It’s a Saturday morning and Alex Skowron and I just arrived at the Upstaging rehearsal space. We’re staring at a monster lighting rig for fall Out Boy. For some reason it looks bigger than when we drew it on paper.
Upstaging has a giant warehouse where they can hang 6 big lighting systems at once. But luckily we’re the only ones here and there is no noise. Alex and I sent 7 days programming the show out at his house. We borrowed a maxxyz console and a portable Martin Show Designer system from the lighting company.
We have 29 songs in the bag, but have yet to see what it actually will look like live. But I do all my tours this way, so I’m confident we will be 75% close to reality once we touch up all the focuses. We still have to go through every single cue separately to adjust the timing. Visualizers are great, but they don’t give accurate strobe rates or effects engine speeds. These can only be matched using the actual fixtures. It’s a tedious process, but we have 3 days to do this.
After 3 days, we will have to load in the set and all the video elements and look at all again. This is to see if our looks are bright enough to compete with the video or the color schemes between the light cues and the video content matches. Because Alex and I have a plethora of other tours we are working on, we had to program the lighting cues 2 weeks ago, before we saw any content. A song that we did in Green has to be fixed as the video content is all red.
So we’re gonna slam through this for 3 straight days and hopefully be ready for a real show. I’ll update this report in 72 hours. I’m sure I will not be as fresh as this AM.
