Recording contracts and stadium concerts are great, but in this era of YouTube and music streaming, a lot of bands are doing just fine without them. Playing everything from jam to jangle and emo to post hardcore, these grass roots groups are building sizable fan bases by purveying their music online and touring like crazy.

Often playing 100 or more gigs a year in venues that rarely exceed 2000 capacity, a new generation of road warrior bands have created a renaissance of live grass roots music, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the coffee house era of the 1960s. In the process, they’ve also created new opportunities for lighting designers. As children of a highly visual age, they almost always place a premium on having a distinctive look on stage with a lightshow that is uniquely their own.

New York lighting designer Victor Zeiser of Squeek Lights has chalked up plenty of miles working with touring bands, having designed for some of the most successful like Grammy winners They Might Be Giants and Canadian cult favorite Silverstein, to some lesser known groups. Zeiser, who also keeps busy as the LD for the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan, shared his thoughts on designing for the new generation of traveling troubadours…Read the rest!