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.
Read More »Winter and your work ethic
Certification Approaches
Certification won’t produce dramatic results, but it will change the nature of the business; it will affect who works and who does not, and could… Read More »Certification Approaches
Read More »Talking Talk-Back
Plenty of companies talk about being innovative, but how many really walk the innovation walk? I'm in Colorado Springs at the invitation of Wybron, who is… Read More »Talking Talk-Back
Read More »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.
Read More »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.
Read More »Don’t Ask Me Why – It Just Rocked
I'm not good at describing experiences. If you ask me how many amps flows through a load at a certain voltage I might be able… Read More »Don’t Ask Me Why – It Just Rocked
Read More »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.
Read More »Get the Gear You Know
Once you know what you will be doing and how long you will have, it is vital to ask about the lighting equipment and the… Read More »Get the Gear You Know
Read More »Why use a binary preset number?
Having a this level of control over the video images used in a show is highly efficient and attractive for many reasons. First of all,… Read More »Why use a binary preset number?
Read More »This is Your Wake Up Call
Two words: click here -> www.scottmcleod.org/didyouknow.wmv Any questions?
Read More »Eye Candy
Today I am in charge of eye candy. This involves throwing different pieces of media onto soft LED panels and some V9 hidef video modules that Nocturne has brought down to WTTW's TV studio in Chicago.
Read More »Scheduling and Walking The Line
OK, so now that I have the introduction out of the way. I am going to speed up with the more recent things I’ve been up to. Recently I’ve been running some bigger shows through outside production. I got to run a great club show with an LSC Maxim XL console 6 Clay Paky mirrors and 6 Martin 250 washes with 200 pars at The Rams Head Live in Baltimore, MD. They have a fun rig and I think the pat pad on the Maxim was fun. You can pretty much use this pad like a touch screen but instead you can assign parameters by moving your finger right or left across a certain part of the pat pad.