I'm currently using an
ETC Insight 2x. It's been in the
venue for nearly 20 years now and is a great board for both
busking and more theatrical productions, both of which are common to the
venue. It still runs very well with the exception of 2 out of 108 sub masters not working properly. The biggest problem right now is the limitations of the number of channels, there's only 324 of them which are all pretty much full which is keeping us from investing in more intelligent lighting. Does anyone have any experience with the cobalt 20
console in regards to
busking and
theatre?
Michael,
I've been running the Cobalt since it came out a couple of years ago, and ancestor Congo, for about seven years prior in a mixed-use concert
hall full of movers. Generally we do music and live events, other times it's comedy, corporate shows & meetings, community events, performance art, private events, and the occasional really unusual stuff like bodybuilding competitions (yes) and TV tapings. We've also done
theatre, Broadway-revue style shows, and even dance and half-staged opera. Cobalt can handle all of this with speed and aplomb: it's very fast for
busking and has a powerful ton of shortcuts for
theatre. Its very short commands can do complex things in a right hurry; and because I am a staff of me, I care a lot about speed.
Theatre, yesterday: one-man performance piece, very theatre-ish. The guest LD is freely adapting his show to our space, so the bare bones of his initial concept are intact but he's having some fun with the gear. Some of his cues are identical repeats that are frequently restored to; some are copied from existing looks & then edited. Cobalt allows 'cues' to be re-used within a sequence, so that if you have ten looks but four of them are blackouts, you only need to write one
blackout and re-insert it. Your list might look like this: 1,2,5,2,6,2,9, where 2 is your
blackout. So when my LD says "Q 38 will be a
restore to Q12" I just type "12 insert" (3 keystrokes) and it's there. Any edits made later to the look of Q12 will then be updated throughout the show, every time it's used. Fast fast. On the other
hand, if he wants to
build a
cue from an existing look, say "I want Q50 to
build from Q25," all I need to type is "25 (hold)
Preset (& tap) A" and my live output is suddenly the contents of 25, to do with whatever I want--instead of having to Copy
Cue 25 to 50, Goto 50, or Goto 25, Record 50 or whatever the string is. Fast fast.
Busking example: faders can contain
almost any content: Groups, Color Palettes, entire Sequences (
cue lists), individual parameters, individual
console keys, you name it. They are fast to load: hold the Group
button and swipe across master keys & all your Groups will load sequentially, for instance. The master keys and faders are customizable so depending on what kind of content is loaded and what you want to happen when you tap, hold, twist or slide you can achieve a lot of different things. Jazz concert: to select a group of lights and
fade their color in a specific time, it's 3+ keystrokes: "[Master button-Group] 9 [Master button-Color Palette]" and those lights will
fade to that color in 9 seconds while your hands are freed up to do other things like run band specials or inhibit backlights or something.
The
RPN is a relatively small learning curve and (
IMO) a red herring: it's far harder to explain it than it is to teach your hands to do it, and while it is central to some concepts, Cobalt hardware does not confine you to the command keys for programming. You're not gonna be typing all the time: you may
build content that way or navigate that way, but the touchscreens remove a great deal of command typing. My only real Cobalt caution for anyone--and it may not apply to your situation--is that it is by design and architecture NOT a
tracking console and if you work with designers who are married to
tracking, you will have trouble working around this. I am my own designer almost all of the time, and I find I rarely miss it; but if you really need it, I wouldn't go with this
console.
Recommend you get your local dealer to give you a demo: it helps a lot to have a pro walk you through the
intro, and the offline editor will only get you so far. So much of Cobalt's speed and
power is tactile .
