So I’m working with another heavy metal artist this week. A band called Disturbed, a popular hard music act. They are extremely nice guys. If you were stopped at a red light and they got out of the car next to you, it could make you feel a tad uneasy about the impending future. But in real life, they are just good old boys who like to play loud music.
So I spend a week in a rehearsal studio listening to Disturbed play. In the corner of the studio I’ve got a GrandMA console hooked up to a computer with a visualizer program running. This band is going on a 3 week club run to “shake the cobwebs out” as they have not toured for a couple years. After that they will spend the summer playing rock festivals before starting their own arena tour in the fall.
Before programming, I sat down with the band so we could talk about lighting and feel each other out. David, the lead singer explains that he hates when the lights are stagnant. He believes they should always be doing something rythmatic and cool to accent the music. I explain how I like to run the lights, with cool effects when warranted, but when the song slows down, so do the lights. He says that’s OK, as long as the lights don’t stop for more than a few seconds.
OK. This is a direct signal to me that I now have to rethink things along the lines of other shows I’ve done. Makes me think of the Gloria Estefan rule we had years ago. Her husband/manager used to come out to the Front of House console to “tutor” us a lot in the beginning. He would say things like, “This scene is very beautiful, very breathtaking. Now do something with the lights.” This meant that despite the fact that the stage looked amazing, we needed to start spinning some gobos or moving lites. This was Spanish music and what the client demanded. So we complied. Sure, it may have looked like just another Telemundo show, but if we didn’t do it, somebody else would be hired to do what the client wanted.
But I will do it all stylishly. I program my first song in just under 4 hours. The actual song is almost 3 minutes long. .There are 153 lighting cues, not counting a bunch of strobe flashes and mole bumps. I look at my director Rob Smith. He nods his head at this bit of info, confident that he will nail each of those 153 cues. We play bak the song a few times and he does fine.
Next song takes just as long to program. But it has 175 cues. I’m wondering if this is the way the whole set will run. It doesn’t. It gets a bit easier. The hardest part of the whole week of programming was trying to make the lights do something, when I feel they should be parked in a stagnant look at that time. I realize this has become an art form. How do I make the lights appear to be chasing, but actually keep them from moving or bumping color? I rely on a lot of flicker chases. That’s where all the lights in the rig will chase randomly between 50 and 100 percent giving one the illusion that there is some movement on stage. Really, it just creates a lot of little shadows on the performers as lites hit them from different angles at a fast rate.
This can get boring after a while so I must mix it up. Now instead of rippling thru intensity chases, I will ripple thru some colors for a while. Put cyan in all the lites. Then lay a sine wave over the cyan filter so they randomly run between white and the lite blue color. New slight effect to prevent the lighting from being stagnant. I will continue to keep searching for different stuff along this vein. The only constant rule I have for any of my shows must stay intact though: Never put up the same look twice in a rock show.
