Maddie and Tae Tour Uses Gear from 4Wall Nashville
Chauvet Professional recently focused in on LD Larry Foote and his tour design for rising country stars Maddie & Tae. 4Wall Nashville provided the gear for the tour, including Chauvet's Nexus 4x4 panels. Check out an excerpt from the coverage below, and head here for the full story.
Aside from being blessed with huge helpings of musical talent, Madison Marlow and Taylor Dye, better known as the chart-topping country act Maddie & Tae, are also incredibly resourceful. How else to explain two high school girls who managed to become close friends and collaborators despite living over 400 miles apart, moved to Nashville together at 18 and reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts before their 20th birthdays?
The same knack for making things happen was exhibited by lighting designer Larry Foote, who created a dynamic and versatile rig for the duo's Life Of Our Years Tour with Lee Brice, using only a single fixture: the Nexus 4x4 COB LED panel from CHAUVET Professional.
"This is Maddie & Tae's first shot at bringing their own lighting with them out on the road," said Foote, who used eight Nexus 4x4 panels provided by 4Wall Entertainment Lighting. "Maddie & Tae got off to a very fast start, but they're still very new, so the touring details haven't caught up yet. I wanted Nexus, because I needed a rig that could fit into a single trailer. More importantly though, I was looking for something that could create a lot of different looks, as well as something that would play well with the house lights at the different venues on the tour."
Foote positioned the Nexus panels on upstage pipe and base stands. "I wanted a rig that could shrink and expand depending on the venue, so pipe and bases were perfect," he explained. The LD grouped six of the panels in pairs - three on either side of center stage - and mounted two individually on stands in the middle. The panels were arranged in diamond shapes to create a more distinctive look on stage.
The flexibility that the Nexus 4x4 offers, allowing users to control each cell individually, was instrumental in allowing Foote to create the range of looks he was after. With his rig consisting of Nexus panels exclusively, he built his show by lighting individual cells on each fixture in different configurations to create a wide variety of patterns.
"This has really been an enjoyable project for me," said Foote. "It demonstrates how much you can do with a fixture when you tap into its performance features. Plus, it's given me a chance to work with some great people like Jennifer Moore and Cathie Lloyd at 4Wall and lighting director Austin Grundberg of Extreme Lighting & Sound, who is out there on the road executing the show every-night."