I’ve been having a lot of fun this year doing something I don’t often do — lighting heavy metal tours. While it’s not my favorite kind of music, I am having a blast. I mean, what other genre of music enables you to hit 160 cues in a three-minute song?
Every year I am hired to design total productions for music festivals. This summer I designed a touring metal festival called Mayhem. Lots of up-and-coming rock artists showcased their talents before the bands Disturbed and Slipknot hit the main stage after the sun went down. When I design these festival shows I usually have to speak to LDs from all the bands and then design something that everyone is happy with. It was helpful that I already had spoken with Disturbed and had been asked to program their lights for the upcoming year-long tour. Now I just needed to talk to Slipknot’s designer so we could design something. The problem was that they did not have an LD — or a production manager.
The first thing I had to do was to figure out if we could afford any video elements. I tried to talk the tour sponsors into using some Martin LC Series low-res LED display panels. From 30 feet away they look great. The plan was to use them for all the bands to play media content and then advertise the sponsors between acts. But they nixed it, so I went back to thinking about 1980s rock rigs. I did have a budget before I sat down to draw up my ideas, which made life easier.
I like to use a lot of lights for rock bands. They don’t have to be expensive moving lights, but a lot of them with a 30-foot trim height works great. The next thing I did was look into using a bunch of moving LED fixtures. These things can throw some light these days and they move incredibly fast. I got about 70 modified Martin MAC 300s with LEDs out of Chicago’s Upstaging Inc. I chose to put bunches of them in traveling pods that could roll in and snap into place. Plus, one multi-cable can power 24 of the things.
I used these fixtures in place of PARs. I love the old huge PAR rigs the metal bands used to have, but they’re not cheap anymore. To use PARs, you need massive amounts of cable and dimmers, building power, guys to put it up, and hours to focus each light, everyday. It’s just not economical to run a festival that way. Korn proved that last year on their own festival tour. The lighting crew went to work every morning and didn’t get a break until the headliner hit the stage. My guys loaded in at 9 a.m. and had little to do from noon until load out.
For the remaining lights, I put bunches of Robe Color Spots and Coemar Infinity Washes into Swing Wing truss and scattered them around. The secret to making it look big is to use a bunch of metal. Truss is cheap. If you spread your lighting fixtures a few feet apart, you can make 25 moving lites look a whole lot bigger than it is.
I love calling spotlight cues and using them in place of a front truss. Unfortunately, the two headline acts on this bill would rather never use them. But they are okay with being lit by lights on the front truss. So I came up with a viable solution. I hung 13 Martin MAC 2000 Washes from the front truss to front light the band and set, and then I overhung some spot seats with another four MACs. I put handles on them and disconnected the pan and tilt motors. I now had spotlights controlled by my console and the band was not blinded like a deer in the headlights.
Focus? There is none. We load into outdoor amphitheaters and the show starts before the sun goes down. Each band wants a house drape to block their set during set change, so focusing during set change is not an option. So I put the majority of lights into Swing Wing truss and designed something where the rigging points would be the same in every gig. By not hanging each fixture every day, they remain in the same place, hung at the same angle every gig. We focused one night during rehearsals and have not touched a moving light focus since.
With no video, every band has to have at least one backdrop. You can count on this just as you can count on the fact that each singer will use the word mother f@#$%r every time they talk to their audience. I ended up with three separate traveler tracks and a bunch of kabuki solenoids. For reliability, I ended up renting solenoids made by Chabuki, a “little guy” with his own company from the Northwest, who guaranteed his gear to work every night. They performed flawlessly.
Two weeks before the tour started, I got a call from my old friend Loz Upton. He had been hired by Slipknot. This is great since we are friends, but we have never worked together. Loz loves the rig, but wants to add his own package of floor lights and set lights. This is wonderful because it will make his show look different than mine. I already have a bunch of MAC 700 Wash fixtures and extra strobes for Disturbed. Now Loz adds in bunches of Color Kinetics Color Blaze LED strip lights as well as strobes and movers to his massive set. All these fixtures face the crowd head on.
It’s quick to see that the two separate bands have distinctly opposite looking shows. We both chose MA Lighting grandMA consoles, but that was the only similarity. Disturbed’s light show was all written in tight sequential cue lists with lots of extra bump cues for flashes and eye candy. Everything was well scripted and tight. I hired Rob Smith to direct the show because of his pinpoint timing and the fact that the band would be on tour for a year and I can’t commit to that schedule.
Loz didn’t have much programming time with Slipknot. He had three days to throw his show together so he chose the punt path. He had a programmer come out and help him get started. But after a week, that didn’t pan out and the kid quit, leaving Loz in a lurch. So I helped my buddy out and ended up cleaning up the programming he was left with and getting his cues set up correctly.
The best way to describe Slipknot’s show is that it is a visual assault. The band desired a flashy bright show where they could see the audience most of the time. So Loz placed Mole Fey blinders all over the place. He also pointed all the strobes and heaps of Color Blazes directly at the audience. We wrote about five different looks for each song and relied on about 40 variations of cues to overwhelm the audience’s visual senses. He did exactly that. For the first time, I left a heavy metal show where my ears didn’t ring, but my eyes hurt.
