KANSAS CITY, MO — Melissa Etheridge makes no secret about her concern for the environment. She won an Academy Award for her song featured in An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s film on global warming. She also posts “Green Tips” on her Web site, www.melissaetheridge.com . So it’s only fitting that for her 2008 Revival Tour, Etheridge’s lighting director David Hamilton helped keep things green with an LED fixture that saves energy, lights the stage with fewer fixtures, and has lamps with a long life, resulting in less waste for landfills.
That green fixture is the Impression from Elation Professional, a compact LED moving head with RGB color mixing. Powered by 90 high-power Luxeon K2 red, green and blue LEDs, the Impression produces a light output that’s comparable to a 575W discharge fixture with a power savings of at least 50 percent.
Etheridge’s tour manager Steve Girmont first saw the Impression at a trade show and brought it to the attention of Hamilton. “We were wanting to go LED-heavy (for the Revival Tour) because of the low energy usage,” said Hamilton, who has been Etheridge’s LD since 2004. “So I checked out the Impression at Bandit Lites and did a comparison with several other LED PARs. The Impression just blew all the others out of the water. There was a night and day difference between it and everything else I looked at — it was like the difference between a 500-watt and 1000-watt PAR can.”
Hamilton said the Impression also covered more area than other LED PAR cans. “The beam spread on the Impression is substantially larger,” he said.
Hamilton was able to light up Etheridge’s stage with a total of only 10 Impressions. The set featured a large overhead L-shaped truss that ran 40 feet upstage, with a perpendicular 20-foot segment at stage left. Four Impression units were hung on the 40-foot segment and three on the 20-foot side truss. The remaining three Impressions were positioned on the ground at stage right.
Between the overhead and uplighting units, “we kind of did an angle thing, and it covered the whole stage really, really well. Ten Impressions were all I needed,” Hamilton said. One of the plans for minimizing energy consumption on the Revival Tour, he added, was to keep the lighting rig as small as possible, piece-wise, and the Impression helped achieve that goal.
In terms of performance, the Impressions proved a good fit for Melissa Etheridge’s shows, which avoid a “flash and trash” look, Hamilton said. “Basically we light the band and light the scenery. It uses subtle looks — Melissa wants the music to do the talking.” The Impression was able to handle the need for slow color fades as well, Hamilton added. “There was absolutely no flicker — zero — which was something I was really impressed with.”
Since her bout with breast cancer, Etheridge no longer uses hazers due to her concern about the effects of the smoke. Even so, the Impression’s Luxeon K2 LEDs delivered the looks Hamilton was seeking. He also praised the compact size of the Impression, small enough to be mounted on a 14-inch center, with a weight of only 16 pounds. “I could carry all the Impressions around in two small cases and could hang them by myself, they’re so lightweight.”
Hamilton also spoke favorably of the Impression’s speed of movement, with an ability to reach 660° pan in less than two seconds and 300° tilt in under one second. “The speed on those things was phenomenal,” Hamilton said. “I didn’t have much chance to use it in this show, but it will be great for future projects where a lot of speed and movement is needed. I definitely will be spec-ing the Impression in future shows,” he added. “It’s my favorite new light — by far!”
For more information, please visit www.elationlighting.com.
