I'd love to hear some experiences and suggestions on how to help make my lighting rig more portable and quicker/easier to setup. Also, I'm always willing to hear other suggestions on how to present things, where to hang the lights, etc. This is our first experience with lighting that's something other than 4 par 38's with dimmers and gels up front.
I play in a country band that's doing about 100 gigs a year. I'm the bass player and because I don't sing, everyone thought I'd be the perfect candidate to deal with the lighting. Cause you know... us bass players don't have much, if anything, to do.
I took this on and built up a light rig as follows:
Rear
20' of Global Truss with 2 ST-132 stands.
On the truss hangs 4 Blizzard Blades and 2 Q-Spot-260's.
We hang our banner in the center and 2 blades on a side with the a q-spot on each end.
I also hang some white spandex on extensions that put it about 1-2 feet behind the truss and banner to give some depth. I light this up with 4 Blizzard Flurries that pretty much just wash it with color.
Front
2 ultimate stands with 4 Blizzard Fab5's on each stand. 2 on each side of these wash the band, 1 on each side are on sidearms that stick out front about head height to light up our lead singer and make his face something other than a shadow under his big assed cowboy hat (this was in an uplighting question thread here) and 1 on each side is pointed at the drummer to make him stand out a little more.
I run all of this with Nicolaudie Sunlite Suite 2. I have a backup system of Blizzard Lucid and/or Luminaire in case Sunlite takes a crap on me. I'll be adding a midi foot controller to switch scenes up.
I use real DMX cables for everything and a terminator. Yes, everything has safety cables and I use Blizzard Klamp-N clamps for all of my rear hanging lights and chauvet O clamps for the Fab 5's up front.
Obviously, this all takes time to setup and I am trying to gin up a few ways to make this all quicker and easier to deal with for setup and tear down. Unfortunately, we don't have a trailer so everything has to come apart to travel.
To this end, I put together some wiring harnesses for the front lighting. The Fab 5's all have IEC power in/out along with DMX In/Out. I used the cords I have which while not all that pretty when wire tied together, seem to work fine and make setting up the front lights fairly quick. My headache comes from the Accucable 50' power/dmx combo cable I use to connect the front light stands together along with the DMX cables I have to run up one tree and down the other tree to connect my chain.
What I would love to do is have a harness that has all my interconnection points on the ground. Power is easy... but the DMX is where I am at a bit of a loss. I guess something like a DMX hub that has an in and a thru and a port or ports to run up to the lights on the stands.
The rear is what it is and I've put together the cables runs I need there. Unfortunately, other than leaving my clamps on the fixtures, this will always be a manual exercise for setup and tear down. I'm more focused on the front lighting because we use this more than the rear truss setup due to some of the venues not giving us much space to set the truss up.
Anything you all want to throw at this would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
I play in a country band that's doing about 100 gigs a year. I'm the bass player and because I don't sing, everyone thought I'd be the perfect candidate to deal with the lighting. Cause you know... us bass players don't have much, if anything, to do.
I took this on and built up a light rig as follows:
Rear
20' of Global Truss with 2 ST-132 stands.
On the truss hangs 4 Blizzard Blades and 2 Q-Spot-260's.
We hang our banner in the center and 2 blades on a side with the a q-spot on each end.
I also hang some white spandex on extensions that put it about 1-2 feet behind the truss and banner to give some depth. I light this up with 4 Blizzard Flurries that pretty much just wash it with color.
Front
2 ultimate stands with 4 Blizzard Fab5's on each stand. 2 on each side of these wash the band, 1 on each side are on sidearms that stick out front about head height to light up our lead singer and make his face something other than a shadow under his big assed cowboy hat (this was in an uplighting question thread here) and 1 on each side is pointed at the drummer to make him stand out a little more.
I run all of this with Nicolaudie Sunlite Suite 2. I have a backup system of Blizzard Lucid and/or Luminaire in case Sunlite takes a crap on me. I'll be adding a midi foot controller to switch scenes up.
I use real DMX cables for everything and a terminator. Yes, everything has safety cables and I use Blizzard Klamp-N clamps for all of my rear hanging lights and chauvet O clamps for the Fab 5's up front.
Obviously, this all takes time to setup and I am trying to gin up a few ways to make this all quicker and easier to deal with for setup and tear down. Unfortunately, we don't have a trailer so everything has to come apart to travel.
To this end, I put together some wiring harnesses for the front lighting. The Fab 5's all have IEC power in/out along with DMX In/Out. I used the cords I have which while not all that pretty when wire tied together, seem to work fine and make setting up the front lights fairly quick. My headache comes from the Accucable 50' power/dmx combo cable I use to connect the front light stands together along with the DMX cables I have to run up one tree and down the other tree to connect my chain.
What I would love to do is have a harness that has all my interconnection points on the ground. Power is easy... but the DMX is where I am at a bit of a loss. I guess something like a DMX hub that has an in and a thru and a port or ports to run up to the lights on the stands.
The rear is what it is and I've put together the cables runs I need there. Unfortunately, other than leaving my clamps on the fixtures, this will always be a manual exercise for setup and tear down. I'm more focused on the front lighting because we use this more than the rear truss setup due to some of the venues not giving us much space to set the truss up.
Anything you all want to throw at this would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
