Touring Lighting Designer Toolkit: Essential Stage & Laser Gear

If you’re getting ready for summer tour season or upgrading your touring lighting designer toolkit, this guide walks you through a real-world, battle-tested packing list—from basic stage lighting tools to digital pre-viz, from DMX testing to laser lighting effects and safety logs. Along the way we’ll talk about spending your budget smarter and choosing higher-value stage lasers and laser lighting gear instead of buying the wrong thing twice.

This touring lighting designer toolkit guide is written for LDs, programmers, laser operators, system techs, and anyone who wants a practical buying guide for stage lighting tools and stage lasers. Whether you’re doing your first small club run or a full-scale laser concert tour with a custom laser light show, this checklist will help you choose the best value gear instead of wasting money.

The moment the truck door rolls up, you never truly know what you’re walking into:

• Followspot or projector positions blocked by a last-minute bar build
• Trim height that doesn’t match the original design
• Audio adding new hang points after you pre-rigged
• Network, DMX, and laser lighting display topology that looks nothing like the plot

In that kind of environment, having a complete touring lighting toolkit often matters more than how expensive your fixtures are. Your toolkit directly affects:

• Whether you can turn the rig on on time
• How fast you can find and fix problems
• How calm and professional you look in front of the client, promoter, and crew

Some of the most important tools for staging a reliable lighting show are small, inexpensive, and easy to overlook. But they’re the ones that quietly save you from chaos during load-in, line check, and encore.

At minimum, you’ll want:

• A good quality multi-tool (knife, hex keys, screwdrivers, etc.)
• A basic screwdriver set (Phillips, flat, and a few small precision drivers)
• Common-size Allen keys / wrenches
• Small pliers, side cutters, and a wire stripper

These tools handle the unglamorous, essential work: hanging and leveling fixtures, tweaking brackets and clamps, adding safety cables and anti-drop measures, and doing quick “field mods” when a bracket doesn’t quite fit.

On the road, time is your most valuable resource. Dialed-in tools are how you buy yourself extra minutes, and extra calm, every day.

Starter shopping list by budget:

• Tight budget: multi-tool + basic screwdriver set
• Regular touring: add Allen key set, side cutters, and a proper wire stripper

Across lighting, audio, and video, everyone is obsessed with tape for a reason. Pack at least:

• Black cloth gaffer tape (multiple widths) – cable runs, securing, blocking light
• White / yellow paper tape – stage markings, fixture IDs, “this is DMX” labeling
• Fluorescent tape – for blackout-safe “find me” marks and safety warnings

Color becomes its own language: one for DMX lines, one for power, one for video. Different widths fit different tasks—narrow for labels, wide for securing cables.

From a buying guide perspective, tape is a high-value, low-cost consumable. For a serious touring lighting designer toolkit, it’s cheaper and smarter to buy gaffer in bulk than to scramble for individual rolls at every venue.

In a complex touring lighting show, a DMX tester is almost non-negotiable. A good tester helps you:

• Check whether DMX is present on a run
• Read live DMX values at specific addresses
• Narrow down issues: is it the fixture, cable, console, node, or patch?

Pack alongside it:

• Several reliable backup DMX cables (short, medium, and long)
• 3-pin / 5-pin adapters
• If budget allows, a basic network tester for Art-Net / sACN systems

This matters even more when your rig mixes moving heads, LED walls, and DMX laser lights. A small investment in a tester saves you hours of crawling truss and guessing.

Touring lighting designers live in dark spaces. At minimum, pack:

• One bright flashlight (ideally with a focusable beam)
• One headlamp so your hands stay free

You’ll be grateful for both when you’re tracing a dead line in blackout on a truss, crawling under stages, or moving around safely during power drops. If your show includes laser lighting effects and special FX, blackouts might be long and frequent. Good personal lighting dramatically improves your safety and comfort.

Touring means working around height, heavy gear, loud SPL, and power. It’s not optional to think about safety; it’s part of being professional.

At minimum, consider packing:

• Safety toe boots
• Hard hat
• Harness for working at height
• Work gloves (cut-resistant and/or insulated depending on the job)
• Earplugs or in-ear monitors for long days in high SPL environments

No gig is worth risking your health or safety. If you plan budgets or purchasing, treat PPE as a non-negotiable line item in your touring lighting toolkit.

In a modern lighting show or laser light show, your keyboard, USB stick, and software licenses are just as important as your wrenches and tape.

Most touring LDs and programmers rely on pre-viz tools like Capture, Depence, Vectorworks / Vision, or brand-specific visualizers bundled with major consoles.

By the time you reach first rehearsal, you’ve probably already built the entire stage lighting rig and laser lighting display in pre-viz, programmed key looks, songs, and cues, and simulated how moving lights, LED walls, and stage lasers interact.

But your first real look at the complete lighting show is often during rehearsal or even on opening night. That’s why you want to:

• Know your pre-viz tool well enough to be fast under pressure
• Save multiple versions of show files (by date, venue, or leg of the tour)
• Keep a separate change log you can share with your team

For small teams, even a simple visualizer or free trial can make your life easier.

For tours and festivals, having a proper backup strategy is critical. Aim for at least three layers:

• On the console or main control system
• On USB sticks / portable SSDs (ideally two sticks you rotate)
• In the cloud (Google Drive, Dropbox, company cloud, when bandwidth allows)

Key things to back up:

• Main show file: name it clearly with city / venue / version
• Fixture profiles / personalities
• Console and node firmware installers
• Laser control projects and media files (videos, gobos, logos used in your laser light show system)

A practical trick is to use a consistent format like 2025-07-12_LA_Festival_v3_showfile so you and your team can instantly tell what’s what.

Not every space with a laser lighting display and full show laser rig has good Wi-Fi. Outdoor festivals and remote venues are especially unreliable.

Build an offline documentation library on your laptop and drives with:

• PDFs for every fixture, stage laser light, and console you’re using
• Basic DMX / Art-Net / sACN diagrams
• Stage sizes, rigging points, and trim heights for recurring venues
• Laser safety notes and local rules summaries (English plus local language when needed)

Even if you’re fully offline, you can still safely adjust patches, explain your setup, and keep the show running.

If your rig includes stage lasers, club laser lights, or outdoor laser installations, you’ll need laser-specific tools on top of your regular stage lighting toolkit. These tools help you balance wow factor with safety and legal compliance.

With modern systems—whether it’s portable laser cube–style projectors or larger concert lasers—laser control isn’t just “plug in and hope.” Many setups now support:

• Dedicated software or apps for virtual visualization
• Per-fixture management: addresses, scan zones, power limits
• Previewing how beams and graphics interact with the rest of your lighting show

Think of it as a laser light show system that lets you preview beams in different haze levels and angles, adjust scan limits to avoid audience scanning and restricted areas, and plan where your brightest, most aggressive looks go inside the set.

If you’re doing outdoor festivals, immersive installations, or touring songs that rely heavily on laser light shows, these tools are a smart upgrade, not a luxury. Starshine and other professional brands often provide pre-viz profiles and documentation for their stage lasers, making it easier to build realistic looks before you ever hit the venue.

Some professional stage lasers and DMX laser lights support built-in DMX test modes directly on the fixture, reading live DMX values per channel and enabling quick diagnosis of signal issues without a desk.

The advantages are clear:

• You don’t have to drag a console up to the truss just to test signal
• You don’t have to disconnect everything to trace cables
• You can stand on the truss, put the laser into test mode, and instantly see whether the problem is cabling, the node, the console, or configuration

If you’re shopping for club lasers or concert lasers, ask not only “how many watts is it?” but also whether it has useful test modes, how easy it is to troubleshoot under tour conditions, and whether it’s friendly for both laser lighting effects and safe operation.

One of the cheapest and most valuable tools you can pack is a dedicated laser operator notebook.

Use it to log:

• Hang positions, mounting heights, and distances to audience and reflective surfaces
• Per-venue power limits, scan zones, and no-go areas
• Local safety rules (for example, venues that ban audience scanning)
• Your favorite laser lighting effects and beam looks for each song or cue

This notebook becomes safety and compliance evidence, a touring efficiency tool, and a creative library. Over time you build your own “best of” list of laser light shows: which looks made a laser concert truly explode, and how you set them up.

Different roles in a touring lighting show care about different tools. Here’s a quick lens through each role.

You’ll care most about:

• Laptop (with original show file and pre-viz projects)
• Pre-viz licenses and dongles
• Project documentation: stage plots, cue sheets, show structure
• USB drives / portable SSDs plus a cloud sync habit

Your core question is: can I adjust the show quickly and explain those changes clearly to everyone else?

Your world revolves around:

• Console accessories (reading light, external screen if needed, backup power)
• DMX testers and, ideally, network analyzers
• Spare switches, nodes, or at least well-documented configs
• Labeled cabling and a label printer

Your mission: keep the entire stage lighting and laser lighting network rock-solid, and find issues faster than they can derail the show.

Your packing list often centers on:

• Laser control software licenses and dongles
• Laser safety documentation and MPE calculations (where applicable)
• The laser operator notebook
• Safety hardware: E-stops, key switch management, covers or shields where needed

Your goal: within safe limits, be as explosive as the music needs—and never miss a crucial laser moment.

Tours, festivals, and club residencies are not really a test of how much one person can carry. They’re a test of how well the whole team prepares.

• A well-planned touring lighting designer toolkit keeps you calm when things go sideways.
• Smart backup strategies keep your show files safe and flexible.
• Laser-specific tools and documentation let you push creative boundaries without crossing safety lines.

At Starshine, we live at the intersection of stage lighting, stage lasers, and real-world touring. Talking with lighting designers and laser ops, the same pattern comes up again and again: the fixtures matter—but the tiny, “boring” tools and habits are what keep the show truly professional.