Tooting your own horn in public can be very successful, as long as you toot properly. I have had to toot my own horn to get where I am today. Learning how to walk the line between blasting a trumpet from the rooftop and noodling on a kazoo can be tricky. The world of self-promotion can be a real entanglement for the corporate artist type.
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I love when people raise the bar, and a lot of that was done this year. It has become quite evident that discharge bulbs are quickly going the way of fossil fuels. Only the old folks will still think there’s money to be made in these things. Heck, one look at the LED Engin series of light sources that Osram has shows us how committed manufacturers have become.
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The LDI exhibition returned to the Las Vegas Convention Center Nov. 17-19, and with more than 350 exhibitors using the event for some of their most significant product launches of the year, there was plenty of innovation for the 16,000-plus attendees to check out.
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Over the course of 2017, the staff at PLSN checks out every new product that has to do with the live event industry and beyond. Besides the wide variety of lighting categories we have these days for fixtures, there are great innovations in everything from touring video systems to clamps and gadgets that aid us in our pursuit of the perfect tools for our shows.
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It’s not just that 2018’s Parnelli Visionary honoree has worked with a lot of acts — it’s the artistic diversity of those acts that underscores the artistic diversity of a designer who is always reinventing himself. Jonathan Smeeton pioneered the concept of visually enhancing a concert beyond throwing some lights with gel on them, and he is quite likely the first LD to take a lighting show on the road. He went on to build by hand key lighting components, and was also an early designer of one of the first big festivals in England, the Bath Festival.
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Automated lighting consoles have many great programming and playback features that provide many useful functions. One of the more clever functions has to do with expanding playback capabilities. Instead of being limited by the number of physical buttons and faders on a console, most make use of pages (or banks) to increase the playbacks immensely. The page functionality can be used for much more, such as organizing songs or scenes, adjusting playback styles, expanding capabilities and more. It is important for lighting programmers to understand the paging functionality of their console.
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As pixel mapping is becoming more and more commonplace in the lighting world, and LEDs are being incorporated into 3D configurations to create scenic objects like chandeliers and cubes, the challenge of programming them increases. Instead of looking at the pixels in a 2D flat “plan” view, now we’re beginning to think about looking at pixels from all sides and angles.
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We sat down to chat with Jeremy Roth as one of his acts, Wilco, just flew in to town to perform three sold out shows at the local theater, finishing up a run that lasted over a year. Along the way, Roth picked up a couple more clients, Ray LaMontagne and Sheryl Crow, whom he designed touring set and light designs for.
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Video switchers are not sexy. At least the smaller frames. Let’s face it, in terms of sheer eye candy, small event video switchers take a back seat to their audio and lighting cousins.
It’s a general rule that the larger the console, the more bells and whistles and consequently more blinky lights and buttons. The smaller fare is basic because they tend to be more utility than glam. There’s only so much you can fit in a frame anyway.
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