Reflecting the scale of opportunities hoped to accompany the post-pandemic return to live performance, Nashville’s Elevation Studios is readying a US$100m campus of soundstages, offices, conference rooms, fabrication workshops, rehearsal studios and creative spaces, equipped with everything from HD broadcast connectivity to luxe amenities.
Live Nation has reportedly booked twice as many shows for 2022 than in 2019, with Eric Elwell and his team ready to meet this demand. They have witnessed all of live music’s ups and downs and have nearly a century of combined touring and production experience, working with major artists including Guns n’ Roses, Prince, Pink and Vince Gill, as well as on Bonnaroo Fest, Austin City Limits Fest and the CMA Awards. They have started, built, and sold companies in digital music and the live industry.
Elwell – the force behind Elevation Studios – and his team know firsthand the wonders that come together when a crew and talent get the space to perfect the production. With millions at stake for each night’s performance, preparation, testing, and redundancy protocols for the complex sound, lighting, and video systems are essential. Major touring productions require meticulous logistics and planning for equipment and 50 to 150 touring crew members. Engineering documents and safety procedures are required to suspend hundreds of thousands of pounds of equipment over the audience’s heads.
The stakes, both financial and safety-wise, are enormous, and rehearsing in full-scale facilities are essential to safe, reliable systems that need to work flawlessly after being transported hundreds of miles overnight in 20 to 40 semi-trucks each night. Yet most large-scale arenas have a schedule that also includes sports and other events, making it impossible to book multi-week tour rehearsals.
‘Artists are earning the majority of their revenue from concert touring,’ Elwell explains. ‘The cadence of these tours has broken away from album release cycles, as many musicians and creators put out new material constantly. Meanwhile, the design, complexity, and expense have dramatically increased.
‘You need the time you need, if you’re going to push the envelope of creativity,’ Elwell continues. ‘If your artist will be flying in a harness 100ft in the air you need a place to work this out with safety protocols for the artist, their team, and, equally important, their fans. Custom-design elements are the norm, and must be made safe and reliable[S2] before being subjected to “zero-fail” conditions. Elevation will be that testing ground. Creative visionaries pushing the boundaries of art and science need a creative sandbox.’
The playground that Elevation will provide is designed to meet the burgeoning demand for a full-scale, private, geographically preactical production space. It is also ripe to capture the growing livestream market, a medium that’s gone from niche to selling hundreds of thousands of tickets in a few months. With multiple large-scale soundstages and an inspiring, green campus, Elevation’s proximity to Nashville and its skilled music professionals will support the rebirth of live events and the evolution of livestreaming, bringing fans the spectacles they are aching to experience.
‘In my 20-plus-year history of touring with top entertainment clients, the execution of pre-tour rehearsals was one of the largest challenges we faced due to the limited availability of large-scale facilities,’ says Alan K Floyd, veteran tour manager. ‘Elevation Studios will provide the scale and needed support, all in a private retreat-like setting. This is a long-overdue solution to the creative needs of hundreds of touring artists.’
More: www.elevationstudios.co
