler Veneziano, Jimmy Murray
Video Director: John Breslin
Video Engineer: Eric Heidel
Cameras: Kevin Fisher, Mark Jarsen, Edwin Lewis
Tour Manager: Ryan Westbrook
Stage Manager: Fred Yanda
Tour Rigger: Sonny Oyler
Gear
2 grandMA 2 Light consoles
1 Catalyst Media Server
40 Vari*Lite VL3000 Spots
35 Martin MAC 2000 Washes
32 Bandit Matrix 5x5s
30 Bandit GRN Pars
26 Chauvet Legend 230SR Beams
20 Chauvet COLORdash Accents
12 Chauvet COLORado Batten 72 Tours
11 Martin Atomic 3000 strobes
8 Chauvet Geyser RGB effect foggers
10 4 Light Molefays
3 Mirror Balls (1×5’; 2×3’)
4 DF-50 Diffusion hazers
More tour photos at www.plsn.me/LambertExtras
