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Writing A Cue, LEDs, and Track Lights

Writing A Cue, LEDs, and Track Lights

Ok so last week I ended the blog by telling you about how I incorporate track lighting into my light show. Well, at first I embarrassingly zip tied them to mic stands. It was really a desperate attempt to get a vertical ACL wash across the stage. It began to be a pain in the ass for the band and myself to drag them around so I took the two pieces I had, untied them and cut them down to about a length of three feet each. The day I went to set them up during a load in a really cool thing happened. I placed them horizontally on the ground one in front of Nathan’s bass rig, and the other in front of Matt’s guitar rig. When I patched everything and turned up the faders I was astonished. It lit the rigs up so intense. Everyone looked over at me and said it looked bad ass. I was complimented in a weird way that day by Geoff our drummer and Erik our sound engineer. They told me that I have the most f#*ked up ability to take something shitty and make it into something cool. I was proud that I made it cool, but also analyzing that it was shitty in the first place.

For Chrissakes, It’s nowhere in the manual?

    I majored in English in college. I can write a mean resume'. I can also write my own opinions here. And nothing pisses me off more than a company that is trying to peddle a product, but fails to write a decent manual. Or at least a pamphlet that can explain to any idiot like myself how to operate something they just spent money on and need to make use of right away.

Winter and your work ethic

 I get a lot of emails and calls this time of year. Some are old friends, some acquaintances and some people I've never met. They are all looking for the same thing. Work.

Celtic trio on TV

    In the whacky world of Nook, (where I reside as king), I find myself lighting just about anything. This weekend I lit a Celtic folk trio for a PBS TV show. Upstaging lighting offered up my services to a local director (thanks guys) and he hired me to wiggle some lights.

Deeper Down: Why They Call It A User’s Manual

In this month’s Technopolis, you hopefully found me expounding on the virtues of (actually) reading a User’s Manual.

I’m sitting in the Tennessee Theatre, watching the tail-end of a load-out from the front-row seats.  As I sit here hoping that the trucks would magically load themselves, I go over the week’s gig in my head and am reminded of one of my most common uses of a manual on-site.

Repairs, repairs, and troubleshooting fun.

Well this week past week for me was all about home depot and repairs, which triggered me to start saving cash for a few new consoles because of specific things that have happened with gear recently. So let’s start with what I had on my plate first shall we? I had to fix burnt out par 38 bulb sockets by soldering in new cables and new sockets. The 38s are a huge part of my show because their wide angle beam covers a lot of my drummer’s kit and it looks pretty damn good shining off the chrome while I’m hitting bumps with him playing. Next were the electric heads for the AC cables. Well as you all are aware grounds are the first to eat it on AC cable so our sound engineer and I were soldering on new heads on the dinner table. Hah, I never mentioned to you all before that the sound guy and I live with the band in a ranch house here in Cave Creek, Arizona.