MIAMI — The feel-good songs — “That’s the Way” and “Shake Your Booty” — may bring audiences all the way back to the 1970s, but KC and the Sunshine Band founder and namesake, Harry Wayne “KC” Casey, wanted a lighting rig that was a little less retro.
“Over the last year, KC has been very interested in changing the lighting design of the show,” said tour & production manager Rick Raymond. “Among his concerns were the ‘dated’ look of a big PAR can rig, the heat all those PARs produce, and an interest in going green.”
Raymond and band LD Lenny Lindsey were also looking for compact fixtures that were easy to set up, since KSCB plays everywhere from casinos to private events, often flying in the day of the show.
“We knew we had to keep the design as streamlined as possible in order to fit this wide range of venues,” said Lindsey. “And it had to be a design that could be put up, focused and ready within an afternoon.”
Raymond and Lindsey visited LDI and NAMM with their lighting dealer Chad Griswold (Mastermind Production Group, Anaheim CA), and they put together a new system from Elation Professional that included Elation’s LED and Platinum Series fixtures.
The new rig includes 12 Platinum Spot 5R Pro hybrid spot/wash moving heads; 12 Platinum Wash LED Zoom moving head RGBW color wash fixtures; 10 Design Brick 70 RGB+ white + amber LED bars; eight Opti Tri Par tri-color RGB LED PAR cans; two Antari F-3 Fazers; and an EWDMX Wireless DMX system.
All of the Platinum Wash LED Zooms and six of the Platinum Spot 5R Pros are hung on a straight upstage truss, along with the all-but-mandatory 36-inch mirror ball and six ACL Bars.
Of the remaining Platinum Spot 5R Pros, four are positioned on the floor while two are kept as spares. The Design Brick 70s are used on the floor to light the backdrop, while the Opti Tri Pars are inside the upstage truss as truss toners.
Raymond and Lindsey credited the fixtures for their bright output, energy efficiency, compact size and light weight, particularly the Platinum Spot 5R Pro, a CMY color-mixing moving head that uses the MSD Platinum 5R lamp from Philips. This hybrid spot/wash unit produces an output comparable to a 575-watt fixture at half the size, weight and energy usage.
“The optics are really impressive — they’re very, very sharp,” Lindsey said. “With other units, I had to spin and do a focus and go through every instrument. But with these I have no problem just spinning just one time, and they come into focus right away. This gets everything rolling a lot quicker, which really helps, since we’re a ‘weekend warrior’ type band that’s constantly flying in and out.”
Lindsey also commended the Platinum Spot 5R Pro for features ranging from 22 replaceable gobos, a 3-facet Rotating Prism, Variable Frost, a Zoom and an Iris.
The other Elation Platinum fixture used in the show, the Platinum Wash LED Zoom, uses a Quad Color LED system (RGBW) that has an output comparable to a 525-watt wash, yet draws only 300 watts of power.
Raymond noted that, in addition to its energy efficiency, the Platinum Wash LED Zoom was chosen because “one of the effects we wanted to achieve was to use a moving LED wash light where, if you were looking directly into the fixture, you didn’t see the individual RGB LEDs.
“We wanted a fixture that could output a true color all the way from the unit to the floor,” Raymond added. “The Platinum Wash LED Zoom fit that bill — and the fact that it was zoomable was the icing on the cake. The price point of the fixture made it a perfect fit.”
Both the Platinum Spot 5R Pro and Platinum Wash LED Zoom have Elation’s EWDMX wireless DMX receiver built into the unit — another priority for KCSB, which experienced firsthand the anxiety of a cut DMX cable during a show at Marlins Stadium.
“All of a sudden the whole show froze up, and my tech told me that the wire had been cut,” noted Lindsey. Now with the Platinum fixtures, this threat has been eliminated, since the units can receive DMX signals wirelessly from up to 3,000 feet away that are sent via an Elation EWDMXT wireless DMX transmitter, which gets sold separately.
“There has been no lag time or signal interference,” Lindsey said, of the EWDMX wireless system. “When I fire up the system, it sees it right away. It also saves a lot of time and headaches. The stagehands are happy to see that they don’t have to run a bunch of cable all over the place — just power cable, and that’s it.”
“Being wireless means no more running the snake — saving time, labor and potential damage,” added Raymond, who noted that the Platinum fixtures’ compact size also makes life on the road a lot easier. “Less weight means less fuel and lower labor costs,” he said. “I have hung those fixtures by myself a few times. Most fixtures require two stagehands to pull out of the case and hang, but not the Elations.”
For more information, please visit www.elationlighting.com, www.mastermindproductiongroup.com and www.heykcsb.com.
