Something's Going On with Trace Adkins and elektraLiteTrace Adkins is currently out on a US tour through October supporting his 12th and latest studio album, Something's Going On. Grand Rapids, Michigan-based Odyssey Lighting USA, who has worked with the country music artist since 2014, is once again supplying the lighting complement for the tour, which includes elektraLite LED fixtures as well as an Avolites lighting console. Lighting designer Andrew Drury describes the set as having "an industrial warehouse look with an exhaust fan, some windows, some gears, and a lot of unique light placement -- rugged, almost," he says. "It was a design from a few people in the Trace camp. I came into this gig right after the set change was decided and I only had input on the final touches." A couple of those set touches, however, included the specification of four elektraLite fixtures: two elektraBars and two elektraBar Minis. A powerful, full-featured linear strip fixture, elektraLite's elektraBar features 18 powerful, 12W, six-in-one (RGBWAI) LED components for smooth color mixing. The elektraBar Mini offers the same features but in a smaller package with eight LEDs, and each pixel can be individually controlled, allowing for 16 million colors. With precision spacing, the fixtures are also ideal for low-resolution pixel mapping and video wall applications. "The elektraBars are used in our rig behind some window set pieces," he notes. "At the beginning of the tour, the windows used LED strips, but when the set change happened at the beginning of April, we wanted something that could be bold and powerful yet still provide a clean wash. The original plan was to have three elektraBars per window, but when we set it up the first time we realized how nice and bright the bars were, so we only needed one per window, which was great!" Drury says they looked around at options before choosing the elektraLite fixtures. "The elektraLites had the cleanest colors, best durability and a very good price point. Their reps really take care of us and have been working with us since we started this run," he says. Tom Lohman, VP of Odyssey Lighting USA, notes that the elektraBars and elektraBar Minis are new products in his inventory, and really his company's first experience with the brand. Not only was he pleasantly surprised by the luminaires' brightness, but also that "the colors are rich and even. Lots of power from such small fixtures," he says. Drury points out that he's happily controlling the elektraLite and other lighting fixtures from an Avolites console. "I used the Avolites Sapphire Touch last fall and loved it, but I'm currently running a Pearl Expert on this tour. With a show that has a lot of band specials, it's great to have so many faders and options on one piece of equipment. I'm running Titan v10, which brings a lot of cool new functions to an older console and makes doing things on the fly very quick and easy." Although Drury is reasonably new to Avolites, Lohman has been a self-described "big fan" of Avolites consoles since the mid-1990s and "has had no reason or desire to change," he says. Odyssey Lighting's inventory includes three Pearl Experts, two Titan Mobiles, two Pearls (from 2004), one Titan One, and a Sapphire Touch, which recently went out on the Festival of Praise tour with Fred Hammond. For more details on Trace Adkins' current tour, visit www.traceadkins.com/tour. Odyssey Lighting USA can likewise be found online at www.odysseylightingusa.com. 
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