Bandit Lights Decades of Christmas Magic with Tenth Avenue North

	Photo: Yvonne Jones

Tenth Avenue North, the multiple Dove Award-winning band, recently wrapped their fan-favorite Decade The Halls Tour this Christmas season, with special guests Plumb and Land of Color. Bandit Lites provided the lighting system for the joyful show, which explores the last 100 years of popular music with the costumes, set, and lighting reflecting the styles of music ranging from Christmas pageants to candlelight services.

"The big directive for the tour design is it needed to contain looks that reminded audience of every decade of the music they're hearing," says lighting designer Mike Marcario. "Combined with logistical directives to keep the system simple enough to be set, teched, ran, and struck by a one-man lighting crew, while also living within a lower than usual weight restriction due to transportation, I believe we landed on a production design that accomplishes all of it."

Bandit Lites supplied GLP X4S, Elation CuePix WW2 Blinders, Chauvet Rogue RH1 Hybrids, Chauvet Nexus 4x1 fixtures, and Mega-Lite Circa Scoop LEDs, a fixture that Marcario shared doubles as the workhorse and time machine of the lighting.

"Starting the night only using the warm LED in the center, similar to a large old incandescent bulb, then adding the RGB color mixing and pixel mapping element as we get to the decades where that technology emerged, allows me to easily paint looks from each of those decades," he says.

As the show progresses, the lighting helps in the transformation of the space, with the static, warm tungsten tones of the 1940s and 1950s. As the decades progress, Marcario drew upon the groovy, psychedelic rainbow looks of the 1970s and the fast, strobe effects for the late aughts.

"As the tour takes place mostly in churches and theatres, the lighting system has to stand on its own without any support overhead from the venue," says Marcario. "This is why I chose to use hybrid and wash fixtures -- both the Elation Smarty Hybrid and GLP X4S can and do cover a lot of ground."

"I always welcome the opportunity to work with Mike Marcario and the Tenth Avenue North production team of Davi Lema (board operator) and Jed Faessler (production manager)," says Bandit Lites business development officer Brent Barrett. "They are an extreme pleasure to work with when on site at our Venue One rehearsal facility. This Christmas tour demonstrated Mike's ability to use the different aspects of a lighting system to reflect the technological development of Christmas over the decades, which makes for an extremely enjoyable Christmas variety show that can be enjoyed by the entire family."

"Brent Barrett is my client representative, and we've been working together for years now," says Marcario. "He is always helpful and patient with any idea and as many design revisions I inevitably come up with. (Project manager) Jimmy Hatten has been taking care of the prep of every Tenth Ave rig since we came to Bandit and seems to come up with more ways every time to make the systems easier to set up and smaller/lighter to pack into the truck as the one before it."

While the tour wrapped December 15th, fans can watch the band's first ever cyber Christmas Concert, airing on 12/20 at 6:00pm CT/PT and 7:00pm ET/MT. For more information and tickets, visit http://yg309.infusionsoft.com/.../orderFo.../Tenth-Avenue-North.