Willis Underhill’s Diamond Rio Rodeo Show Rides High with ChamSys

SAN ANTONIO – As the lighting designer for the multi-platinum Grammy winners Diamond Rio, Willis Underhill has run his dynamic lightshows in a variety of venues from arenas and music halls to festivals. But it’s doubtful that any have been quite like the site of his most recent setting when he lit the band’s show at the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo. 

First, there was the venue’s size. The 19,000-capacity Frost Bank Center, home of the San Antonio Spurs, is big by any measure. Like all massive spaces, it presents a challenge to any designer wanting to foster a sense of intimacy between the artist on stage and the audience. This is especially concerning when lighting a band like Diamond Rio that thrives on connecting to the crowd.  Complicating matters even further in this case —  the stage was in the center of the rodeo floor and Underhill’s FOH was two levels up in a corner of the arena.  Did we mention too that the 360-degree stage rotated throughout the show?!

“There were some challenges involved in creating the looks we wanted to create, given the size of the arena and the nature of the stage,” said Underhill, who nevertheless was able to power an engaging show that drew the band and their fans together, while making the large space inside the arena seem intimate. 

Underhill was able to meet the challenges the rodeo threw at him with help from LD Systems, which ran production for the event. “The LD Systems team was great,” he said. “They were very friendly and super helpful.”

Also helping to make Underhill’s show a success was his ChamSys Magicq250M Stadium Console. “I can’t tell you how valuable this console was to me in this setting,” he said. “For starters, the Group Cues feature allowed me to scale my show file for a large venue like this with minimal effort. On top of that there was one new feature I really used a lot in this project — Chunks. It allowed me to get more complex, deep looks from my position palettes. 

“Then there were The Timeline and MQ tracks,” continued Underhill. “They gave me absolute control of cue timing while adding depth and complexity with MQ tracks. Another good thing was that the ChamSys software really works well with Capture and CuePoints that I used for this show.”

Although most of his show was preprogrammed, Underhill also did do some busking at key moments, especially when he wanted to accent the band’s connection to the crowd. That connection, by the way, was front and center throughout Diamond Rio’s show even in this big arena, thanks to the skilled work of this LD on his console.