I’ve been asked several times about what smaller bands playing nightclubs should carry for lighting gear. These questions come from cover bands to newly signed acts to old touring professionals who are reuniting for a club tour. The two things they all have in common is a lack of knowledge and a shortage of cash for lighting. Long gone are the days when bands put colored PARs in coffee cans and connected lots of wires to a foot pedal board for the guitarist to trigger. The good news is that lately a lot of lighting manufacturers are helping out with a variety of lower wattage and lower-priced fixtures. Smaller fixtures have been manufactured for years, but I ignored a lot of them because they simply weren’t very bright. But with new optics and bulb technology, this is no longer the case. The advent of LED products has also put a new spin on things. One of the biggest costs for club owners is buying new lamps. This can be a huge expense for moving lights. Thankfully, the lamps in some of these newer fixtures are not as expensive as the older models. But it still is a big chunk of money to a band wishing to purchase their own fixtures. With LEDs, the chances are pretty good that your band will break up before you would ever need to replace a single diode.
At the front of this movement is a lighting manufacturer called Coemar. Just this year, I have seen a wide variety of instruments come out that target the buyers I am talking to now. Coemar was the first company that I personally saw with an LED PAR. They started manufacturing it a few years back. I’ve been using these for years now, and they are just as dependable as the day I bought them. They don’t need any special road cases. I often wrap a bunch of them in packing blankets and throw them in a box for travel. I can plug half a dozen into one wall outlet and not worry about blowing a breaker because these fixtures require very little electricity.
Besides these PARs, there are some other very cool LED fixtures. Robe makes a mole-looking fixture called the REDBlinder 2-96 that contains eight separate cells of red, green, and blue (RGB) LEDs. These are great for lighting the audience at a bar. Or if you hang them from a rear truss at a gig, they will backlight the band with a wide beam spread and light the crowd as well. Coemar also makes a strip light of LEDs, which is great for several purposes. One, they can live on the floor of a stage and front-light the band, or they can be used to uplight a banner hanging upstage of the artist. Because these fixtures have no conventional lamps, they never get hot and they don’t blind the players like typical theatrical lamps.
One of the things I like about these lights is that they have RGB as well as pure white LEDs. Some LED fixtures mix a white color by simply turning on all of the RGB diodes. It makes a pinkish-white color. It’s not a true white and often makes an artist appear in a strange ghostly hue. The Coemar version has separate white cells that can create nice flesh tone colors, from CTO to daylight white, that are perfect for any video recording. This company just released a new compact strip light called the StageLite that consists of six rows of LEDs that can tilt and run an array of built in effects, thus turning the strip light into a moving light and a great disco effect.
Making an Impression
Elation and Chauvet have long been known as two of the best places bands can go to pick up inexpensive fixtures. They have such a wide array of different club type lights that I wouldn’t know where to begin. Last year, Elation released the Impression series of fixtures. These are extremely bright moving yoke LED lights. They weigh a fraction of what many other moving lights do, and that’s a big bonus for playing in clubs where the rigging won’t support heavy loads. Mind you, they are expensive, but they are dependable.
LED fixtures are great for all these reasons, but not all name brands are easy for a less-established band to afford. For these bands, you can talk to several dealers to get a good price. Or look into buying used products from companies like Gear Source (www.gearsource.com). They have tons of used LED products that are perfect for a small band. This is not shabby gear by any means. Lots of the stuff they peddle was purchased for a single event and then the fabrication company that purchased them had no future use for them.
Moving on to Moving Lights
As for arc lights, Coemar has several new fixtures that cater to the club scene. They now build a small Infinity wash light as well as the Infinity ACL. The wash light has a variety of effects like gobos and prisms that, up until recently, nobody really used in a wash fixture. Four of these bad boys on an upstage truss can wash out a small band shell quite nicely. Their ACL fixture is similar, but has a very tight beam that is punchy and quite bright. They also make a hard edge small spot fixture that has plenty of gobo patterns and a color wheel that will give you a splendid array of colors.
Clay Paky’s new wash fixture, the Alpha 300, cannot be dismissed either. It is brighter than other little light fixtures, but the real selling point of this light is that it can pan and tilt faster than any other yoke light I’ve seen. It’s good for a variety of uses, but I think it’s the perfect fixture for any metal act. It’s also great for a club, but is so bright that many major touring acts are now using them as well.
Martin also released their SmartMAC 150 series last year. These are good lights for any low ceiling venue. They have a wide beam spread and their reliability is second to none. Its low wattage and high output makes a great combo for any club act.
Control Yourself
Lighting consoles can be a big problem for little bands. Within the last few years, many companies have come out with PC-based consoles. They take a while to learn and operating lights with a mouse is just not good for your sanity. I suggest clubs look into using PC-based consoles, but try the new ones made by Chamsys. They have five different models, and their best model is an actual replica of their professional series console with all the same buttons, faders (10 of them), and DMX512 outputs (four of them). It connects to your PC and uses its processing power to think. It’s perfect for any application, including traveling in the back seat of your van if necessary.
Having to light an act with a skinny budget and limited physical space is not the ideal gig. But the good news is that there are more really great lighting tools available today to help you do it well. Everything from LEDs and moving lights to consoles and wings have been brought into the realm of affordability. A limited budget is no longer an excuse for having a sucky lighting rig.
