Lighting Designer Jake Roeber On Lighting The Do LaB Stage at Coachella 2026

The Do LaB stage runs on a different metabolism than the rest of the Coachella grounds. Six days, nearly 90 artists across two weekends, no two sets shaped exactly alike. For LD Jake Roeber, returning for his second year operating the stage, that meant living at FOH long enough to watch his own show file evolve in real time, and walking into the second weekend with a list of edits already in hand.

Photo: instagram/@coachella

The big change for 2026 was structural. Do LaB and Spektrum added 11 towers around the stage area, fitted with a mix of Acme Tornadoes, GLP X5 IP Bar 1000s, and GLP X5 Maxx IPs. The towers reshaped the room. They added vertical depth on either side of the stage and gave Roeber a genuine layered plot to work with.

Underneath all of it was a fresh grandMA3 file getting one of its first real tests. Roeber leaned hard on recipes ("I'm a full blown recipe lover now, cannot imagine programming life without them"), refined the desk's sound input capabilities until they could carry stretches of the program without him hand-piloting every moment, and used NDI input mapping to push VJ content directly onto fixtures around the stage. Three independent layers of motion working together: programmed cues, audio-reactive content, and live video on the surrounding poles and pixel tools.

Then there was the wind.

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A Directional Haze Surface, Built On The Fly

Coachella's wind problem is well documented and equally well cursed. Roeber's solution was to build a directional haze control surface inside his file.

"When it gets super windy, it doesn't make sense to run all the units when half of them aren't making usable atmosphere. I built a directional control surface to tell the console which way the wind was coming from. Only had to use it a few times, but it was the right tool for those moments." - Jake Roeber

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A Week Of Edits, Then Sub Focus

Roeber came home between weekends with a list of file edits and additions, the way most operators do after a heavy festival run. By Friday night of weekend two, those changes were in the file. The reward was Sub Focus as a special guest, a set he had been especially eager to run, and one he describes as a rollercoaster for the full hour at the helm.

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Six days and 90 plus artists is also a different challenge for the operator's headspace. After enough sets, the looks start to feel familiar even when the music does not. Roeber's response was to lean into the discomfort, experimenting more in the software during the slower windows and trusting the surprises that came back.

"After a while everything kind of feels a little repetitive, so I started experimenting more recklessly in the software and got some surprising results. Those have now been permanently added to the showfile." - Jake Roeber

That pattern, working a stage long enough that the file grows in the field, is most of what makes the Do LaB gig what it is. It is not a one-off design build. It is a residency disguised as a festival slot, and the operator at the helm has to keep finding new ways into the same rig.

Gear List

20 x Martin Mac Viper XIP

40 x GLP X5 Maxx IP

64 x Elation Protron Eclypse

6 x GLP JDC2

88 x Acme Tornado

71 x GLP X5 IP Bar 1000

23 x Astera AX5

20 x Elation SixBar 1000 IP

4 x MasterFX Mystic 2

6 x Base Haze

3 x MasterFX Atlas

10 x 30W Laser

2 x grandMA3 Full Size

1 x grandMA3 L PU

Crew

Lighting Designer / Operator // Jake Roeber

Lighting and Video Vendor // Maktive

Technical Production Manager // Spektrum

Producers // The Do LaB

VJ // Jansen VJ

LSO // Laserguise

Art Department // The Do LaB

Photo: instagram/@coachella