Colour Sound supplies Feeder’s Arrow tour
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Bryan Leitch is the band’s LD and visual designer and the person who took the tour to Colour Sound after previous excellent experiences with the west London based company. “It was a video-based tour so ideal for Colour Sound,” he comments. Colour Sound also invested in some new lighting fixtures to ensure that Bryan had exactly the rig he wanted.
Bryan has worked for Feeder since 2004. On this tour he was joined on the road by technician / crew chief - and Colour Sound regular - James Hind.
His creative inspiration for the design started with three festival shows last summer where they used an upstage screen split into three sections, a format that lead singer / guitarist Grant Nicholas really liked.
Another consideration for the overall design was that it had to be scalable to deal the wide range of venue sizes.
This touring version utilised 60 panels of Colour Sound’s proprietary BT-6 LED screen, configured as four tiles wide and five high (20 panels per screen) which was upped to six-high for the London show at Brixton Academy.
Video content was a mix of existing material and new footage which was created by Bryan - much of the new clips were shot on an iPhone 8 - then edited and complied to fit exactly to the screen specifications. This was replayed via a pair of Green Hippo v4 media servers.
New kit bought for the tour included Vintage Blaze 55s from Showtec, a very cool looking fixture combining a tungsten lamp, and a RGB LED background effect with strobe function plus colour macros for an extra dimension. The combination of both these dynamic light sources appealed to Bryan who describes them as “beautiful” lights. He particularly likes the fact that the LED sources are subtle and concealed, but their effect is high impact.
Six of these were utilised on the tour, rigged on the upstage truss which was also flying the video panels, fitted into Colour Sound’s practical and easy to rig touring frames.
Also new were ProLigts AIR6PIX moving LED battens. These offer individually controllable LED pixels, and both sides of the lightsources pivot to create classic ACL “fan” and “knot” looks. The idea of being able to bend the light like this really appealed to Bryan and the AIR6PIX offer something new and different from the plethora of LED battens out there.
Eight were rigged on four vertical upstage towers and used for both wash and effects looks. The count was boosted to 12 units for Brixton.
Bryan chose Robe’s new MegaPointes as the main moving light, with six on the rig, distributed between four upright trusses at the back, a mid-stage truss overhead and two slightly shorter downstage vertical sticks of truss, also on the deck.
“It’s a rock show,” says Bryan. “MegaPointes were perfect for this type of set. Six was all we needed.” The MegaPointe count was upped to 16 fixtures for Brixton.
In addition to these, six Robe LED Wash 300s provided filler light, some Source Fours on the mid truss were the basic key lighting and six Claypaky Stormy LED strobes were also attached to the upright trusses along with six 4-lite blinders.
Also for Brixton, Colour Sound supplied what Bryan describes as “The mother” of all confetti blasts to help bring the show to a tumultuous close.
To accommodate this, a front truss was installed over the dancefloor / audience area complete with four automated fan ‘spreaders’, and two stadium confetti blasters were positioned in the pit.
The two Avolites Sapphire Touch consoles and the two Green Hippo video servers were supplied by MIRRAD.
Colour Sound sent three extra technicians to Brixton - Alex Bratza, Simon Robertson and Alfie Hursthouse.
(Jim Evans)
