Eric Church set out on The Gather Again Tour this fall with the intention to unite fans and celebrate the return of live music, promoting his most recent Heart & Soul albums. Now, he doesn’t have to worry about being at certain mic positions for certain moments. With the format of The Gather Again Tour, special moments can be created anywhere on stage at any time during the show, thanks to BlackTrax!
While The Gather Again tour shows take place in arena-sized venues, the stage is set up in an intimate, in-the-round style where the audience surrounds the performer from all sides. It’s a setup that required a brand-new stage from the ones that Eric’s used to performing on for prior tours.
Production Crew
- Butch Allen: Production Designer
- Gavin Lake: Touring Lighting Director
- Robert Roth: Christie Lites Account Executive
- Robert Harrison: Touring BlackTrax Technician
- John Fields: Touring BlackTrax Technician
- John Taylor: BlackTrax Onsite Installation Technician
BlackTrax Team
- Dekkar Densham: BlackTrax Channel Manager, Interactive
- William McDaniel: BlackTrax Technical Team Lead
- Nicholas Lau: Training & Product Support Specialist
The design brief mandated that 64 automated follow spots (the ROBE BMFLs) simultaneously tracked the 8 different targets; 8 fixtures allocated per target. An Eric Church concert is a high energy performance where performers are moving quickly and end up all over the stage.
Butch Allen, the show’s Production Designer, worked very closely with TAIT (staging, and automation vendor for the tour) to develop new flying camera platform, now called the Navigator Camera System. BlackTrax sends positional information to TAIT via RTTRP-M so the flying cameras can automatically track Eric Church in real-time.
- x12 BlackTrax Sensors (SX13)
- x8 BlackTrax Beacons
- x64 ROBE BMFLs
- TAIT Navigator Camera System
