Robe Hits the Highway with Billy Strings

	Seeking to create an architectural framework for the stage, Waller used nine diamond-shaped pods: four mid-stage flown up high, with five upstage at a lower trim. Photo: Jesse Faatz

Billy Strings' 2025 tour, built around his 2024 album, Highway Prayers, mixed headlining arena and amphitheater dates with festival slots and international shows.

Lighting was designed by Colorado-based Saxton Waller, who chose 37 Robe iFORTES and 26 MegaPointes for the heart of his rig, which, for the fall US leg of the tour, was supplied by Bandit Lites' Nashville office.

With no video onstage, it was all down to lighting to provide maximum visual impact and reinforce the band's music and performance.

Waller had been off the road for a few years immediately before this opportunity came up, although still busy with lighting, programming, design engineering, and CAD drawing. "They essentially wanted a proper rock-and-roll light show," he says, "complete with all the drama, accents, highs, lows, and general energy. I knew that it was paramount to underscore the sheer musicianship onstage, and I also wanted to introduce a bit of mystery, surprise, and anticipation to the show to help keep fans engaged visually."

Seeking to create an architectural framework for the stage, he used nine diamond-shaped pods: four mid-stage flown up high, with five upstage at a lower trim, all made up from custom Tyler Truss, and with a projection surface skin stretched across the centers. The diamonds were outlined with a linear pixel product.

There were four flown lighting bars, made up from general-purpose trussing, with the first through the third having iFORTES and MegaPointes equally spaced out among them.

These units were complemented with a section of GP truss upstage on the floor, along with another nine iFORTES behind the band on the deck, utilized for projecting gobos, color, and texturing onto the diamond skins, in addition to backlighting the band.

With a certain amount of jamming involved in each performance, the show called for a busked style of operation, for which Saxton built cue stacks that were accessible at any time. Whole sections of the stacks included iFORTES and MegaPointes, with around 130 or so looks available to create complex eye-candy scenes with all the iFORTES on the rig pointed upstage, complete with a gobo. The MegaPointes were used with their frost filters to highlight the band through these giant cyc looks.

Before the start of the tour, Saxton conducted an exhaustive shootout between 16 potential beam and long throw fixtures at Bandit's Nashville shop, before finally deciding on the iFORTES and MegaPointes."I love Robe's color mixing system for its consistency, as well as the rotating and indexable gobo packages in both fixtures," he says. "So everything else was edged out of the picture," He appreciates the color wheel layout, with the "right colors in the right places."

Billy Strings is back on tour beginning this month.