Touring with Diamonds in the Design
Production Designer/Lighting Designer Jon Eddy has a history of working with metal bands. Tours with Misfits, Megadeth, Marilyn Manson, Jane’s Addiction, and Psycho Las Vegas are a few in his design repertoire. He has been working with alternative metal band Deftones—which some describe as “The Radiohead of Metal”—since 2014. For this 2022 tour, the LD had to adhere to the “less is more” vibe requested from the California band.
“They wanted to see a more theatrical vibe from what a metal show would normally bring,” Eddy says. “The starting point was trying to take a hard turn away from everything I’ve ever done, while still keeping my style of doing things, and to incorporate new aspects for myself.”
Making the whole set/rig one canvas was the goal, to make it flow/look good from anywhere in the room, he explains. “The floor rig is extremely minimal, and the overall rig is the smallest amount of moving lights I’ve ever used for an arena-sized production.” The tour’s lighting is supplied by Christie Lites.
Diamond Rig
The most prominent piece of the design is the rig, consisting of six diamond shapes—created from three trusses—outlined with Martin VDO Sceptron 10s. On this first leg of the tour, the diamonds are static and form one unit, the LD notes. On the next leg, the rig will undergo an “evolution,” he says, hinting about new tricks up his sleeve.
The workhorses of the diamond rig are 48 active Claypaky Xtylos—the only moving fixtures in the diamonds besides the Robe BMFL FollowSpots. This is the LD’s first time to use the Robe product, which he calls “a game changer, 100 percent—being able to have my key performers steadily lit the whole show as needed without crazy light bleeding upstage at the projection surfaces was amazing. I feel like I’m playing in the big leagues now,” he says. “I didn’t need to wear my headset at all as I controlled the color and intensity/zoom on the lights with my tech Luis Herrera controlling the main spot and another tech, Pepe Salas, for the other spot.”
The Claypaky ReflectXion moving mirror lives upstage on the set’s staging. “It’s the ‘god light’ that is not a light,” he says. The mirror’s big moments comes when lead vocalist Chino Moreno picks up the guitar for a few songs on his center riser during the songs, “Digital Bath/Sextape/Change” and the end of the set.
Accurate Staging provided the staging’s decks and stairs, with triangle pieces on the outside for the rounded overall look. For the U.S. run, GLP’s Scenex Lighting LED pixel tape lined the edges of the stairs, while in Europe, they switched to the new Scenex Lighting’s Shadow Line LED tape, whose black housing disappears into the set when not in use.
Avolites Synergy Video Playback is running content through the Scenex LED tape, along with the Xytlos and Sceptrons. Elsewhere in the set, Color Kinetics’ ColorBlast 12 units are positioned as floor fixtures for highlighting band member positions.
Retractable Video
Ruben Laine has worked alongside Eddy as associate designer of Megadeth’s The Metal Tour of the Year in 2021, so they have adapted a workflow that, well, works. “For this tour with Deftones, I helped bring Jon’s vision into renders, previz, and tech drawings in Capture [Visualizations’ lighting design software] during preproduction,” Laine details. While there are seven video panels behind the band, the team is using something different for visuals. Says Eddy, “I wanted an option to not have anything there at all when not playing video to create more stage depth.”
Laine explains, “When we were looking at the video element for the show, LED walls were just out of the question. It would take too much truck space, take too long to set up every day, and we needed a video solution that could cover the entire stage, but that could disappear when not being used so that we wouldn’t have a hard surface in the way, getting hit by lights when Jon started swinging lights like metalheads in a mosh pit.”
The team turned to Creative Integration Studio for Wahlberg Motion Design’s 2-meter-wide Mini Roll Downs. These DMX-controlled roll drops offer a retractable video projection surface that can be rolled up and down as needed and can be easily controlled from FOH. “We had two sets of scrims on tour, a 30% blow-thru and a 70% blow-thru material, which we would switch out depending on what kind of outdoor venue we were in, and it helped account for inclement weather,” Laine explains. Hanging on the downstage truss were two projectors from vendor OSA International. “We used two Christie [Digital] D4K40-RGB laser projectors, which produce an output of 40K lumens with 4K in resolution to deliver insanely bright, crisp images,” Laine says.
The relatively lightweight roller scrims help the production team hang their design completely unaltered at almost every venue. “Thanks to the adjustable nature of the rollers, when we lost as much as 12’ of overhead space at venues like the Greek Theatre in L.A., the design and overall visual experience was not affected,” Laine notes. “We even planned for the potential of hitting even larger venues, which is why we fitted the rollers with 30’ long scrims.”
In spaces between the projection roll drops, the LD has placed eight vertical 24’ pipes, each fitted with two GLP JDC1 Hybrid strobes and five Elation DTW Blinder 350 IP fixtures. “JDC1s are always fun and bright as hell—in aggressive mode—and Elation’s DTW gets me pretty close to the dimmer I like from traditional blinders,” Eddy says. With these LED-powered alternatives replacing the old-school blinders and strobes, he can be “kinder” to his crew and the environment. He kept the pipes rigged at angles to flow with the diamond shape above, further adding to the depth of the design.
Laine chimes in, “Once we moved into the final stage of production and rehearsals, while Jon was pouring his soul into the carefully organized chaos that is this touring punt file for lighting, I focused on programming the video aspect of the show. I also integrated the seven Wahlberg Motion Design Mini Roll Downs into the show in a way that was both efficient and natural feeling to him as he takes every inch of console real estate, which is where the 100 physical playbacks on the [Avolites] D9-330 come into play.”
Part of this process included tracking the position of the roll drops so that the Avolites Ai media server would be able to shutter off video as the screens move up and down to avoid disrupting the negative space upstage of the rig, Laine explains. He pixel mapped over 200 linear feet of GLP Scenex Lighting LED tape and created group layouts of all the fixtures in the rig so that Eddy could get the most out of Avolites’ Synergy and Effect Engine features. Synergy brings lighting and video together, offering a streamlined workflow for all of the visual elements. Synergy is a proprietary connection between any Titan lighting console and any Ai media server.
Diamond Control
There are more diamonds in a different form at the FOH. Eddy is using the Avolites Diamond D9-330 console for his main desk, with the smaller Avolites D9-215 as a backup. Says Eddy, “With Deftones, things are run 100% manually every night. No timecode, no cue stacks. I use the setlist feature and store color palettes and video content within. The band has a consistent set list lately to go with the new production, but in most of my years with Deftones, things changed quite regularly. They can definitely still jam out 50-plus songs from their catalog. It’s me shredding on a punt page every night, making it look timecoded.”
Laine says working with Eddy is an organic process. “I get a great feeling of satisfaction from watching him develop each song’s look, and how quickly he can adapt what he’s got cooking on the console to the band’s highly dynamic style. As he punts the same show over and over, it’s super interesting to watch him polish his technique night after night, changing playback positions to improve the ergonomics and flow of the show file.”
Eddy’s favorite features of the Diamond D9-330—which won the Indispensable Technology Award for Video at the 20th Annual Parnelli Awards last month—start with the amount of real estate it offers for him to work. “I don’t have to change the page once,” he says, expanding on his favorite features. “It follows the same Titan software from previous consoles, so the adjustment period was very minimal. There was so much attention to detail when Avo built this console, they truly outdid themselves.”
Laine was impressed enough with the Avolites Diamond D9 console to order two consoles from the very first batch of D9 shipments to the U.S. “The hardware is phenomenal, and the software makes programming a breeze,” the programmer notes. “It certainly is the most robust console I have ever been on. The super-bright screens allow you to work outdoors without having to pay attention to the glare, and the built-in photo sensor adjusts the brightness, so you are not blinded when working indoors. The faders are sturdy and responsive, and the buttons are still the same classic Cherry actuators from the old Pearls, only with new, modern, more ergonomic keycaps providing you the tactile and audible feedback you want when working with a metal band 65 feet from the downstage edge.”
He continued to heap praise on more features such as the built-in Luminex switch and Neutrik opticalCON fiber optic connections. “In short, I love the D9. I love that all the Avolites consoles from the D9 to the Pearl Expert can all run the latest version of Avolites Titan software. It certainly has reinforced and justified my decision to switch to Avo back in 2018.”
Deftones are currently playing festivals and their own headlining gigs in Europe this summer, with a festival gig in Australia slated for December.
Deftones 2022 Tour
Production Team
- Designer/Programmer/Operator: Jon Eddy
- Design Associate/Advisor/Projection/Automation Integration/Programming: Ruben Laine
- Crew Chief: Dan Arnold
- Production Manager/TM/FOH: Andy Tinsley
- Dimmers/Media Servers/Robe FollowSpot Op: Luis Herrera
- Crew: Casey Wadell, Pepe Salas, Joe Rich
Vendors
- Lighting: Christie Lites/Rep Cory Walker
- Video: OSA International, Inc./Rep Mark Fetto
- Video: Creative Integration Studio
- Staging: Accurate Staging
Gear
Lighting:
- 1 Avolites Diamond D9-330 Console
- 1 Avolites Diamond D9-215 Console
- 48 Claypaky Xtylos
- 1 Claypaky ReflectXion Moving Mirror
- 2 Robe BMFL FollowSpot
- 6 Robe BMFL WashBeam
- 40 Elation DTW LED Blinder
- 23 GLP JDC1 Hybrid Strobe
- 200’ GLP Scenex Lighting LED Pixel Tape (U.S.)
- 200’ GLP Scenex Lighting Shadow Line Pixel Tape (Europe)
- 144 Martin VDO Sceptron 10
- 4 Martin MAC Quantum Wash
- 10 Color Kinetics ColorBlast 12
- 2 hazebase Base Hazer
- 2 High End Systems F100 Performance Fog Generator
- 5 Reel EFX DF-50 Diffusion Hazer
Video:
- 2 Christie Digital D4K40-RGB Laser Projector
- 1 Avolites Ai Media Server
- 1 Avolites Titan Net Processor
- 7 Wahlberg Motion Design Mini Roll Down DMX Roll Drop
