Looking for a BIG desk

[steve h]

One of the problems I can see is 2 or 3 guys on 1 desk have to have some way of communicating, on stage, ?in silence? as to what their ideas are. You say you want the piece to be known for its lighting as much as classical spectacular, and thats all the planning that will go into it, and made easy to do so by the fact that its all cued ready to go.

 

You say that you want it to have the same impact as CS yet you also say the lights change with the mood and not be a mess, yet for me the only way to do this easily would be simple colour washes. If you ask 2 or 3 guys to busk the show then they will all have different ideas and so different things will happen, or you go to the flip side of things in which you have the guys (and gals!) memorising cue after cue of manual changes, quick changes in time to the music.

 

but I also know just how much work and thought would need to go into producing a state whilst under pressure and in time with the music and in the same style of the music.

 

If you want the lights to be noticed for the right reasons you need to give them something really special, and I dont think that you will be able to do that mixing it live. I have a feeling that possibly the peeps on the desk will only be there for entertainment purposes for when the attention spans start to fade. And remember if im going to a concert its to hear the music, not watch 3 guys move faders

 

Im a strong believer that lights shouldnt be noticed in most things, only the effects of them...except maybe when called for in gigs etc., for instance I find the intelligent lights that are sitting on the floors of most TV sets along the back wall immensly annoying and IMHO only put there for the way they look, not what they do

 

firstly I want to bring back the art of live mixing, creating a plot on the fly

 

Finally, the art of live mixing is still alive, ask most peeps who do work in schools and im sure they will tell you that, apart from maybe the shows, pretty much every other event is done live, from the gigs to fashion shows...I only get to see the exam pieces once, once with lights and then the actual exam, all done live.

 

Steve

[gherriott]

Finally, the art of live mixing is still alive, ask most peeps who do work in schools and im sure they will tell you that, apart from maybe the shows, pretty much every other event is done live, from the gigs to fashion shows...I only get to see the exam pieces once, once with lights and then the actual exam, all done live.

 

Steve

 

This is exactly where they idea has eminated from, from many years of me doing exam pieces on the fly froma scribbled piece of paper handed to me 30 seconds before the exam. I am not say this will be easy, memorising cues, or busking them or whatever, it will be a challenge, maybe even creating a new way of scripting cues, like musical notes, marking in ideas on a score and following that it is all a work in progress idea at the moment and will only be able to come across issues as and when we rehearse and play with the ideas. Potential problems have beoing pointed out through the course of this topic which has been very useful and I welcome them, so thank you for those. I may be biting off more than I can chew, but you have to start somewhere.

[Caldair]

I'm not quite sure what you want the FOH and the onstage desks to control, but as far as I understand it you want to make an orchestral concert/lighting show with the lighting ops doing, essentially, the My God This Console Is Big And I Have No Submasters Dance? And you have 120 dimmer/intensity channels?

 

The way they did big lighting cues (more than a few faders per hand per op) in the ol' days, I've been told, was that they made cardboard... uhm, can't think of the English word at the moment... stencils? You take a piece of cardboard, cut down to each fader at the level you want it to end up, and push all the faders up using the stencil. You'd need another one from above to push down faders. I'm not saying it's not complicated, but that's how they used to pull it off...

This requires that the whole thing is (in cardboard stencil terms) preprogrammed, though I suppose you could make stencils for red, blue etc. and busk using those... Though I'm glad I wouldn't be the one doing it :P , and the lighting ops would probably need to talk more on stage to make sure they're trying to do the same thing.

Without stencils you're stuck either just moving a few (literally a handful) of faders each time, meaning small and not necessarily pretty changes throughout.

 

Another option is to cheat and use submasters, but have a lot of additional faders that don't do much.

[gherriott]

I'm not quite sure what you want the FOH and the onstage desks to control, but as far as I understand it you want to make an orchestral concert/lighting show with the lighting ops doing, essentially, the My God This Console Is Big And I Have No Submasters Dance? And you have 120 dimmer/intensity channels?

 

exactly! The stencil idea is one that has been considered too, again 'props'/tools that would make it interesting to watch. The show is not just a concert, it is and will be advertised as a show, the audience being totally surrounded by both sound and light from live sources, and by surrounded I mean lights behind the audience to the sides you name it, even possibly under them (and yes I will look into the logistics and safety surrounding that idea, so lets not go off topic on that), I want it to be a moving experience both visually and audioly (is that a word?!).

[paulears]

with a fader per dimmer channel - then without grouping/cue/looks/scenes/pallettes you don't have the manual dexterity to do really simple stuff with this number of channels. That's why multi-preset conrols evolved. With 3 people 40 channels each, a simple change from blues to reds is nigh on impossible. Using every digit on both hands, the most dimmers you can flash to full is 30 from 3 people - assuming the bump buttons are with a hands spead apart.

 

 

I think that if this project, in this form was offered to me with the constraints of a huge manual desk, I'd be walking away. A great idea, to incorporate the ops, but can they actual produce good and exciting lighting - I'm not sure?

[Ken Coker]

I am at a loss, given that this is presumably an educational project of some description, what the academic point of this project is. If I were supervising it I would certainly want more clarification of the aims. Is it about:

 

1. The technology of desks

2. Operators and technology

3. Operators as artists

-3.1 Operators as improvisors

4. Developing some kind of notation for desk operation.

 

All of the above seem reasonable areas of research but I'm just a bit confused.

Suggest reading Derek Bailey's book on improvisation and Scott Palmer's essay "A Place to Play " in The Potentials of Space. Scott has some interesting things to say about operator as performer.

 

KC

[gherriott]

This is not a research project or educational project, this is an actual production. With regards to the aims, they would be a combination of operators as artists, notation for desk operation and operators as improvisors. I cannot stress enough that at this moment in time we are still experimenting, as with any new idea it takes time, perserverance and guts to stick by that idea. The initial idea is still evolving each day as new obsticles are reached, but surely that is they way things are created.

[Caldair]

Hmm. The question is, do you want the ops to constantly run around tweaking like sound techs do? Or do what they normally do but on a bigger desk to force them to move around a bit (which looks more interesting than...well, what we normally look like)?

 

If you want them to tweak, you'd either:

-have them work on a two or three preset desk, just setting up the next cue (and one guy on a modern desk for palettes, chases, shapes etc), or

-have one guy actually doing the lights on a modern desk and the rest pushing faders that don't do anything.

 

If you're not using presets, remember that the desks nowadays can have all those faders be submasters anyway, so you can have single channel subs where you want them but also the option of group and fx faders just to make things managable.

[gherriott]

similar to the first option, presets but also a mixture of runnig around tweaking. There are two concepts really, first one being colours represent registers of the orchestra, colours represent volume of the orchestra or colours represent sections of the orchestra, or secondly intensities reflect the previous options. I am currently exploring a a mixture where the light is sectioned according to the orchestra, intensity is relative to volume and colour is relative to pitch, but when it actually comes down to it, it really ends up just being whatever the operator feels represents that sound/feeling/tonality of the music, as I found when I was mixing light to a cd track for experimentation purposes.

 

Can I just say here thank you very much everyone for your comments so far, it has tested my concepts and changed them too due to you flagging up possible issues. I know this topic has digressed to a discussion about the plausability of the production now, but in a way I am glad. Please do however keep those suggestions of desks and suggestions of desk sources coming though!

 

Greg

[Paul J Need]

I am at a loss KC

 

This is not a research project or educational project, this is an actual production. With regards to the aims, they would be a combination of operators as artists, notation for desk operation and operators as improvisors. I cannot stress enough that at this moment in time we are still experimenting, as with any new idea it takes time, perserverance and guts to stick by that idea.

 

I'm with Ken on this one: The development of memory lighting control systems achieved a number of fundemental things:

Mainly the ability to replay a lighting state instantly and accurately and over a time pre-determined to fit the action, the mood or say, the music. This allows for consistancy ( there is reason why a certain channel will have been set to 37% rather than 41% for example - both in terms of the mechanics of the dimmers being used, the lantern intself ( 500w,1000w, 5,000w each has its own filement and mechanical characteristic which makes them react differently when fading or building in level) and to balance the scene to the eye inkeeping with what is required at the time: when using a manual desk; it is more than likely each time a cue is 'played 'back' human error plays its part to destroy, in part, what the lighting designer had in mind.

 

Most operators will employ a technique of grouping colours, focus positions etc on to a sub-master, or "pallette", removing the need to control each individual channels during the actual performance, therefore a 120 way desk would be reduced to say 24 sub masters.

 

During live music performances; and I have lost count how many I have lit, one wants all of the pallettes instantly available for use; to bring in to play as and when one wants to use them; a virtually impossible task when using 120 faders; hence my comments about things getting messy.

 

If you are wanting to make more of a statement about how the lighting is operated during a performance - simply install a video camera above the desk and project a beautiful image on to a giant screen for the audience to see. Rather distracting I feel, taking focus away from the music and the lighting also perhaps !

[paulears]

Even more controversial is the issue of performance. When I see a band with an on-stage DJ, I still squirm. I've kind of accepted that a DJ can be a perfomer, maybe even accepting that they could be termed 'musicians' in a slightly skewed definition of the usual understanding - but lighting people as performers, is for me just a step too far. I know from the Bentham era on, we've had this concept of colour music - but the entire aim here seems to be to turn operation into art - which although perhaps an interesting challenge won't be understood by the audience, unless they can relate to what the 'artistes' are actually doing. We've had years of Top of the Pops where people twiddled, prodded and turned knobs that did nothing at all, and much of what these on stage lighting performers do will not be obvious. After all, watching a pianist is never exciting - listening to it can be.

 

With something as odd as this, there's probably some funding available too!

[Ken Coker]

I must make it quite clear that I have no inherent problem with the project, the relationship between "operator"/artist/performer is an interesting one to explore; quite how anyone can make a degree out of board opping escapes me - although even now I imagining that RB students are sharpening their keyboards to tell me - but it is worth mentioning that both PJN and I like operating our own shows*.

 

All I'm saying is the project seems a bit ill-defined. Scriabin, as the OP will know "wrote" a piece for light and there is a view of it here. Similarly, Bentham wittered on and on about "colour music" for centuries; if opening the covers didn't make me seriously ill I'd look in it now for some pertinent reference. Experiment should indeed be encouraged, but need to have method and contextualization to make it valid..and a few other thing that I forget.

 

KC

 

*Actually, what I really like most is someone else operating our shows and PJN taking me for a drink during the event.

[weatherhead]

the problem to me isn't one of whether the lighting op can be regarded as an 'artist', but rather why you want the audience to be seeing them? On the one hand you're saying your production is going to be an extravaganza of light and music, so you are wanting the audience to be actually watching the lighting effects in themselves. On the other hand, you're saying you want the audience to be watching the lighting ops running around and twiddling. I seriously think more art is involved if you just did it with a lighting guy clearly visible on a normal console doing his thing, and make the effects as wowing as possible. If you're wanting the lighting guy to be a performer, then surely he is more performing his normal art on what nowadays we would term a 'proper' lighting console. You wouldn't have a keyboard player on stage then replace his customary rig of (say) five keyboards with one acoustic piano, because it limits his artistic options. Similarly, if your lighting guy is going to be "artistic" then he'll want his normal tools which allow him to be as creative as possible and what he feels comfortable with. Speaking for myself and I believe the vast majority of lighting ops I know of, that certainly ISN't a 120 fader, full manual desk.

 

Just my £0.02

[Jimi]

I think this is a fantastic idea. Just because something can be done more efficently and with more consistent results, it doesn't mean that there isn't room for a little fun. I'm sure people like Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Lee Lewis, would have had a far eaiser time of it if they'd stuck to playing their instruments with their hands, rather than using their teeth or feet. I'm sure also that many bands would sound technically better if everything was just mixed down before the gig and they just mimed along ... wouldn't that give you a cleaner and more consistent show night on night?

 

I think the question here isn't so much "Will this give the technically best lighting we can have?", it's more down to two guys doing something, because they can. For the sheer spectacle of it. But just as learning to play the piano is no easy thing and takes rehearsal and practice, so in my mind would this. I can't see it being an easy feat, but I think it's something that's damn well worth trying. Yes it could fallon its arse, then again ...

 

I'm all for experimenting and having FUN! God knows there's too many people that aren't willing to do things just for ***** and giggles anymore.

 

Just my opinion (for what it's worth)

 

//Jimi

[weatherhead]

hey, I don't disagree entirely, I definitely know about doing things "just because you can". It's that attitude that attracts me to experimental physics, however....

it's one thing learning to play an electric guitar with your teeth as a crowd pleasing tour de force, it's quite another to give jimi hendrix a fender dreadnought acoustic and expect him to be able to get his sound. Maybe go for 40 or 50 submasters, raher than 120 individual channels??