Backstreet Boys Millennium Tour

Thursday, August 26, 1999 || Martin Professional

The world famous American boy band brought their Millennium Tour to Copenhagen recently with a hysteria-generating barrage of soft ballads, high flying stunts and high energy light show.

The highly successful band has been touring Europe since late May using an all Martin lighting rig including 26 MAC 600s, 30 MAC 500s, 10 MAC 250s, 5 MAC 300s and 25 Pro 918 scanners along with a complement of Jem smoke machines all controlled by a Case Pro II desk.

The new Eureka 3D, a real time sound modeler which creates sound generated images is also used in the show. All lights were specified by rental company Premier Global.

Lighting Programmer/Director and Crew Chief for the tour, Jorge Valdez, a long time user of Martin lighting said, " A long tour like this, where we are in a different country every other day, is hard on the equipment - night after night we run the lights hard and they keep performing."

"Besides the live audience we have to light for video during the show as well - and we've also done a couple of TV shows where we added MAC 600s for front light which looked really good - so we use the lights in different ways. Martin lights were used on the Backstreet Boys tour last year as well and the gear has been excellent. We have no complaints."

Jorge was one of the first-ever users of Case control desks and still swears by them. "I've programmed other controllers before but the Case board is awesome!," he says. "First of all they're reliable and secondly the Effects Generator lets me do things that nobody else can do. It is really nice and fast. Nobody else can do what I can because of that."