USA - As the co-founder of Diablo Digital, which provides turnkey live recording systems and services for concert, touring, festival, installation and broadcast applications, Brad Madix has accumulated an impressive resume. He has worked alongside artists such as U2, Shania Twain, Shakira, Van Halen, Rush, Alanis Morissette, Jessica Simpson, Linkin Park, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac and many more.
In his current role as live FOH engineer for Florence + the Machine, Madix relies on a range of DPA Microphones to help deliver pristine percussion to audiences. For instance, he depends on the company’s 4099 Instrument Microphone for the drum kit and the brand’s 2011C Compact Twin Diaphragm Cardioid Mic for overheads, which pick up the sound from the band’s various percussion instruments including cowbells, cymbals and a wood block. He also positions a pair of 2011C’s above t

Germany - The 2019 edition of Parookaville featured an impressive number of CLF fixtures. The festival attracted 210,000 attendees and took place at Airport Weeze, with CLF fixtures used in the Time Lab, Wacky Shack, Brainwash and in all the sales outlets throughout the festival area. Rent-All GmbH supplied over 700 fixtures.
LD Janik Hensen (Dekor Event) took care of the lighting design, including the Time Lab, based on a stage design by Stefan Dicks and a lighting concept by Robert Sommer. In addition, his company took care of the site layout, production and material planning. In the Time Lab, Aorun were used as the main fixtures, accompanied by the LEDbar PRO as a continuation of the LED surfaces.
CLF Conan fixtures were used as washlight, because of their zoom function. All fixtures had to be lightweight, since the load capacity of the roof was limited. On top of

USA - SRB Consulting & Design recently installed a Martin Audio system consisting of WPC line arrays, SXH218 and SX118 subs and CDD12s as part of an upgrade at the Speaking Rock Entertainment Centre in El Paso, Texas.
Describing the venue, SRB owner Scott Brown explains: “Speaking Rock is located on a native American reservation and they have live entertainment seven nights a week with outdoor concerts once a month in their parking lots and a large park nearby. It’s the ‘go to’ area for entertainment because people know there’s always something going on there.”
Concerts at Speaking Rock include a wide variety of artists such as Chubby Checker, P.O.D., RATT, Molotov, Buckcherry, Sammy Hagar and more. In terms of the performance venue, Scott explains, “The main room has a kind of large club atmosphere with two storeys and wraparound balconies, a main st

Germany - Lighting designer Thomas Gerdon has been working on Nature One for over 15 years and has designed the lighting for the festival’s main Open Air Floor every year since its introduction in 2011. The designer stays on the cusp of innovation and after incorporating IP65-rated Elation Proteus Hybrid luminaires in his notable 2018 pyramid truss and stage design, turned to more Proteus line fixtures for the 2019 festival.
“Last year, I discovered how easy and cool it was to have an IP65 fixture with the Proteus Hybrid,” the designer states. “This year, I was sure I wanted to use as many IP65 fixtures as possible. Ninety percent of this year’s fixtures were IP65 rated and all the moving lights were Elation Proteus series.” Populating Gerdon’s newly designed overhead audience and stage rig were Proteus Hybrid moving heads, new Proteus Rayzor 760 LED moving he

Europe - Allen & Heath’s compact SQ digital mixer recently wrapped up a 22-date European tour with Brass Against, including working FOH and monitors for the band’s support slot with Lenny Kravitz at London’s O2 Arena.
The band called upon Production & Touring Ltd. (P&T) to support their shows on both sides of the Atlantic. “At P&T, we work with artists all over world, from first timers to larger seasoned acts, and our goal is to make it financially viable to tour without compromising on expertise or gear,” explains P&T’s director, Mike Taylor.
“Brass Against needed an affordable package that had to facilitate everything from a 500-capacity venue right up to the O2 Arena and festival stages. The final kicker was that the whole lot, including the backline, had to fit into a bus bay.”
In designing a compact, cost-effective system

USA - For glam rock band Warrant, the 30th anniversary of the release of their first album Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich meant pulling out all the stops and throwing a full-on party for themselves and their fans. Known for their hard-rocking performances, Warrant always puts on an intense live show, and a recent stop at the Psycho Silo Saloon for their Dirty Thirty Tour delivered the goods.
Located in the middle of rural Illinois and sporting a stage made out of old semi-trailers, this outdoor venue stands out from most performance sites. Wanting to create a lighting design as fierce as the band’s hard-driving, Jeff Hinton of 815 Productions DJ Service added intensity to the house lights with a punchy package comprised of 18 Chauvet DJ fixtures.
Hinton placed six Intimidator Hybrid 140SR fixtures on the back of the rig to light the band with a variety of

Finland - Established in 1872 in Helsinki, the Finnish National Theatre is the oldest Finnish-speaking professional theatre in the country. Its current venue was built in 1902 and the combination of Alcons Audio Q series and L series pro-ribbon loudspeakers means the 900-capacity main stage enjoys quality sound and coverage, without impacting on its historic decor.
The horseshoe-shaped auditorium has three balconies, providing a challenge to projecting seamless, high quality sound to every seat. This was solved when sound and lighting specialists Electro Waves installed an Alcons QR series pro-ribbon system several years ago. This comprised L-C-R arrays of QR36 modular line-source array columns with QM36 modular line-source LMF array extensions. QB363 modular low-frequency array columns were added to the centre cluster, all powered and controlled by Alcons Sentinel3 and Sent

Lighting designer Yaron Abulafia was asked by director and choreographer Richard Wherlock to light his new ballet work, The Comedy of Error(z), staged at Basel Opera House (Theater Basel) in Switzerland, which “explores the themes of confusion and misunderstanding directly connected to the realities of digital lives that are also present in Shakespearean comedy”.
The story also contrasted and contextualised the lives of rich and poor in countries that are financially stronger or weaker, throwing out some complex and intense messages for debate and expressing ironies of geo-fiscal imbalance via the captivating mediums of movement, music and light.
Yaron had the venue’s house lighting rig at his disposal which included 40 x Astera AX1 Pixel Tubes.
Ahead of the production, he started researching the available kit and thinking about how to incorporate the AX1s

Australia - The popular Spin Off festival returned in 2019 with an of over 20,000 at the massive 84m x 64m mainstage tent, presenting organisers, Five-Four Entertainment, with major technical requirements where the need for screens was paramount.
To meet this demand, technical provider, Adelaide’s Novatech Creative Event Technology, employed two onstage ROE Visual Carbon 5 IMAG screens, an upstage screen, a delay screen behind FOH and two delay screens outside of the tent, controlled from two Brompton Technology SX40 processors with three Brompton Tessara XD distribution units vastly simplifying cabling requirements.
“With such a big footprint, we needed to ensure that not only everyone inside the tent could see a screen but also outside,” explains Phil Pieridis, senior video project manager from Novatech. “Using many screens generates a lot of signal distribu

Hungary - Ujbuda Gyermeknap (Children’s Day) is an annual event held at Bikás park, a tranquil sea of green in the bustling Ujbuda district of Budapest. In addition to other attractions, there is also an array of musical acts performing on stage, which this year included Hungarian folk-rock singer Miklós Fenyő.
Lighting the main stage, András Praksch of Mobil Audio and Lighting Kft had to create looks for a long list of unfamiliar bands. Even the popular Fenyő came without his LD, which required busking on the part of Praksch. On top of that, since the festival took place during daylight hours, options to create captivating looks were limited.
Praksch met this challenge and helping him accomplish this was a collection of Chauvet Professional Maverick, STRIKE and COLORdash fixtures.
“I have been doing this festival for many years with the event producer

Israel - Shlomo Artzi is one of Israel’s most successful singers, and his most recent shows hit the road with an ongoing lighting design by Gadi Spivak who has worked for the artist for over 20 years.
Gadi and his lighting associate Shlomit Lola Nehama chose to use 24 x Robe Spiider LED wash beams for a key element of his lighting rig.
This stage design was originated for the show around 2 years ago and has been modified and evolved as Shlomo has continued playing constantly – he is always in demand and will sell out any venue.
The most important aspect of the Spiiders for Gadi is the colour mixing. “I wanted a really bright light source with smooth movement and refined CMY colour mixing and all these features I find in the Spiider,” he stated.
The 24 fixtures were all hung on a semi-circular truss just downstage of a large 6mm pitch video screen,

UK - A.C. Entertainment Technologies (AC-ET) has provided Scottish Opera with a new surtitling system, utilising APIX2 by Prolights LED video panels.
Founded in 1962, Scottish Opera is Scotland’s national opera company and largest performing arts organisation. With a diverse annual season of productions embracing opera’s unique blend of music, singing and theatre, it is committed to making the art form available to the widest possible audience.
As well as performing its productions in mainstage and other venues across the country, Scottish Opera’s home is the Theatre Royal Glasgow, which last year celebrated its 150th year. Recently the Theatre Royal’s surtitling system was in need of an upgrade after 11 years of service.
Alex Reedijk, general director of Scottish Opera approached AC-ET to discuss alternatives. Chris Beardwell, technical sales executive i

Malaysia - Singesen Technical Production and Chan Lee Sound & Light selected a combination of Powersoft’s X8 and X4L amplifier platforms for American singer-songwriter Jason Mraz, who stopped off in Kuala Lumpur for the third Asian date of his Good Vibes world tour.
The main hangs at the arena were made up of 12 JBL VT-4889-1 per side, with eight JBL VT4888 flown per side as side-fill and six JBL VT4888 in the centre. The 20 JBL VT 4880 subwoofers were ground stacked at the side of the stage, while a series of Nexo PS15 wedge monitors were placed along the downstage edge. A total of six JBL VTX A8 were used as front-fill.
The main system was driven by 11 of Powersoft’s X8 amplifier platforms, while a pair of the company’s latest touring product, the X4L (look out for a product review in the September issue of LSi, out next week) - were also use

Europe - German heavy rock superstars Rammstein have embarked on their European stadium tour, with lighting designers Roland Greil and Patrick Woodroffe of Woodroffe Bassett Design utilising over 100 VL6000 Beam fixtures from Vari-Lite.
Woodroffe and Greil joined a creative team that also included renowned production designer Florian Wieder. In creating the show, they drew on the visual impact and large-scale performance features of the Vari-Lite VL6000 Beam to achieve extra layers of visual impact.
“After a brief from the band,” says Greil, “we jumped right in and explored the Rammstein world before starting to brainstorm and create the first designs.”
Discussing the main requirements for the Rammstein lighting rig, Greil explains: “We were looking for bright but versatile fixtures, that would fit into the overall design as well as into the specific R

New Zealand - When TV comedy show 7 Days Live, produced by MediaWorks NZ, visited the Queenstown Winter Festival, the festival’s production supplier TomTom Productions was on hand with its Hippotizer Karst media servers from Green Hippo. The Hippotizer enabled them to deal with the additional visual requirements of the television recording.
“The brief was fairly simple,” says Hamish Edh, director of TomTom and designer of the festival’s live stage video elements. “Background eye candy that looks great on camera, as well as for the live audience, and having the 7 Days logo on the screens for the wide shots.
“The design concept was based around mis-matching elements with different LED pixel pitches,” explains Edh. “To create contrast between the different pixel pitches, I use Martin Sceptron 20 battens in an array to complement the 6mm LED panels a

Australia - After its closure in 2017, Darlinghurst’s Midnight Shift club has been resurrected by Universal Hotels using Prolights fixtures.
Universal Hotels, a Sydney-based hospitality group owned and operated by the Kospetas family, picked up the 1000sq.m building last June for a reported $12m and have relaunched it as Universal, a rebranded music venue and LGBTIQA+ safe place.
“Universal is an evolution of the Midnight Shift, rather than a revolution,” explains owner Jim Kospetas, who plans to respect the special role that the venue has played for the LGBTIQA+ community and continue its long-held legacy of inclusivity.
Kospetas contacted Show Technology with a brief requiring “masses of beams and good sight lines throughout the venue”.
Tim Macfie of TDM Productions was chosen to design the lighting system. “They wanted someone who could meet

USA - Taylor Swift celebrated the release of her new album, Lover by surprising fans with a bubble-filled sky over Central Park. While Swift’s productions usually feature plenty of confetti, Swift opted for the eco-friendly Bubbleworks effect for the performance of Shake It Off live on ABC’s Good Morning America.
“What a privilege to work with Taylor and a dream come true to create this moment in her show,” says Bubbleworks founder Adam Williams. “We wanted to do something big for her fans and create a theatrical bubble experience beyond her wildest dreams.”
The choreographed bubble effect filled the stage and floated over the thousands of fans who lined up 24 hours early for the show.
(Jim Evans)

USA - Tony Award-winning lighting designer Ken Posner selected Ayrton Mistral and Diablo-S fixtures for the Broadway musical, Beetlejuice, and the Off-Broadway one-act play, Long Lost. Beetlejuice opened in April at the Winter Garden Theatre and has achieved hit status; Long Lost, by Pulitzer Prize-winner Donald Marguelies, made its New York premiere at The Manhattan Theatre Club’s Stage I with a six-week run.
Posner has many notable credits on Broadway, Off-Broadway and in American regional theatre. He was the lighting designer for Wicked and Hairspray.
Posner’s use of Ayrton’s Mistral on Beetlejuice marked his first deployment of Ayrton fixtures. His associate lighting designer, Anthony Pearson, and moving light programmer, David Arch, collaborated in the decision to use the 300W spot luminaires after ACT Ligh

South Korea - To deliver arena-filling sound as efficiently as possible, TechData Co recently installed an end-to-end JBL Professional networked audio system at the Changwon NC Park baseball stadium.
Changwon NC Park is a 22,000-seat baseball stadium which opened in 2019, replacing Masan Stadium as the home of the NC Dinos professional baseball team. The stadium features four tiers of seating that curve around home plate, leaving the outfield side open to the air.
To deliver premium sound across every seat while minimizing sound leakage to neighbouring residential and commercial areas, Changwon NC Park required an ultra-focused, efficient and highly scalable sound system. To achieve the client’s goals, TechData designed and installed an extensive Harman networked audio system featuring JBL loudspeakers, Crown amplifiers, Soundcraft mixing consoles and BSS signal proc

USA - Nashville-based designer Chris Lisle was already working on the festival’s main and second stages when he was approached by Lollapalooza PM Brandon Sossamon about creating the Perry’s Stage rig.
As is typical of EDM stages, Perry’s was dominated by video. So, Lisle and his assistant LD Erik Parker began their design by layering video panels supplied by Go Vision. Then came the critical task of filling the gaps in the Z truss configuration of those panels with lighting from Bandit Lites. A key element that held everything together in this intricate, tightly woven multi-level rig were 78 Chauvet Professional COLORado Solo Battens.
“Perry’s Stage was an impressive structure, but considering all we had going on with this design, the space was relatively tight,” explains Lisle. “Much of our concept for the rig was based on Z-shaped trussing from Reed Ri

Argentina - The Alliance Group, which brings together four of the most important nightclubs in San Carlos de Bariloche, has invested in Claypaky Axcor 300 moving heads for its Cerebro nightclub. Macaio Argentina is the country’s distributor of Claypaky lighting products.
The installation, carried out by the staff of Roberto Maqui, features an array of Axcor Spot, Wash and Beam fixtures.
“We chose Claypaky not only for its performance and quality but also because we have known the brand for years,” says Carlos Zeiss, CEO of The Alliance Group. “Despite intensive use they usually require very little maintenance.” These attributes, combined with the fixtures’ low power consumption, contributed to the purchase of the fixtures.
Roberto Maqui also performed the programming and commissioning of the Axcor fixtures.
(Jim Evans)

Czech Republic - Lighting designer Jiri Roucek is enjoying a busy summer as the LD for leading Czech pop-rock band Krystof and has also created the production design for the main stage of the 2019 Ceske Hrady Festival tour, a two-day event with an identical line-up that visits eight castle and cultural locations around the Czech Republic.
Krystof is headlining this year’s Ceske Hrady tour as well as playing their own shows concurrently. The tour presents the best of Czech ‘multi-genre’ rock - from psy-core favourites Dymytry to crazy punk anarchy with Visaci Zamek - to mixed, family-friendly, sold-out crowds at every stop.
The format is two stages set up side-by-side and ‘flip-flopped’ both exclusively using Robe moving lights supplied by ZL Production which also supplies audio, video and staging. ZL has been servicing this event since 2013.
This year,

China - A High End Systems Hoglet 4 is providing big control for a new outdoor multimedia installation in China.
Two times each night, a lake in the park in Liaocheng, Shandong Province comes alive with lighting, lasers, mist, flames and fountains. The free half-hour interaction enthrals up to 10,000 spectators with the colourful, watery spectacle.
LD Theo Cox - a High End Systems Hog 4 lighting console user - chose the smaller, more compact member of the Hog family for this project. “I elected to programme with a Hoglet 4, as this was the right piece of kit to leave in permanent situ after the shows were up and running,” he explains. “As well as the nightly timecode shows, there was a requirement to run a few simple cues manually, and a physical console was desired but it had to be streamlined. So with only two kinds of fixtures to program, and no need for lot

USA - Utah Festival Opera & Musical Theatre is a popular five-week summer festival in Logan, Utah, that presents four fully staged works in repertory at the Ellen Eccles Theatre. Lighting designer Chris Wood, who just wrapped up his seventh season working on the festival as part of a top-notch cast and crew, had the opportunity to use Elation Artiste Picasso LED profile moving heads on this year’s productions - Newsies, West Side Story, Mary Poppins, and The Marriage of Figaro.
4 Wall in Las Vegas recommended the Picasso to Wood and although the fixture entered the lighting specification somewhat late, which didn’t give the designer much time to familiarize himself with it, he says he got better acquainted with the light through fixture documentation. “I appreciate that Elation puts out a lot of photometric data,” Wood says, “which

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