Bruce Hornsby is back on the road with The Noisemakers
USA - After three Grammy Awards, over 100 shows with the Grateful Dead, and 11m record sales, Bruce Hornsby hasn’t lost his taste for touring. The singer-songwriter is crisscrossing the US with his band The Noisemakers this summer and enjoying every minute of it. Touring is fun, Hornsby told an interviewer, because he and the band “keep the spontaneity factor high.” This free-flowing spirit was very much in evidence when the Hornsby tour bus pulled into the Columbia County Amphitheatre in June.
The owner of Quest Sound & Productions, Berret created a bountiful range of looks to reflect Hornsby’s eclectic set list with a rig that was anchored by CHAUVET Professional Rogue and COLORado fixtures and run with a ChamSys PC Wing. Even a sudden summer storm, which wound up cutting the concert short, didn’t damped the pure exuberance of the concert or the lightshow.
“The combination of Chauvet fixtures and ChamSys worked very well for me because of its flexibility,” said Berret. “Bruce Hornsby and his band convey a lot of different moods with their music and they are very loose on stage. The Chauvet gear gave me a lot of options and I was able to change looks quickly with my ChamSys to keep up with the music.”
Key to helping Berret conjure up a steady stream of fresh looks were the four Rogue R1 FX-B fixtures in his stage package. He had two of the units stacked on truss just to the left and just to the right of centre stage. Drawing on the five independently controlled moving heads on each of the linear Rogues and their rapid pan-tilt movements, he was able to create an endless variety of chase sequences and sweep the stage with undulating wash motions.
“The great thing about the FX-Bs is that you can get a wide variety of looks from just a few of them,” said Berret. “Aside from moving their individual heads in all these different directions, you can also use them to create a range of effects. So you can change things up throughout a show without taking up a lot of space on your rig. We used them for some eye candy type of looks during some of the numbers -- at other times they worked more as washes.”
Barret also included eight Rogue R2 Spots and eight Rogue R1 Beams in his Hornsby rig. Flying the Rogue Spot fixtures on upstage truss, he used them to backlight the performers at dramatic moments, change the ambience on stage with gobos, and engage the crowd with audience lighting.
(Jim Evans)

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