“A monumental metal event,” says the website Consequence. “Metallica Rocks 80,000 at MetLife Stadium,” announces USA Today. “Metallica Catches Lightning in Arlington, Twice,” says the Austin Chronicle. Clearly, the quintessential metal band, now in its fifth decade, has lost none of its mojo. In the vivid words of Sam Law, writing on the website Kerrang!, “If there’s one non-musical moment that’ll stick with us from the landmark first stop on the San Francisco giants’ planned two-year M72 World Tour, it won’t be queueing alongside the metal masses for a show-exclusive shirt six hours before doors open; it won’t be walking into Amsterdam’s colossal Johan Cruyff Arena to see the space-age stadium setup for the first time; hell, it won’t even be Lars Ulrich’s eye-catching new 72 Seasons yellow drum kit magically popping up around their circular stage. No, the one that’ll really endure is how, at the end of 32 songs and well over four hours of music across two awesome nights, the 50,000+ punters in attendance were still baying for more.”

In support of the new album 72 Seasons, Metallica is touring with an unusual concept, performing two distinct shows—no repeats—on successive nights in each city. In addition to introducing the album to fans, it’s a deep dive into the band’s extensive repertory, played out on an enormous circular stage supported by epically scaled lighting and sound rigs along with plenty of video. And don’t forget the beach balls! Lead vocalist James Hetfield can often be heard at concerts, welcoming everyone into the “metal family.” Looking at it that way, the M72 Tour is a grandly familial gesture. (The title refers to the seasons one lives in the first 18 years of one’s life; as we will see, it’s a number that is worked out repeatedly in the design.) The show happens on a vast circular stage with the “snake pit”—the standing room area for superfans—in the center and four separate drumkits for drummer Lars Ulrich.

Dan Braun, Metallica’s longtime creative director/production designer, says the design involves “several different ideas that came together at one time. I’ve been playing around with something for an indoor show that involved cylinders, maybe a way to suspend them. I was trying to keep a place where [Ulrich] could be as close as possible to the audience for a portion of the show. On the WorldWired Tour [2016– 19], we did a bit of that, and we took it to a new level on this. This show is very much about the band, their music, and their interaction with the fans. I think of a Metallica show as 50% audience and 50% band.”

Indeed, the degree of closeness between the band and the audience is pretty astonishing in this day and age, when musical stars are routinely getting stray objects tossed at them. But the members of Metallica remain fearless.

“It’s very much about the audience and band interaction, the exchange of energy between the two,” Braun says. “The band’s energy comes off the stage and the audience amplifies it and turns it back to the band.”

Preserving that intimacy isn’t always easy, Braun notes.

“If we play in stadiums, how do we make the guy in the worst seat feel like he’s having an interesting experience, like the guy on the barricade line who might be having a completely different, but also interesting, experience?”

One clue can be found in the show’s sleek, clutter-free design. In other words, Braun says, “No haunted houses, motorcycles, tanks, or flying machines. The entire stadium is the stage and everybody in the audience is part of the stage. If you look from one side of the stadium to the other, you’re looking at the Metallica family interacting with the band.”

Erin Tiffany, a project manager at TAIT, the firm that fabricated the set, says, “The stage for the M72 World Tour is 120' in outside diameter and 76' on the inside. We also provided an outer lighting shelf, inner monitor shelves, rolling performer platform, beach ball drop, instrument storage barges, video headers, bumpers, light brackets, fascia, and wind bracing.” Interestingly, she notes, “The stage is at three heights to give the artists different ways to interact with the crowd. The tallest is at 7'6" by the bridge over tunnels to enter/exit the center pit. That height steps down to 5'6", which is the drum lift height, and then it ramps down from there to 3'6" tall.”

For Ulrich’s drumkits, Tiffany says, “We engineered and fabricated four custom drum SLR (SLOAT Lift Revolve) units. This new design has a sliding lid that lays flat at stage level and, when a flip deck is opened, it can roll under the stage so a turntable that is integrated into the lift platform can be raised and lowered. Controlled by TAIT Navigator, the drum SLRs are located around four central points of the circle stage and act as reveals for four different drum sets, enabling Lars Ulrich to engage with fans around the stadium. Custom umbrellas that attach directly into the revolve to turn with the drum set were created to be deployed in case of rain.”

Surrounding the stage are eight 100' ground-supported towers on which are mounted lighting and sound systems.

Each tower has a cylindrical video screen. It’s an expansive, all-enveloping layout that makes the audience a key part of the spectacle. Stageco supplied the towers and “took care of rigging all the stuff that appears to be floating in the air,” Braun says. Tiffany, noting the close collaboration between TAIT and Stageco, says, “Everything we designed needed to work with the tower system they had designed and with the lighting and video products. Our engineering teams worked as partners and the constant communication between the teams made this a success.”

And, because Metallica tours evolve as they go, she adds, “Just before the start of the North American tour, the team came to us wanting to add a moment where 72 fivefoot beach balls would fall out of the towers, as well as a rolling performer platform for [bassist] Robert Trujillo to engage with. Even with a challenging timeline, we were able to work with them to design, prototype, redesign, and then fabricate both moments within two weeks.”

Video

Discussing the circular video screens, Braun cites the WorldWired Tour, which featured an array of box-shaped video elements, as an example of his innovative ideas, adding, “We don’t want to do anything that anyone else has done.” At the same time, he says, “In a stadium show like this, IMAG is important to reach the people in the back rows. You know, I was a kid who stood in the last row of the stadium, literally with my back leaning against the exit wall of the building, so I know what those experiences are.

The circular screens allow a bunch of different looks as you move around the stadium. It’s always about the band, and the visuals are there to help your journey along.”

The screens feature a combination of IMAG and some content that “we believe will enhance the experience if you’re watching the show,” Braun adds. The content is developed partly in-house and partly contracted out to other creators. “We have people we’ve worked with for a long time, who have an understanding of what this thing called Metallica is about,” he explains.

To capture the IMAG, video director Gene McAuliffe says, “We are currently at 36 cameras. Thirty-two are live at any moment. That's just for the video production side of it.

We have a camera at almost any position the band members could turn. From day one, we attacked the circular stage as a clock face, positioning someone at almost every hour so that, no matter where a band member is, we can get a nice, clean shot.” He adds that the cameras break down as 16 manned, 12 robos, and eight POVs.

The video screens consist of ROE Visual Carbon CB5 panels. “We’ve got 1,200 sq. m. of LED,” McAuliffe says. “I believe it’s more than 36 million pixels. Just to drive that, with a fully redundant system, we have 11 disguise gx 2c media servers.” To run a system of that size, he adds, “We have a director machine—in this case, the 11th—and it’s the brain that tells all the others what to do. We have machine one and machine one-B,” the latter of which can take over in case of a malfunction. The system is aided by Brompton Technology Tessera SX40 processing. Video gear was supplied by 4Wall Entertainment.

McAuliffe is aware that the combination of ROE, disguise, and Brompton makes for a Cadillac system. “It's been bounced around the world with good success. The image quality is fantastic. With the Brompton processors, we do a lot of color matching; we spend hours in overnight sessions doing corrections on all our screens. It gives you that extra flexibility and control over your final display.”

Of course, McAuliffe is ready to deal with an everchanging setlist. “There's a core list of songs that we're prepared for. Knowing there would be 32 songs a weekend, we prepared ourselves for 50. If we come to the party ready for 50 songs, we're safe even if they put in some new ones or surprise us with some deep cuts. But it’s six or seven o'clock at night” before he gets a running order.

Given the show’s scale, it is probably no surprise that it requires 66 trucks, with 21 to transport the infrastructure plus an additional 45 for audio, lighting, and video gear.

Asked about the logistics of loading in and out, Braun says, “Anytime you’re in a stadium, there are all sorts of logistical challenges. A stadium show crosses out rockand-roll and starts becoming construction. We have great crews but it’s a lot of cranes and all sorts of fun stuff going on.” And yet, he says, it contributes to the overall effect: “It doesn’t have much to do with James’ guitar, but it has everything to do with James’ guitar.”

Asked to describe the difference in tone, if any, between the two shows, Braun says, “I kind of think of it as one show, over two nights. And, because we have no musical repeats, we have no visual repeats; everything is unique to each night. That creates a few challenges, but that’s how we approached it.”

Lighting

When he first saw the tour’s production design concept, lighting designer Rob Koenig says, “I liked it, because it didn’t look like what U2 had done [with the 360 Tour, 2009-11]. That set a big precedent for stadium touring.

When Dan came up with this architecture, I was pleased to see that it couldn’t be farther away from that.”

Talking about the two-shows-per-weekend format, Koenig adds, “They have enough classics and top-ten hits to fill up two nights of 16 songs each. We have four anchor songs; each night; we know they’re going to start with a certain song and end with a certain song. But anything that happens between them could change. Gene [McAuliffe] and I have to be cognizant of that. I have different color spectrums for some songs so that we don’t have four blue songs in a row. With some songs, you’re not going to change the color palette because it doesn’t make any sense.

Occasionally, we might end up with two red or two blue songs in a row. It would be bizarre for us to take a song like ‘No Leaf Clover,’ which relies on greens and blues, and take it into a red-amber spectrum; it just doesn’t work.” In other cases, he says, it’s possible to be more flexible. “‘Creeping Death,’ for example, is a very red song, but it also works in green, so we have an alternate where, if we’re backed into a corner and it’s up against ‘Fuel,’ which is a very red-amber song, we can morph ‘Creeping Death’ into green.”

Altogether, he says, he programmed 46 numbers.

The tour features an enormous amount of audience lighting. Koenig, echoing Braun, cites “the symbiotic relationship between the band and audience.” Indeed, the band members get extremely close to the audience, often high-fiving and shaking hands as they enter. During wardrobe changes, Hetfield hangs out near the audience, interacting with them. “We try to find ways to light the audience without being obnoxious,” Koenig adds. “If you pound lighting up their noses all night long, it’s not comfortable.

I try to come at it at oblique angles.”

To light the band, eight groups of nine Elation Professional Proteus Excaliburs are positioned on risers in each corner of the field. (Eight groups of nine units equals 72, as per the tour’s title.) “We needed a howitzer for that position as we didn’t know on a daily basis where exactly they could be placed,” Koenig says. “It depended on the venue, the size, and the scalability or the fire code. We needed something that could go to the extreme ends of the end zone if we needed to and still read on camera, shooting all the way back towards the stage.”

He adds that each Excalibur “has a giant piece of glass on the front of it [a 10° lens] and is a really nice cannon of a light. That’s something that’s lacking on the market right now.” Emitting 20,000 lumens, the Excalibur’s narrow 0.8° beam can be widened to 3.5° using an expander lens.

“Also, the color mixing is really smooth, and it has just enough tricks to give you flavors throughout the show. We became more reliant on them than we ever anticipated; they’re worth their weight in gold.” The units are used for big aerial effects and dramatic background looks, often featuring chasing beams. He adds, “The built-in prisms give me some versatility. It’s a really nice beam of light and it uses only a 400W power source.”

At the top and bottom of each tower are nine Vari-Lite VL3600s (again, do the math), complemented by an equal number of Chauvet Professional STRIKE Ms. Wrapped around the stage are Claypaky Sharpy Aqua Plus units, chosen primarily for their wide zoom range, and SGM Q7s.

Also, Koenig says, “Facing the stage and between video screens, we have ladder torms with nine lights on each, but it’s broken up differently, with seven Robe BMFL WashBeams on top and two BMFL LTs on the bottom.”

Running the numbers, the rig includes 144 VL3600s, 144 STRIKE Ms, 72 Proteus Excaliburs, 56 Robe WashBeams, 48 Sharpy Aqua Plus units, 24 SGM Q7s, 38 TMB Solaris Flare Mozart Ones, 16 BMFL FollowSpot LTs and eight RoboSpot controllers. The stage deck is lined in 99 SGM Touring VPL pixel units. Providing special effects are eight Look Solutions Orka and 12 Look Solutions Viper deLuxe foggers. Control is handled by three MA Lighting grandMA2 Full-Sizes and seven NPUs. Lighting gear was supplied by Premier Global Production.

A key consideration in choosing gear was the wear and tear they would take in stadium shows. “Obviously, the IP ratings were a big selling point,” he says. And, in recent years, his options have exploded. On the previous tour, he had one IP-rated unit. “On this one, I looked at 40 IP-rated fixtures—and I didn’t get through everything I wanted to look at! I couldn’t believe how much the market has shifted toward these fixtures.”

Koenig, who has been with Metallica for many years, notes, “We definitely wanted to reinvent this show. We worked from the ground up. There was no cloning from previous shows. It is a fresh take on everything.” For example, he adds, “There is a lot of yellow, dedicated to the new songs. I’ve never really used it with Metallica. But it brings the new songs out; they’re punctuated a bit differently from the rest. That’s worked out really well.”

Special effects

Speaking about the production’s special effects, Reid Derne, of Pyrotek, says, “As opposed to a whole bunch of moments, they are concentrated into three or four big things. A lot of that has to do with which songs are we doing tonight, and which ones are we doing tomorrow.

There’s also the challenge of doing a show in the round with audiences in the circular snake pit. There’s a big issue about what we are legally and safely able to do in terms of distance to the audience.”

He adds, “I’ve been with Metallica on and off since 1994—I’m not shooting anymore, I’m the project manager—and there are probably 30 songs we’ve shot pyro to.

These are discussed with the band before they go onstage; they know which is a pyro song and what the cues are for it, but they get reminded before the show.”

“The effects package includes sparkle cannons, comets, mines, flashes, and fire effects,” he continues.

“And if we’re doing the outdoor show, there’s a full finale as well. We start getting into 65' flames and effects up to 500' from behind the stage. It depends, from city to city.”

Sound

Asked about his initial response to the production design concept, front-of-house engineer Greg Price says, laughing, “A couple of designers said I was going to commit audio suicide. But, for me, the biggest thing was the opportunity to do something so special. Dan Braun has that amazing thirst for doing something different. I personally didn’t want to do another end-of-the-stadium show. I just think it’s a formula that has run its course.”

Driving the production’s sound is a rig comprising 288 Meyer Sound PANTHER large-format linear array loudspeakers, a record number. Braun consulted with John and Helen Meyer and Bob McCarthy, the company’s director of system optimization, about the system, which is deployed in three concentric rings. The outer ring arrays are suspended from the eight towers, with two PANTHER arrays on each: 16 cabinets per array on the four long-side towers and 13 cabinets on the four short-side towers.

Each tower also carries dual hangs of six 1100-LFC lowfrequency units and one set of six VLFC very-low-frequency elements. The inner system, suspended from a web over the stage, has eight hangs of seven PANTHERs providing stereo coverage out to about 138' from the center.

The snake pit is covered by inward-firing Meyer UPQ-D2 narrow-coverage units with the outward-facing side featuring 20 ULTRA-X40 compact boxes for front fill. Ground sub-bass is powered by eight sets of two 1100-LFC elements around the stage.

The system is connected, controlled, and monitored over three Milan AVB networks. One connects Milan directly to all 288 PANTHERs via ten Galileo GALAXY 408s and two Galileo GALAXY 816 network platforms using a fiber network incorporating 26 Luminex Gigacore switches.

The others are primary and secondary networks for signal distribution and monitoring of the remaining analog Meyer loudspeakers and for providing redundant analog inputs to the PANTHERs. The three networks comprise 52 Luminex switches and 35 GALAXY network platforms. Meyer’s Nebra software platform manages all network configuration, connection, and real-time system monitoring.

Price also makes use of Spacemap Go, Meyer’s spatialization sound design and mixing tool. Using it, “I fly a World War II B-29 bomber engine over the stage,” he says.

I put the effect on Pro Tools and we played with it. I picked this sample because I wanted that flutter of air as it moves around the room. It does one loop only in the center ring, then flies to the outer ring and gets to the outer reaches after two-and-a-half passes.”

Regarding mics, Hetfield continues to prefer his Shure legacy product, but Price has switched Ulrich’s drumkit to DPA 4099 COREs. “With them on the toms and under the cymbals, married to the articulation of the PANTHER, they work amazingly well,” he says. “I believe the DPA mics add tremendously to the clarity and depth of a lot of the instruments onstage. That doesn’t mean I’m not using a [Shure SM]57 on the snare top. But Greg Fidelman, Metallica’s record producer, is very active and we work with him. We’re striving more than ever to bring Metallica’s studio environment to the stage. Before we toured, we set up Lars with his drums in the studio and we tested everything. I had a list of mics; he had a list of mics. We tested every single one, recording them on Pro Tools,” before settling on DPA.

Still, Price notes, the challenges are many. “You know, most mix positions are 100' or 200' out; right now, I’m 350' from the center of the stage.” He mixes the show on an Avid S6L 32D. And, as the co-founder, with Brad Madix, of the company Diablo Digital, “I can record a rehearsal and play it back immediately for the band,” he notes. “Bands have never had the chance to be out front, listening to themselves. It’s a big aha moment for musicians.”

He adds that he is light on processing. “I have a [Rupert] Neve 500 frame. I’ve always been a big fan of the Neve stuff, whether it’s Portico or anything like that. And I have McDSP, which I’ve fallen in love with. Colin [McDowell, founder of McDSP] makes amazing stuff.”

Although Metallica buys most of its gear, Clair Global maintains it on tour. “Without a company like Clair, we wouldn’t be able to do it,” Price says. “They handle logistics, cabling, engineering, everything you have to have. In the modern era, you need a partner, and who better than the best and brightest in the world?” The M72 Tour is scheduled through the middle of November. Following a break, it starts up next May in Munich before returning for more US dates in July and August.