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LD-AT-LARGE
PROJECTION LIGHTS & STAGING NEWS
Heavy Metal Thunder
By NookSchoenfeld
I’ve been having a lot of fun
this year doing something
I don’t often do — lighting
heavy metal tours. While it’s
not my favorite kind of music, I
am having a blast. I mean, what
other genre of music enables
you to hit 160 cues in a threeminute
song?
Every year I am hired to design
total productions for music
festivals. This summer I designed
a touring metal festival called
Mayhem. Lots of up-and-coming
rock artists showcased their talents
before the bands Disturbed
and Slipknot hit the main stage
after the sun went down. When I
design these festival shows I usually
have to speak to LDs from all
the bands and then design something
that everyone is happy
with. It was helpful that I already
had spoken with Disturbed and
had been asked to program their
lights for the upcoming year-long
tour. Now I just needed to talk to
Slipknot’s designer so we could
design something. The problem
was that they did not have an LD
— or a production manager.
Designing the Rig
LD@L
The first thing I had to do was
to figure out if we could afford
any video elements. I tried to
talk the tour sponsors into using
some Martin LC Series low-res
LED display panels. From 30 feet
away they look great. The plan
was to use them for all the bands
to play media content and then
advertise the sponsors between
acts. But they nixed it, so I went
back to thinking about 1980s rock rigs.
I did have a budget before I sat down to
draw up my ideas, which made life easier.
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I love the old huge PAR rigs the metal bands used to
have, but they’re not cheap anymore.
I like to use a lot of lights for rock bands.
They don’t have to be expensive moving
lights, but a lot of them with a 30-foot trim
height works great. The next thing I did
was look into using a bunch of moving LED
fixtures. These things can throw some light
these days and they move incredibly fast.
I got about 70 modified Martin MAC 300s
with LEDs out of Chicago’s Upstaging Inc. I
chose to put bunches of them in traveling
pods that could roll in and snap into place.
Plus, one multi-cable can power 24 of the
things.
I used these fixtures in place of PARs. I
love the old huge PAR rigs the metal bands
used to have, but they’re not cheap anymore.
To use PARs, you need massive amounts of
cable and dimmers, building power, guys
to put it up, and hours to focus each light,
everyday. It’s just not economical to run a
festival that way. Korn proved that last year
on their own festival tour. The lighting crew
went to work every morning and didn’t get
a break until the headliner hit the stage. My
guys loaded in at 9 a.m. and had little to do
from noon until load out.
For the remaining lights, I put bunches
of Robe Color Spots and Coemar Infinity
Washes into Swing Wing truss and scattered
them around. The secret to making it
look big is to use a bunch of metal. Truss is
cheap. If you spread your lighting fixtures
a few feet apart, you can make 25 moving
lites look a whole lot bigger than it is.
Spotlights
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I love calling spotlight cues and using
them in place of a front truss. Unfortunately,
the two headline acts on this bill
would rather never use them. But they are
okay with being lit by lights on the front
truss. So I came up with a viable solution.
I hung 13 Martin MAC 2000 Washes from
the front truss to front light the band and
set, and then I overhung some spot seats
with another four MACs. I put handles on
them and disconnected the pan and tilt
motors. I now had spotlights controlled
by my console and the band was not
blinded like a deer in the headlights.
Focus Time
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Focus? There is none. We load into outdoor
amphitheaters and the show starts
before the sun goes down. Each band wants
a house drape to block their set during set
change, so focusing during set change is not
an option. So I put the majority of lights into
Swing Wing truss and designed something
where the rigging points would be the same
in every gig. By not hanging each fixture every
day, they remain in the same place, hung
at the same angle every gig. We focused
one night during rehearsals and have not
touched a moving light focus since.
Backdrops
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With no video, every band has to have
at least one backdrop. You can count on
this just as you can count on the
fact that each singer will use
the word mother f@#$%r every
time they talk to their audience.
I ended up with three separate
traveler tracks and a bunch of
kabuki solenoids. For reliability,
I ended up renting solenoids
made by Chabuki, a “little guy”
with his own company from the
Northwest, who guaranteed his
gear to work every night. They
performed flawlessly.
Visual Assault
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Two weeks before the tour
started, I got a call from my old
friend Loz Upton. He had been
hired by Slipknot. This is great
since we are friends, but we
have never worked together.
Loz loves the rig, but wants to
add his own package of floor
lights and set lights. This is
wonderful because it will make
his show look different than
mine. I already have a bunch of
MAC 700 Wash fixtures and extra
strobes for Disturbed. Now
Loz adds in bunches of Color
Kinetics Color Blaze LED strip
lights as well as strobes and
movers to his massive set. All
these fixtures face the crowd
head on.
It’s quick to see that the two
separate bands have distinctly
opposite looking shows. We
both chose MA Lighting grand-
MA consoles, but that was the
only similarity. Disturbed’s light
show was all written in tight
sequential cue lists with lots of
extra bump cues for flashes and
eye candy. Everything was well scripted
and tight. I hired Rob Smith to direct
the show because of his pinpoint timing
and the fact that the band would be on
tour for a year and I can’t commit to that
schedule.
Loz didn’t have much programming
time with Slipknot. He had three days to
throw his show together so he chose the
punt path. He had a programmer come
out and help him get started. But after
a week, that didn’t pan out and the kid
quit, leaving Loz in a lurch. So I helped my
buddy out and ended up cleaning up the
programming he was left with and getting
his cues set up correctly.
The best way to describe Slipknot’s
show is that it is a visual assault. The band
desired a flashy bright show where they
could see the audience most of the time.
So Loz placed Mole Fey blinders all over
the place. He also pointed all the strobes
and heaps of Color Blazes directly at the
audience. We wrote about five different
looks for each song and relied on about
40 variations of cues to overwhelm the
audience’s visual senses. He did exactly
that. For the first time, I left a heavy metal
show where my ears didn’t ring, but my
eyes hurt.
Nook Schoenfeld is a freelance lighting
designer. He can be contacted at
nschoenfeld@plsn.com.