"I've been one of the beta testers for the grandMA2, and this year marks the first time that I felt I could exclusively spec the grandMA2," reports Mark Butts who serves as programmer for the tour, with Chesney and McGraw, and programmer and lighting director for the CMA Music Festival. "I'm now specifying them for all my new projects."
The Brothers of the Sun Tour is the tenth that Butts has done with Chesney. The all-stadium tour features "simple straight trusses but a lot of stuff. I decided to go with four grandMA2 full-size just to manage the complexity of the show," says Butts.
The consoles need to manage large amounts of data. "Kenny has 400 lights and lots of video - 24 layers of HD video and four servers with a custom Control Freak DMX bridge. We did a whole multiuser network. The features on the grandMA2 full-size are really great when you have multiple programmers working on the same file and the same network."
Among the lights controlled by the grandMA2s are 16 Clay Paky Sharpy, which lighting designer Mike Swinford configured in four groups of four mounted atop giant Marshall amp replicas.
The four-night shoot for the CMA Music Festival featured 380 lights controlled by five grandMA2s on two separate control systems and one pre-vis suite. "It was more of a modern design," Butts says. "It seemed like a really good time to upgrade. We had all these Jarags, and the grandMA2 consoles were great at managing all that stuff."
Butts reports that the grandMA2 consoles "worked great and really made my life easy on these gigs." He also gives kudos to "the MA Lighting team and A.C.T Lighting for doing such a fantastic job supporting the systems".
(Jim Evans)
