It's hard to believe, but sometimes I think I have better luck with lighting gear I get in Brazil, then what I get in some places in America.
Spent last week doing a couple of one off's in the south. One with an established lighting vendor and one at a brand new casino with a new install. Two things amazed me. One was that it took all day for one company to make 2 trusses of pars and a handful of movers to work. The other was that a brand new facility with brand new fixtures, could actually have broken multi cables, a broken hog IPC and no knowledge of what mode their moving lights were in.
How can someone hang a dozen vari*lites in the air and not tech them prior to the show. By focus time I realized that something was wrong with the pan and tilts on some of the lights. Lower down the truss and what do I find? Half of them are set in 8 bit mode for some unknown reason. OK, truss comes down and that problem is fixed.
Next I go to check out the gobos. Half of the fixtures bump from gobo to gobo, the other half take about 30 seconds to roll from one gobo to the next. Down comes the truss and we find that half the lights are in extended mode and half are in basic. So we fix that and everything is OK. For now.
I checked a few colors and they snapped correctly. It wasn't until a nice slow ballad that I found that half the fixtures had the proper congo diachroic gel in the right place. For some unknown reason, the other half were in pink.
I don't know, but I'm thinking that all fixtures would be better off set to the factory default settings before every gig. Should be an unwritten law. Then at least all the fixtures would react the same, even if they were in a mode I did not care for. Or maybe all fixtures should come with just 2 modes, theater or rock.
Now a brand new venue has a bunch of antique Robe fixtures that I have never seen before. And believe me, I've seen just about every fixture til now. I could not get a proper hog fixture library and it was 4th of July weekend. The one in the hog was incorrect. Thank goodness I can fix those libraries and was able to sort out the problems except for one. There was a 1.5 second delay on the an/tilt of the fixtures every time I pressed go. They would bump colors and intensity, but could not move worth a damn. Kudos to whoever dumped these old fixtures on a new club. They are still laughing.
The club did a fantastic job of replicating my gel list for their fixtures. They had all brand new ETC source 4 pars. But the electricians totally ignored the lens sizes I spec'd on my plot. Not enough time during loadin to fix, so we just go with it. I was just fortunate enough to have brought in my own consoles so I wasn't stuck trying to use the hog IPC in hog3 mode. Nobody could get that console to save to a disk, despite the fact that it was brand new. Software issues I'm told. I've been told that about hog 3 problems for like 5 years now. Hhhhmmm. If I can't save a show on that console, I certainly can't use it. Because I know I will crash it and be left with just house lights by the 3rd song.
Some of these pars would not fire up. The fixtures were fine, but of course the install company sold them used cable. Or if it was new, someone assembled them without doing a good solder job. And the install company left zero spare circuits on the truss. But why should they, I'm sure they told the casino they were selling them the latest in quality gear.
But in the end, (as usual), it was the best show ever. The crowd went wild and I am the only one who knows he's running with a bunch of crap.
