Today we’d like to introduce you to Alex Rodgers.
Hi Alex, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I started working merch for local bands in my hometown back in high school. I was always interested in music technology and thought I’d be a recording engineer. After starting college at Belmont I fell in love with live audio, and in my internships I got put in the lighting department. Through that I found a talent in lighting that I put to practice at Belmont’s performing arts center. Since then I’ve had the opportunity to work for a variety of artists in multiple genres in venues all across the world.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It has not been completely smooth. The biggest roadblock was Covid. It’s very hard to design and operate lighting for live events when there are no live events.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I design the production, program the lighting and video and operate the consoles during live concerts. The design can starts months before an artist goes on tour, where I am working with them to determine what’s important to them visually, and how we can best support their songs and music in a visual medium. Throughout this process theres a number of revisions to the stage design and the lighting selection based on a few factors, budget and transportation space being the primary limiters. Throughout the tour I’m working with the artist to refine the show, anything from changing entire songs to changing small aspects of a song for example the artist not liking the color of the lights. One of the most fun and challenging projects I got to work on recently was with Bren Joy for his Sunset Black China tour. As it was an overseas tour, we didn’t have the budget to bring over much of our own gear and so we utilized whatever gear the venue had and that provided a ton of issues when it came to putting out a consistent show every night. It was incredibly rewarding though when the show hit and night after night we were able to put the best product on stage, it felt like summiting a new mountain every day.
Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
I think that in this profession finding a mentor is huge. There are so many things that I haven’t encountered before so I’d never thought about until they popped up. Alongside that, just not being afraid to ask for help or advice. Everybody knows something different than you. There are so many group chats and forums to hop on and get help. When I’m at shows, I always make an effort to introduce myself and be kind to any other artist’s crew, the local crew, it goes a long ways. This is such a reputation based industry, as a tour manager of mine put it once, “you do a show for 2 hours, you sleep for 6, and the other 18 hours of your day you just figure out how to not be a jerk.”
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