Grammy-winning producer/DJ Anton Zaslavski, professionally known as Zedd, kicked off this year with the same New Year's resolution as he had for the previous year: "Not to respond to hate, and spread positivity and love."
In mid-January, the 26 year-old EDM star finished up his True Colors Tour. "For two years, we watched almost every show I played and wrote down notes of what I liked/didn't like and how we could improve the show. Before I started the True Colors Tour, we rented a warehouse for three weeks and built my production. I changed the position of certain lights and angles of the LED walls, and designed a bunch of lighting look ideas. And, we just made sure that every single song I could play would have a plan, color, position and vision. Up until 30 minutes before my first show, I didn't even have a set yet – all we had was a look for every song. So it took a couple weeks for me to finalize a perfect set for the tour," he says of the tour preparation.
Zedd always puts considerable importance on the music itself as well as the visual aspect of the show. "We spend an insane amount of time brainstorming ideas of how we can interpret every single song," describes Zedd. Furthermore, to make things more intense (and fascinating), he is a dedicated perfectionist. "The downside of me being such a perfectionist and wanting my show to be 100% live is, obviously, there are always mistakes involved. That's natural. There are hundreds of lighting fixtures and 82 feet of LED wall, lasers, and special effects. Everything is run live by five people in total so it's very hard to achieve perfection," he reveals. "Sometimes, when we have a bad show, it bums me out more than it really should – for most of the things we notice, no one else sees because no one knows what I had planned. The upside is that the goal of having a perfect show is so high that you always have something to look up to. In four years of touring and playing hundreds of shows, we've not one single time played a perfect show, but we're still getting better and better with every single show. I think it's really important to always have something to work up to in life."