UK - Lighting design studio Michael Grubb Studio is celebrating a decade in business, having been set up by founder and managing director Michael Grubb in 2013.
Like most fledgling enterprises, Michael Grubb Studio began with just one solitary employee – Michael Grubb – working from a desk in a back bedroom. Now, 10 years on, the studio has grown to become an international winning lighting consultancy.
From the outset, Michael set out to assemble a team of creative and ambitious designers. His current team of 12 experts in their field demonstrate these skills and capabilities.
“I sought a team that possessed self-motivation, audacity, a willingness to take calculated risks, and a commitment to educating our clients about the possibilities that light could offer,” says Michael. “Our DNA and ethos remain at the core of everything we do, creativity, educat

France - The CHAUVET Professional team has built its spaces at JTSE (29-30 November) around the theme ‘Frame your scene: immersion in the frame’.
Visitors to Stand #85 and Boîte Noire (Black Box) #14 will find a wide range of new Chauvet Professional projectors designed to help them create striking visuals, enabling them to ‘frame their productions impeccably’. Among them are new additions to the Maverick Storm and COLORado families, all IP65-rated to suit all conditions.
The COLORado range is enhanced by the COLORado PXL Curve 12, an innovative new spotlight with 12 zooms and 12 individual tilts. This fixture is also to be presented at the JTSE Awards. Lighting designers will appreciate how this groundbreaking projector offers them new ways of creating a moving frame and conveying emotion through all their pictures. The controllability of each of the 12 fully

France - Lightware Visual Engineering has announced the opening of its new Experience Centre in France, located near Paris.
The new facility, situated in Vélizy-Villacoublay, serves as both the new office for the Lightware France team and a central hub for partners and customers throughout France, offering sales, customer, and technical support for all of Lightware's products.
Customers enjoy direct access to Lightware's comprehensive product range, which includes Vinx, MX2M, TPX, LARA, as well as their award-winning technologies such as Taurus UCX and UBEX. A training room, equipped with the latest Lightware devices, provides customers with a platform for product testing, roadmap discussions, and the exploration of emerging technologies.
The opening of this new facility in France marks a significant strategic move in Lightware's global expansion, says the co

USA - Ed Sheeran’s record-breaking international Mathematics Tour is as much a display of artistic and technological prowess as a testament to the impact a single performer can have - when supported by the right technology. Which, here, includes an expansive Clear-Com system supplied by Major Tom.
Typically, artists of Sheeran’s status tend to add more players, more instruments, and a fair bit of backing tracks to satiate their audiences' demands. As ever, Sheeran takes a different approach, creating a grand spectacle utilising innovative and unique staging and production elements while primarily performing alone, using a custom loop setup to generate accompanying sounds live in the moment, ensuring no show is the same.
Mathematics plays out on five stages placed around the floor of the venue, usually a stadium: one centre stage with a revolving rim allowing

USA - Front-of-house and monitor engineer Cooper Davis (The Regrettes, No Vacation, The Happy Fits) has chosen the Waves eMotion LV1 Live Mixer and Waves plugins for American singer songwriter Gus Dapperton’s 2023 world tour.
Cooper explains why he chose the Waves eMotion LV1 for this tour: “Superb sound! This is a club tour carrying audio and lights in a single trailer, so the audio package had to be compact, yet powerful. And this LV1 is definitely powerful.”
He continues: “Another advantage of using the LV1 mixer is the ease of use and its advanced engine. Operating the LV1 is quick and effective. The console is very user-friendly and the layout is customisable. Working on the console is like a free-flowing movement of listening, decision making and executing. Furthermore, the ability to scale the size of the system up or down depending on the needs of the s

USA - Tedeschi Trucks Band (TTB) is a popular contemporary blues band, known for musicianship and gripping live performances, so Nashville-based lighting designer Tony Caporale of design studio InfinitusVox was delighted to be asked to design a new lighting scheme for their live shows.
Tony has enjoyed an action packed 2023 schedule and TTB is a new client. They reached out to him after seeing some of his other work, particularly the Goose tour earlier in the year, for which he was lighting programmer, working closely with LD Andrew Goedde.
A long-term Robe advocate, when Tony started drawing up the plot, he looked to some of his most trusted moving lights - Fortes, Spiiders and MegaPointes - to help add that special magic and sparkle for TTB’s stage presentation.
It started as a summer shed and theatre tour and crossed over to arenas towards the later US dates

UK - Notts County has listened to fan requests and upgraded the sound system at its Meadow Lane stadium. Having experienced the challenges of an aging PA for several years, the football club opted to invest in a top-of-the-line solution to improve the matchday experience while also meeting all the life safety requirements of the 18,816-capacity ground.
To achieve these goals, Notts County turned to the combined benefits of Electro-Voice, Dynacord and Bosch equipment.
As the oldest professional football club in the world and a founder member of the football league, Notts County has the kind of history that generates a large and dedicated fan base. While established in 1862, the club has been playing its home games at Meadow Lane since 1910, with the current all-seater stadium built in the early 1990s. When these stands were completed, the club purchased a second-hand s

Croatia - A feature of this year’s Špancirfest, a Croatian street festival held every August since 1999 in Varaždin, was the appearance of the tribute band, The Croatian Pink Floyd Show. An array of Claypaky Sharpy X Frame/FD and Midi-B fixtures illuminated the dynamic live show.
Špancirfest took place throughout Varaždin’s city centre and featured various street performers, theatre shows, stand-up comedy, concerts and more.
The Croatian Pink Floyd Show is a project led by producer and sound engineer Johnny Grudić who founded the band in 2016 and launched performances two years later with the mission to give the audience the most authentic Pink Floyd experience possible. That's where Dino Petrina stepped in as a lighting designer. Production manager Denis Fulir was responsible for the show on the main stage with production by Croatian rental company IVAS Grou

Indonesia - In the past 20 years, hospitalisations in Indonesia for neurological-related conditions have increased rapidly, with stroke being the leading cause of death and disability in almost all hospitals in Indonesia. To improve stroke prevention, survival and rehabilitation, the Indonesian government’s Ministry of Health established a new hospital on Java to serve as the country’s epicentre of comprehensive brain and nerve health services.
The 11-storey hospital encompasses 11,000sq.m with beds for up to 350 patients. The hospital deployed steerable loudspeakers from Renkus-Heinz in their ballroom to deliver highly intelligible audio for medical seminars.
The hospital turned to PT Kairos Multi Jaya, Renkus-Heinz’s Indonesian distributor together with PT DKSI, for help outfitting the audio system in the ballroom. They recommended Renkus-Heinz’s ICLive X Se

Czechia - Christie RGB pure laser and 1DLP laser projectors lit up a host of spectacular projection mapping exhibits at Signal Festival in Prague. Christie technology - including Griffyn 4K50-RGB, M 4K25 RGB, and 4K10-HS projectors - featured in four exhibits at the festival of digital and creative culture, where international artists created a unique collection of rich and colourful experiences for attendees to enjoy.
“We were thrilled to collaborate with Christie, a brand synonymous with high-end projectors and visual innovation,” says Martin Posta, founder and CEO of Signal Festival. “This partnership is more than a meeting of minds; it’s a fusion of visionaries committed to pushing the boundaries of digital and immersive arts. With Christie’s cutting-edge technology, the Signal Festival delivered unparalleled experiences that captivated and inspired, solidifyin

Crisis Grants - The Royal Theatrical Fund has launched a one-off Emergency Crisis Grant Award to assist struggling workers in the industry during the cost-of-living crisis. The grant, open for applications from 1 November, is intended to help those who are "unable to meet their essential needs" due to an unexpected change in circumstances.
The non-profit organisation cited the continuing cost-of-living crisis as a factor behind the initiative, and suggested grants could be used to pay phone bills, buy school uniform and for food. Eligible applicants must derive their main income from the entertainment business and have worked professionally in the industry for seven years, with professional training included within that time.
The RTF launched a similar small crisis grant scheme, the Fleabag Support Fund, in 2021. The scheme awarded more than £1.7m to theatre industry

UK - Ever since Manchester UK-based fac365 secured the Optocore dealership in 2016, the pro audio RF and comms rental specialists have enjoyed increasing success with the brand, culminating in this year, with most notably the Festival Box.
Originally set up in the UK’s Greater Manchester area by Mike Hayes, fac365 supplies solutions right across the broadcast and entertainment spectrum - on both a sales and hire basis - including many interactive devices from the Optocore portfolio.
Festival Box itself is a point-to-point converter, which enables all signals and protocols to tunnel over the same fibre. It quickly established itself on tours by Billie Eilish and the Spice Girls and subsequently on Coldplay tours.
Having first debuted Optocore’s AutoRouter on the Head Full Of Dreams tour at the end of 2015, Alex Hadjigeorgiou introduced Festival Box to the band

UK - An Audient ASP8024-HE has been installed in The Live Room, a community support project in Birkenhead, northwest England, providing a venue for musicians wanting to reconnect with their passion. The arrival of the console followed a recommendation - and generous donation - from Pete Townshend.
The brainchild of public-spirited Iain Ogilvie, The Live Room offers a lifeline for musicians who are dealing with issues of addiction, isolation and poverty. “Our goal is to support the mental health of participants through team involvement, and signposting to professional agencies where necessary. In doing so, we help them overcome challenges through the creative process.”
The concept of The Live Room came to Iain whilst he was working at the Keyboard Repair Centre in The Wirral. “I noticed an increasing number of older, retired musicians asking for repairs to their o

UK - CJP Broadcast Service Solutions, systems integration, production and content digitisation specialist, has handed over a new virtual production environment at Solent University Southampton. The project involved creating an existing studio space into a very large, high performance, flexible environment which will serve students across a range of disciplines.
To provide the sort of facilities students will see in their working lives after graduation, the studio is equipped with the most widely used professional tools. The virtual volume is formed by a 10m x 3m LED wall, with a 4m x 2m ceiling, using AOTO RM2.3mm and MxH3.7mm LED panels powered by a network of Brompton video processors.
The screen displays virtual graphics generated by a multi-node Mo-Sys VP Pro XR server, the third university to utilise this system. At the heart of the VP Pro XR is the Unreal Engin

Europe - During the busy August festival season, Europe’s largest stages called upon the timing and audio spatialisation prowess of TiMax SoundHub to manage immersive soundscapes, as well as vocal and orchestral localisation, on the vast productions which draw the summer crowds.
In the UK, Edinburgh Military Tattoo is a pinnacle of the Edinburgh festival and pulls in a 9,000-strong audience every night to watch a spectacular and dynamic performance featuring military bands from all over the world. In new creative hands this year with sound designer Scott Willsallen of Auditoria heading up the audio team, TiMax SoundHub and TiMaxTrackerD4 were still a requirement to spatially reinforce and track hundreds of military musicians through the nightly, multi-act, performances. Referring to the high calibre technology deployed for the tattoo, creative director, Michael Braithwaite

UAE - Technology from LSC Control Systems is at the centre of the dimming and power distribution installations at two of Dubai’s latest fine-dining experiences. Specified and installed by Loud DXB for Solutions Leisure Group, the APS (Advanced Power System) and GEN VI systems from the Australian manufacturer provide both quality of performance and peace of mind for client and supplier alike.
At Dubai’s new En Fuego restaurant, a colourful and vibrant Latin American-themed dining destination at the Palm Dubai’s Atlantis resort, Loud specified both an APS configurable power system and GEN VI intelligent dimming/direct power system from LSC Control Systems. Meanwhile, for another of Solutions Leisure’s latest attractions, the Asia Asia restaurant and lounge with its ancient Spice Route theme, sited on Dubai’s stunning Business Bay, they again specified LSC’s GEN VI

Finland - Singer Kaija Koo celebrates an impressive 40-year career as one of the country’s most popular artists, and anniversary activities have included staging a massive show at Helsinki’s Olympic Stadium.
The high-profile one-off event featured an elegant and eye-catching production design evolved by the combined talents of Ari Levelä (set & video) and Pekka Martti (lighting), who chose to use a full grandMA3 system for lighting and video control.
The two have worked together as a visual team since 2016 and enjoy the creative benefits of pooling ideas and experiences to produce unique shows and spectaculars. This show followed an arena tour they completed at the end of 2022 featuring four powerhouse Finnish female singers, one being Kaija Koo.
Her management team was clearly impressed with their work and invited Ari & Pekka to present a design fo

USA - The ascent of bluegrass guitarist Billy Strings from van-and-trailer gigs to A-level arena touring is a testament to his mastery of traditional styles as well as his expansion of the genre into new realms of rock-influenced extended improvisations.
On the current leg of his 2023 amphitheatre and arena tour, Strings is enveloping his growing legions of jam-band fans through a robust system based on Meyer Sound Panther large-format linear line array loudspeakers. As with all recent tours, the system supplier on this outing is Nashville, Tennessee-based Major Tom US.
The regular tour schedule took a pause at the end of September for the third annual Billy Strings Renewal Festival in the mountain valley of Buena Vista, Colorado. Here, with the timely arrival of custom cabling and infrastructure from EMG, the tour’s complement of Panther loudspeakers became one of

Italy - It may not have rivalled the 200,000 or so spectators who used to watch chariot races there in ancient times, but the 70,000 fans who turned out at Rome’s Circus Maximus for Imagine Dragons’ show recently constituted a pretty good-sized crowd.
Making the only Italian stop on their Mercury World Tour, the Grammy- winning band from Las Vegas, didn’t disappoint.
Reflecting the mood of music and the stage ebullient persona of the band was a lively and upbeat light and video show by the Milan design studio Blearred that featured 100 Chauvet Professional Color Strike M motorised strobes from Zalight with service from Agora.
The Color Strike M fixtures were arranged on the upper frame of the three LED walls, as well as being aligned across the entire width of the stage deck and fixed to the trusses of the delay towers. From these positions, the multi-for

USA - Floridian rockers Tedeschi Trucks’ summer 2023 tour staging was dominated by soaring horizontal LED battens which displayed pixels of video content, driven by Hippotizer Karst+ MK2 media servers. The battens were interspersed with LED fixtures to create a dazzling series of audience blinders, colour and sweeping effects to set the scene for the band’s brand of American blues rock.
The lighting design and programming was delivered to the tour by Infinitus Vox, headed by Tony Caporale, who used a Hippotizer Karst+ MK2’s NDI feed to his Depence R3 pre-viz software. This meant that during pre-production, he could view all of the lighting and video design together, before controlling the Media Server via a grandMA3 console.
“Since pixel mapping was the main focus here, the Karst+ MK2 was the right Hippotizer for the job,” says Caporale. “It offers flexibi

Japan - Ryōgoku Kokugikan, also known as Ryōgoku Sumo Hall or Kokugikan Arena, is the only building dedicated to Sumo, Japan’s national sport, and has been home to many historic initiatives.
The origins of sumo began some 2000 years ago but in its modern form it only took hold around 300 years ago. Once established in Japan, it passed down from generation to generation.
Such is its status, there is no-one in Japan who has not heard of the Tokyo-based Ryōgoku Kokugikan. Sumo wrestlers practice here daily, dreaming of winning the Gift Cup, and since sumo is Japan’s national sport, His Majesty The Emperor sometimes comes to watch, and has seats reserved for him.
But Ryōgoku Kokugikan also hosts various other events during periods when sumo is not being held, including wrestling, concerts and corporate events.
Sumio Akashio, sound engineer at the Ryōgo

South Africa - Ayrton has announced a new distribution partner for South Africa - Planetworld.
Planetworld will be closely supported by current distributor, Bespoke Entertainment Solutions to ensure Ayrton’s current and prospective customers receive the very best in products, service and support.
Planetworld, already a well-established company in the consumer audio market, and familiar to the entertainment industry through its distribution of leading audio brands, recently launched its new Pro Division. The Planetworld Pro Team - formally Wild and Marr - is responsible for supplying both technical design and equipment into the pro AV systems and live entertainment markets. Ayrton will become the second major LED brand to strengthen its product portfolio, complementing its Leyard LED screen representation.
“The entire team at Planetworld and I are beyond exci

The Netherlands - The Essential Festival in Oost-Maarland became a centre of music and light on 16 September, thanks to Matrix Event Support. The festival, which featured a line-up of renowned dance DJs, regional artists and singers, was set against the picturesque backdrop of the river Meuse.
Using Showtec and Infinity fixtures, Matrix Event Support brought the magic to life with their spectacular lighting designs that illuminated both the Main Stage and the Hard Dance Stage.
Commissioned by Heijnens Audio - Light - Vision, Matrix Event Support left festival-goers in awe with their mesmerising lighting design at the festival. The Main Stage, a focal point of the event, was bathed in a vivid spectrum of colours with 50 Showtec Spectral M800 Q4 Tour RGBW LED spots. Sixteen Showtec DWE Audience Blinders and five Showtec Stage Blinder 4 DMX audience blinders were strateg

Europe/USA - Hailed as an ‘atypical pop star’ for her genre-bending musical styles, Rosalia Vila Tobella, known as Rosalía, is a Spanish artist who wears multiple creative hats, including as a singer/songwriter, producer, actress and musician.
With an impressive tally of 11 number-one singles in her home country, 12 Latin Grammy Awards, plus a host of other prestigious accolades throughout her music career, Rosalía is widely considered one of the most successful and influential Spanish vocalists of all time.
FOH engineer Ricky Ashford, who has been working with the singer for almost two years, has relied on a DiGiCo Quantum 338 and Quantum 225 digital mixing console for her latest Motomami world tour, which took in 68 dates at stadiums and arenas in Europe, Latin America, and North America, with Rosalía’s presence also gracing stages at world-renowned events

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