This year has been really strange for me in the variety of music I have been lighting. I seem to lighting quite a few heavy metal bands this year. Nothing wrong with metal mind you, I just haven’t bought into it since Deep Purple and Led Zep hung up their rock n roll shoes. (Or did they?).
But I enjoy lighting it. Where else can you fit 150 lighting cues into a 3 minute song?
I sat down with the US band Disturbed last month to plan out their year of touring. First they were gonna do a 3 week run and play all clubs, just to “shake the cobwebs off” after spending the last year in the recording studio. But they wanted a little excitement in their shows, so they asked me for some help. I sent them a dozen mac 700’s, a bunch of color changing strobes, a Grand MA and the key ingredient, Rob Smith.
The kind of lights we used didn’t really matter, as long as they worked. The console just needed to be something dependable as there would be no room in any club to set up a spare. Since other consoles seem to have more quirks, the MA series seemed the sturdiest. I only crash that one when programming shows, not playback. But Rob is the one who made the difference. He rarely misses a cue, and with several thousand button pushes per nite, that’s amazing.
The band had gone down to see one of my other acts last year. A band called 30 Seconds to Mars. They loved the lighting cues and were determined to use the guy that ran that show for this year’s tour. That would be Rob. What was funny was that their manager called me to ask if I knew how to get hold of this guy Rob that lit this certain show. As fate would have it, Rob works for me and I designed the show they liked. So I was able to get them to use me (local boy to them) to design the show and Rob to run it.
So I spent a week in a rehearsal barn with the band and manager. I brought in a portable martin show designer visualizer computer and a GrandMA. I showed David (lead singer) what I was doing and he only had one thing to say…, “Never leave the lights stagnant for more than a few seconds”. He wanted the lighting to accent all the complex non 4/4 time rhythms. OK I said, but now how do I do this without the show looking like a mariachi band’s concert?
By subtlety having the lights flicker intensity and colors when the verses were going on was one way. By writing a hundred little back round chases was another. For years I have preached the value of leaving just a simple look on stage and letting the band do the work. Now I had to rethink stuff and go in the opposite direction. Or lose my gig.
Fortunately heavy metal music has a driving beat and quick tempo changes are never more than a few seconds apart. The biggest challenge is never repeating the same lighting effect twice in a show. If your gonna use strobes, find a variety of ways to use them. One should not just flash them all on.
But what I live for is the “STOP” cues. That’s the point in each song where the pounding music stops for a split second, before the train starts rolling again. These are the times where I hit special light cues that dazzle the audience. They happen so fast that nobody really knows what happened. They just look at each other for a second and go “that was cool”. And then resume bobbing their heads in a fast unison manner.
