Live show - Education resources?

Embarrassing confession time: I've never had a chance to use moving lights during a live show.

I have some experience during theatrical shows and that's easy enough to cue, but when it comes down to a live concert, I have no idea how to execute a show.

My live experience has been in good old 60 Can Shows and the like. No one had the money for movers, but now things are cheaper & I fear getting thrown into the deep end.

I have ZERO idea how to make them work for me on the console. There seems to be a gap in the knowledge base as to making things work. I have all of the tools, but no idea how to make those things into art other than my 60 can show Submaster Fader / Bump Button type thing.

A familiar refrain in most training talks is to make lots of macros.... I have no idea why. Can you really run a smooth show from macros without having things flashing in & out instead of fading? The content of said macros seems to be a big secret. I'm assuming that's akin to one's art you don't want people to copy, but without a basic understanding of structure or having any chance to experiment at all, I'm clueless.

Macros?... CueLists?... Then why have Faders?

So does anyone have any decent resources for my gap in knowledge? I think it might be called Experience, but I'd take anything.

 

On a side note, I'm considering purchasing one of those $60 Chinese knock-off movers just for educational use out of my own pocket. I don't want to arrive at the venue to find my TD got a moving light package & I have 2 hours to make a show.

 

Thanks anyone!

Parents
  • there are two resources usually mentioned when it comes to live stuff:

    www.youtube.com/watch
    this is based on his humongous showfile. but there is enough stuff in there that might give you a hint on workflow.

    blog.etcconnect.com/.../

    and then there's also this:
    blog.etcconnect.com/.../


    i would start with:
    a wrapped cuelist with color for your rig (pressing Go gives you a new color), fader as Rate Master
    a wrapped cuelist with positions for your rig (pressing Go gives you a new position), fader as Rate Master
    a color effect (i.e. 917) on a sub, two faders, one effect size, the other effect rate)
    a movement effect (i.e. 901) on a sub, two faders, one effect size, the other effect rate)
    and an intensity sub

    from this you can start playing with timing, splitting up your rig, maybe with inhibits, maybe with separate sets of the stuff above for backlights, front lights, washers, spots...
  • www.youtube.com/watch was exactly what I was referring to when I mention the "Lots of macros" bit. He literally skipped over the subject. I've watched that video 3 or 4 times now and although it has been the most helpful, half of it is gibberish to me because I have a hole in my understanding.

    So correct me if I'm wrong, but if you had a cuelist for colour, that would mean everything would be one colour and you'd have to cycle through the entire list to get the colour you want? This doesn't make sense to me. What am I not understanding?

    Will check out the other two links... THANK YOU!
Reply
  • www.youtube.com/watch was exactly what I was referring to when I mention the "Lots of macros" bit. He literally skipped over the subject. I've watched that video 3 or 4 times now and although it has been the most helpful, half of it is gibberish to me because I have a hole in my understanding.

    So correct me if I'm wrong, but if you had a cuelist for colour, that would mean everything would be one colour and you'd have to cycle through the entire list to get the colour you want? This doesn't make sense to me. What am I not understanding?

    Will check out the other two links... THANK YOU!
Children
  • Assuming you are wanting to busk a show rather than just build a complete cue list as you would for a theatrical, then try doing something like this.

    Record some focus pallets eg FP1 movers all pointing down into the center of the stage. FP2 movers pointing at the back of the audience and so on.

    Then one of the things you can do with macros is record a macros like Sneak 5 FP2 and Sneak 1 FP2 and Sneak 15 FP2

    Now when you run your show you can just select your movers and if they were at FP1 run one of those macros and they move slowly to that position.

    You can do the same thing with Colour Pallets as well.

    If you use a magic sheet then you can give yourself more freedom and not bother with the macro as you can have sneak 1 sneak 2 sneak 5 sneak 15 as buttons on the sheet. Have buttons for the fixtures and groups and also for the colour pallets and then just hit the group, hit the sneak you want and hit the colour of focus you want.

    Re the cuelist, I think the idea would be to set your lights with 2 or more colours giving a "look" to the stage, record that, then change something, record that, so you would have a set of transitions for a song and hitting go moves you through the sequence which repeats. You could record several of these for different song styles.
  • two things:
    my wrapped color cuelist: they're just cues with different looks, one look could be everything in one color, or two colors with a pattern or a rainbow or whatever tickles your fancy. so they question is how to get from 1 to 4 without fading through everything. that's where the rate master comes into play. pull it down (rate 0, i.e. stop), press Go 3 times and wait for the right moment, then bring the fader up.

    one part of the whole macro thing was this (for the reason why i write "was", read on ;) ):
    changing the timing of manually recalled stuff, be it from the number keypad, from a magic sheet or from direct selects is done in 0 seconds by default. you can change this either by using Sneak or by changing the manual timing associated with parameter categories. the Sneak time also can be changed, either just for this one time by using the command line, or more permanently in the setup. both setup changes can be macroed.
    so the workflow was: find out if the song is a ballad or up-tempo. execute the proper macros, i.e. 8sec color fades because it's a ballad, and then use e.g. direct selects without risking 0 second changes.

    the reason why i write "was": in 2.6 a Manual Time fader was introduced. you can have a fader that decides how quickly stuff happens. you can have more than one of those faders and filter them to different stuff, like Color, or Group 5, or Chan 1+3+5+7 or a combination of those.

    so nowadays you could have a set of manual time faders and use the quick way of recalling stuff spontaneously by magic sheet or direct selects with the planned look of timed fades.

    but of course the "old" macro ways still work :) and can be combined with the new: macros to change one or a set of manual time faders.

    the possibilities are endless! :)
Related