ADJ doubles up at At Birds of a Feather festival
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Located at the picturesque Thornhill Drag Strip in a little town called Morning View in Kentucky, Birds of a Feather is a small family-friendly festival that hosts a mixture of local and regional touring acts. At the top of this year’s line-up was Tropidelic, a band that blends reggae, hip-hop and high energy funk alongside ‘trashgrass’ string quartet The Rumpke Mountain Boys and electro-psychedelic-funk-rock band Dizgo, which gives a flavour of the musical diversity on offer. To ensure compliance with local COVID-19 rules, each household attending the festival in 2020 had a designated camping spot and were also allocated to their own socially-distanced space – marked out on the ground – in front of the stage area.
Lighting and audio production for the festival was provided, for the second year running, by Waveform Live. The company’s principle, Michael ‘Crazylegs’ Hemann, designed the lighting rig and also operated it for the duration of the three day event.
“It’s a great little festival, but it’s also a hard gig to work as an lighting operator,” explains Michael. “This year only one of the bands had their own LD, so I ran the whole show. There were two 30’ stages, which flip-flopped throughout the day. The music started at around 11am and continued almost non-stop all day and night, with the last band finishing at 3 or 4 in the morning! Because of this format, there can be a bit of a grey area as to which act is the headliner on each day, so to avoid any possibility of bad feeling I used an identical rig on each of the two stages. Of course this also made life easier when it came to programming.”
Michael has been a loyal ADJ user since the early days of his production company and his current lighting inventory consists exclusively of ADJ equipment. One of his favourite fixtures, both for his one-off festival work and when touring with The Rumpke Mountain Boys, is the Focus Spot 4Z and it served as the workhouse moving light for this rig. Six of the fixtures ran across the upstage truss on each stage, while two more units were positioned on truss totems flanking the drummer.
For his ground package, Michael utilized six of ADJ’s Inno Spot Pro moving heads on each stage. For mid-air aerial effects, Michael utilized a fixture that is a much more recent addition to his inventory, the Hydro Beam X1.
“I’ve used both of the Hydro Series Beam fixtures and really like them, they are great value IP65 moving heads that are ideal for festivals,” states Michael.
Doing double duty providing colour washes for the stage and also key light for the performers, six 12P HEX IP fixtures were rigged to the downstage trusses of each stage. Completing the rig was one of ADJ’s Entourage pro-grade touring ‘faze’ machines.
