Grammy-winning alt-folk artists and multi-instrumentalists Mumford & Sons know a thing or two about putting on an exciting show. Their live concerts are nothing short of a rip-roaring ride on an emotionally draining musical rollercoaster propelled by gut-wrenching vocals, feverish banjo pickin,’ rousing bittersweet string passages, throbbing kick drum patterns and the occasional self-deprecating, expletive-laced rant.
Dynamic songs, such as “Lover of the Light,” “The Cave,” “Thistle & Weeds” and “Little Lion Man,” built upon sonic passages of light and shadow, offer fertile ground for LD Ed Warren, of Next Level Lights, to creatively enhance and illuminate the music’s underlying concepts.
Through cutting-edge fixtures, imaginative use of existing gear, and new lighting console desk software, Mumford & Sons’ live shows have evolved, since the late 2000s, from sparse visual affairs to memorable and technologically innovative arena spectacles.
In years past, the band’s concerts were not quite as visually rich, however. LD Warren’s first show with Mumford & Sons, half a decade ago, was staged at a 200-person capacity club in London, where he was armed with only four PAR cans. Today, it takes seven trucks to haul the band’s lighting, video and trussing gear across continents. “The thing about this band is that they are interested in giving a whole, complete show,” says Warren. “The band is very ambitious. They want to do big shows and they want to be epic and large. They’ve never asked me to chill out, which is cool.”
String Theory
Despite Mumford & Sons’ skyrocketing success, the band’s loyal fan base has come to expect the same level of intimacy that marked the quartet’s early performances. One of the ways Mumford & Sons maintains this fragile connection with the throngs of fans who attend their shows is via Warren’s lighting design, which currently includes the clever use of tungsten bulbs and LED festoons on reinforced cables. “There was a worry that when we started doing arenas, the band would lose intimacy with the audience,” says Warren. “These [tungstens and LED festoons] kind of retain it.”
Ten different cables, measuring approximately 80 meters each, carry hundreds of festoons and 800 individually addressed bulbs that extend to a downstage video truss. (For festivals, the strings are typically hung from the stage structure, itself.) A cross between backyard-party summer lights and a gigantic diamond-encrusted chandelier, the tungstens and LEDs swoop over the heads of the concertgoers, placing them smack dab in the middle of the (light) show, bestowing the entire production with a laidback, near-beer garden, vibe.
“At festivals and outdoor shows we use as many tungsten bulbs as we can without it getting messy or dangerous,” says Warren. “When we do the outdoor shows, we can’t hang a truss over the crowd. We sometimes take them out to delay towers. We have steel cable reel reinforcing every string.”
Tungstens have been a part of the band’s production design for years, but it’s only been in the last several months or so that “we got a hold of some LED festoons,” says Warren. “Now [the string lights] change color, and I often do chases. Rather than all of [the lights] coming on at once, I can have sweeps. But I don’t want to take away from the tungstens, so I really only use red and tungsten.”
Video Eyebrow
Perhaps the expansion of Mumford & Sons’ stage production was inevitable, and this rapid growth is directly and proportionally linked to the band’s newfound popularity. With larger stage events came the need for more visual saturation, including the use of live video.
Providing a linear lid for the entire production are 198 Pixled F-11 panels (33 panels wide by six tiles high), hung from trussing and dubbed the “Eyebrow.” “All of those tiles create three big screens through which we run I-Mag,” says video designer Charles Woods, who controls video via a Grass Valley Kayak console and generally sends three feeds from the desk to a Catalyst media server where it’s sized and sent to the appropriate screen. “The center screen is wider [than the others] and the two outer screens are angled upstage, slightly, so that people on the side of the stage can get a better view.”
Nine live cameras (five manned) immerse the crowd in stage imagery, including five Triax backed Sony HDX 100s for U.K. and European tours (in America the camera crew operates Sony HDC 1500 broadcast cameras run on SMTPE fiber), two DogCam Pro HQ2 bullet pencil/helmet cams trained on the downstage drum kit played by lead vocalist/guitarist/mandolin player Marcus Mumford, and one Sony BRC-700 robocam, each downstage on the brass (stage left) and the string section (stage right).
Two of the Sony HDXs/HDCs are placed on Vinten Osprey Elite pedestals and a dolly track system stationed in the gap between the barrier and the front of the stage. “My favorite shot is the one from the pit, looking up at the band,” says Woods. “I can get an up-close shot without impacting them in any way.”
Cameras, Woods says, are positioned to best capture the energy of the band’s live performance. “In a song like ‘The Cave,’ for example, when [Marcus] starts thumping on the bass drum, I have a really tight shot of [the kick],” says Woods. “There’s a lot of vibration from the drums, which gives a nice little effect.”
Data from these cameras travels to a remote control panel rack and then a camera control unit (CCU). From the CCU, the signal is sent into the Kayak console, “where I see it and cut to it,” says Woods, who operates video from either stage left or stage right, depending on the venue. “Then the feed — the output from my desk — goes into the Catalyst [media server software].”
Although all cameras are native black and white, Woods can colorize images via the Catalyst. “It’s not appropriate to use black and white for every song,” says Woods. “For instance, for ‘Thistle and Weeds,’ which is quite dark, with a lot of rage in it, Ed did a really good red lighting look and I did a kind of washed out, blood-red look, as well, for my screen.”
There are some reds in the show, Ed Warren says, but he “tends to keep the color palette to orange-y, dusky sunset kind of style. There’s a few blue songs in there, as well, in the darker songs.”
Symmetry and Elidy
Warren worked out many of his looks and troubleshot his equipment in Montreal, where technical rehearsals for the tour took place in the spring. Prepping himself with Cast Software’s Wysiwyg previz program, Warren programmed 30 songs, although he says the band doesn’t perform all of them for any given show.
“Obsessed” with symmetry, Warren configured his lighting fixtures, including the new Chromlech Elidy panels, in a unique pattern for maximum lighting effect. A glance at the design drawings reveals that the lighting rig is split into (roughly) two halves: each half contains fixtures that correspond with its lighting doppelganger on the opposite side of the rig. “I want to frame the stage and arena and venue well,” says Warren. “It means a lot to me to get it right. It drives me crazy if a light is out of position.”
Helping to fuel Warren’s obsession, Montreal-based lighting, sound and video solutions company, Solotech, has devised a method to offer the LD greater design flexibility and control. Dozens of the aforementioned Elidy panels have been placed on Zap VIP One automated yokes, which are secured from custom (vertical) drop-down aluminum bars.
“The moving yoke concept was R&D on our part,” says Francois Leroux, executive vice president of international business development at Solotech. “We took those Elidy panels and we mounted them on the yoke, so Ed could use them as moving lights. We were the first ones to put the moving yoke together with the new Elidy fixture to create a unique product, and Mumford & Sons are the first ones to use it.”
Perpendicular to the custom drop-down bars are horizontal aluminum tubes, which secure more than a dozen Robe Robin 600 LEDWashes that are situated behind the Elidy tiles and offer more lighting options. In addition, 64 Chromlech Elidy-Wall panels, each measuring approximately 900 by 950.5 by 58.5 mm (W x L x H), are hung from an upstage truss and stacked 16 tiles wide by four high.
“Ed literally drew a design on the back of a napkin and told us, ‘This is something I need,’” says Leroux. “Our folks in Montreal and here in Vegas gave him [a design] on scale, and he was pleased with it.”
“I wanted to create something that hadn’t really been seen before, to the best of my knowledge: one-meter square moving LED beam lights in the truss,” says Warren.
A “layered” or stepped trussing array tidies up the rig and further adds to the visual impact of the lighting: Trussing is arranged in order of descending heights, from downstage to upstage, beginning with a 30-foot truss and gradually dropping down to a 6-foot, 7-inch truss. The Elidy panels are secured to four of the five lighting trusses, three of which feature the drop bar system. “The trussing and the panels help to leave plenty of space in order to create other varied looks using the moving heads in the rig,” says Warren.
Indeed. Mix in a little smoke, and the slender beams that poke out from the Elidy units evoke futuristic pin art or pin screen games. “Each pixel sends out a really thin bright beam of light,” says Warren. “And the beauty of it is that these panels also work as a video source, so I can run content through them. The panels can also double as an extension of the wall when pointed out at the crowd. When pointed at the stage, at an angle, they look like they float in mid air.”
MagicQ Man
Lighting control is accomplished via a ChamSys MagicQ MQ100 Pro 2014 (with two MagicQ Wing units, an Execute and Playback, for additional playback capability) and another MQ100 running as backup. “ChamSys has made some new software for their desk that can control 56 universes,” says Warren. “This new update can handle so much data at once.”
“Ed was the first to use the console with that number of universes on a rock ‘n’ roll show,” says Chris Kennedy, software director at ChamSys.
Warren has also been making strides with the pixel-mapping function in the MagicQ software. “In the last couple of years, with the emergence of many multi two-dimensional multiple element LED and dimmer arrays, such as Jarag, Elidy and LED grids, we added a [function] to MagicQ that allows for easy playback pixel-map effects within these two-dimensional elements,” says ChamSys’ Kennedy. “One moment you’re playing an FX across a whole grid, the next the FX is playing individually on each multi element head. Traditionally, if you had this number of Elidy fixtures, you would use a media server or dedicated pixel-mapping software instead of a lighting console. With MagicQ, you can treat the fixtures both as a ‘lighting element’ and as a ‘video element.’ Everything is controllable. So, if Ed wanted to modify the speed of his ‘rain FX,’ then he could do this as part of the cue, or even control it using a fader. When I watched Ed’s show for the first time, there were several really cool effects that he’d created that I had no idea how he’d made them, even though I wrote the
pixel-mapper software. I had to ask him how he did it.”
Not Fade Away
Despite new toys, added equipment functions and all the colors at the designers’ disposal, a big part of the show’s success, from Warren’s point of view, is the continuity between songs. “I like to keep the lights fading down at the end of each song,” says Warren. “There are a couple of songs that smash, cut out, black out. But for the basis between every song, I always have three seconds of darkness and close, with a nice fade. I have four spotlights behind the band that open up from a small iris to big, and a tungsten wash behind the band, so everyone can see what they are doing on stage. When the band is talking to the crowd, I’ll bring up the blinders. Before the next song starts, we go to black and cut into the next song. I think blackness is very important in between songs; otherwise people get confused if too much is going on. The songs are very intense. People do need a breather in between songs sometimes.”
The lights never really seem to fade on at Mumford & Sons show, even when the last notes and chords of the final song are crashed. “When it all ends, I bring up the house lights, so everyone can be seen. We always leave the show with the festoon or light bulbs on as well as the searchlights, from their final song, ‘The Cave,’ to give the show an epic end. Just because the band has stopped playing, it doesn’t mean the show is over. Sometimes the crowd needs some time to gather themselves and think about what happened. We don’t like to switch all the lights on and say, ‘Get out. Show’s over.’ The band wants the whole experience to be fun and enjoyable. We want people to take it with them.”
CREW
Lighting Co: Solotech
Video Co: XL Video
Production Manager: Steve Gordon
Lighting Designer: Ed Warren
Lighting Crew Chief: Adam “Moon Unit” Morris
LED Tech: Ted Cognata
Video Designer: Charles Woods
Video Engineer: Norvin Maloney
Catalyst Operator/Specialist: Rich Stembridge
Camera Tech: Paul Bange
Project Managers: Jo Bierne, Phil Mercer, Dave Hyslop,
Mark Haney
GEAR
Lighting
2 ChamSys MagicQ MQ100 Pro 2014 (one running backup)
1 ChamSys MagicQ Execute Wing
1 ChamSys MagicQ Playback Wing
38 Vari*Lite VL3015 Spot
21 Vari*Lite VL3500 Wash FXs
22 Mole Molefay Four-Light
15 Robe Robin 600 LEDWash
16 Robe Robin 1200 LEDWash
24 Clay Paky Sharpys
7 Martin Atomic Colors
12 Chromlech Elidy-S panels
12 Chromlech Elidy-Big panels
64 Chromlech Elidy-Wall panels (16 x 4 lighting wall)
800 Tungsten bulbs on reinforced cable
24 Custom drop bars
1 Custom Elidy rigging system w/ Zap VIP One yokes
Video
198 Pixled F-11 panels
1 Grass Valley Kayak console
2 Catalyst media servers (one running backup)
2 Sony BRC-700 robocams
5 Sony HDC 1500 cameras (in the U.S.);
5 Sony HDX 100 cameras (in the U.K. and Europe)
2 DogCam Pro HQ2 bullet pencil/helmet cameras
1 Vinten Osprey Elite pedestal and dolly track system
