The Rolling Stones SIXTY tour featured a new set design by Stufish and lighting by Patrick Woodroffe, with 83 Ayrton Perseo Profiles and over 20 Ayrton Domino LT units in rotation.
“When designing a European tour, you must consider the vast range of weather conditions you might meet across the summer from beautiful sunny days to end-of-the-world storms,” said Terry Cook, associate lighting designer at Woodroffe Bassett Designs. “One thing Ayrton has become famous for is their high-powered IP rated fixtures,” adding “At FOH, for the first time ever, we specified 10 Ayrton Domino LT units attached to the FollowMe. This is a new Long Throw unit of the Domino range, and is also IP rated so it takes the weather concerns away.”
An additional 12 Domino LT fixtures were also chosen for exposed positions at the front of the stage, all of which were supplied by Neg Earth Lights. “Pretty much everything that is exposed to weather and/or hard to access is now an Ayrton product. Nearly every light that is crucial to the show – spots and keylights – are now Ayrton because of their intensity, reliability and IP65 rating,” said Rolling Stones lighting director, Ethan Weber.
Nine Perseo Profiles were hung on the downstage edge of nine overstage finger trusses and used to keylight the backing musicians; thirty-six more were rigged on two pairs of ladders upstage and mid/downstage, and 42 Perseo Profiles were positioned on the floor with 24 on the left and right screamers, and 18 in upstage positions behind the band. Twelve of the larger Ayrton Domino LT are also sited on the downstage floor with six per side lighting the fascia.
“The Stones setlist doesn’t often include too many songs that are gobo friendly, but we do get a few patterned looks in there and I was impressed with the gobo selection,” said Weber. “The LED source is very important to us as well. We haven’t been asked to account for our energy consumption, but morally it’s definitely a step in the right direction. The fact that our only significant power draws are when we’re testing the system, when I’m using the lights for late night focus/programming sessions and during the running of the show, goes a long way towards helping to ease my moral conscience.”
The 10 Domino LT fixtures used as followspots with the FollowMe system were rigged on two of the front of house towers with an average throw distance of 125’/38.5m. The five remote followspot operators were positioned more comfortably in the control tent with the rest of the lighting team.
