When production managers ask me how much time I need to program the show, my response is always “All the time.” This usually sparks a chuckle followed by a quizzical intrigue. “What do you mean?” is the most common response. I mean that I need all the time that is available to me. I need to be working on the show file for as long as possible. I want to work on every little nuance until I either fall asleep or get told I must leave. My reasoning is simple. I want to make sure that the lighting is as good as it can affordably look. I want to make sure that every music change gets the attention that it deserves. I want to explore different looks and see what fits best. This is all part of my process. Here’s how that goes.
Get the Music
Obviously, I can’t put together a song without knowing what I’m programming to. The first step is to ask for the set list. If no set list is available, I hop on over to setlist.fm and find the most repeated setlists from previous shows. Then I go to iTunes, download them and put them into a playlist in setlist order. I listen to the playlist in my car, while playing SimCity, and in the shower. All too often, the live versions of the song are substantially different from the album versions. That’s when I go to YouTube and see what they have altered. Often, there are extended remixes, medleys, and completely different versions that work better onstage than in the studio. Listening to the music is where most of the creative ideas come from, but none of the legwork. This is where I explore the meaning of the songs and what the artist is trying to say. I ask things like “When he says ‘herbal remedy’ is he talking about weed, or medicine? Should this song be dark green to allude to pot, or CTO for good health?
Break ‘em Down
After I get the feel, it’s time to dissect the parts. Thanks to the digital age, it is exceedingly easy to find the lyrics to any song online, even unreleased hits. Somewhere, there must be a team of gnomes that finds hidden songs, transcribes them, and posts them on the internet with laser accurate search engine optimization. I take those lyrics, copy them into a Word file and make notes. I break the lyrics down into intros, verses, chorus, pre-choruses, tags, etc. I make notes where big hits go and where little nuances belong. Using MA Lighting’s grandMA onPC, I copy and paste those into the notes window for each song. This way I can follow along to the lyrics and place my cues where they belong in the sequence. This gives me the base that I need to ensure that each song will be unique.
Put Nuts to Bolts
After the structure is built, it’s time to start placing the particulars. How many people are onstage? Where are they? Are they playing on this section? Do they need to be highlighted? Do they hate front light? This is where I usually require input from the designer or director. I’m quite adept at making these decisions on my own, but most often, this is where the creative minds like to put their spoon in the soup. After a decision is made, it’s time to implement their ideas. What works best for me, is to write down their ideas, build them while they’re off doing something else, and then present a first draft of the song. When the creative types look over my shoulder while building a song, it usually takes longer than necessary. Inevitably, they’ll look up and ask, “This is what you think I meant?” “No, I’m building pre-sets right now” is the stock answer. “I’ll let you know when I’m ready to present it to you.” It’s like showing up in the middle of a home renovation and thinking that the hole in the counter is my idea of a sink. The sink isn’t done yet. You must wait until the plumbing is complete and the sink is installed to present the entire kitchen sink. Managing these expectations takes time.
Tinkering
After the designer and I have made certain that we are on the same page, now I’m free to put little nuances on the transitions. I love when I have the time to put individual timing on sweeps and transitions. They make all the difference. Instead of the back light coming on in one chunk, it’s so much sexier when one light fades in, followed by five other backlights. Like a flower petal blossoming, I love the look of a gentle sweep that finds its target. A huge sweep out to the audience is far more impactful when it sweeps out from stage left to stage right and settles into symmetry.
Housekeeping
Even after all the final touches are in place, it’s time to clean house. I want to make sure that my show is clean, repeatable, and understandable. I like to make sure that my show file could run by a child if I got hit by a bus. I have seen other programmers that make their show file so complicated that no one could sort out their methodology. This is great for job security, but terrible for cloning into a festival rig. When macros fire alternating stacks that trigger hidden matrixes, you have probably overcomplicated things. I take time to put everything into a palette. Raw values drive me up a wall. They always seem to surface at the most inopportune time. I once had a designer who would go in and tweak the video content and fill the sequence with raw values under the pretense that the band would never play a festival and the show would never need to be cloned to a different media server. That designer was wrong, and it took me several hours to clean up the mess.
Take the Time
I enjoy going out with the crew for drinks as much as anyone, but I’m being paid to make these artists look as good as they can afford. I will take every minute that can feasibly be allotted to me to establish that this is the case. My longest time spent at the console is in the vicinity of 38 hours straight. My designer, at the time, would often nod off while I was building songs and spring back to life to approve or reject certain looks. The previous programmer, or a software update, had broken the links between embedded presets. On top of cleaning up the presets, we also had 17 new songs to program in a day. I could have just as easily kept the raw values, but I knew that would only take more time over the length of the tour. Taking the time to fix these issues during rehearsal ensures that I won’t have to look like I don’t know what I’m doing later. That’s why when production managers ask how much time I need, my default answer is always, “All the time.”
Reach Chris Lose at close@plsn.com
