China - Showtec International recently partnered with Harman Professional Solutions to create a visual experience at the Beijing International Automotive Exhibition.
Showtec was hired to provide lighting for the biennial auto show in which manufacturers such as Lexus, BMW and Mercedes-Benz showcase their latest luxury models to the largest and fastest growing auto market in the world. In order to ensure an elegant atmosphere with immersive lighting, Showtec relied on an array of Martin by Harman lighting fixtures.
“High-end events like the Beijing Auto Show require state-of-the-art lighting solutions to highlight the importance of the new innovations being exhibited,” comments Henry Ang, managing director, Showtec International, Singapore. “With this goal in mind, the Martin fixtures were a perfect fit, helping to transform the venue into a supercharged visual e

UK - Theatrical lighting rental specialist, systems integrator and venue installer SLX has invested in nine new Zero 88 FLX range consoles with the purchase of seven FLX S24s and two FLX S48s.
The decision to purchase by SLX was particularly driven by the transition to LED based lighting rigs in so many venues at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where SLX is supplying lighting to the Underbelly.
“We needed a console that was straightforward and easy to use with the power to control a reasonable amount of moving and / or LED fixtures with all their parameters, and FLX was a perfect and cost-effective solution,” comments Ruari Cormack, business development manager for SLX.
He also mentioned that the two companies are near neighbours, with SLX headquartered in Bristol, with facilities in London and Exeter, and Zero 88’s manufacturing plant just across

USA - Luke Bryan’s current What Makes You Country tour includes stops at New York’s MetLife Stadium, Chicago’s Wrigley Field, and Dodger Stadium (it will be the first country act to headline there).
The tour, which resumed on 31 May before 40,000 fans at Toronto’s Rogers Centre, features a mix of familiar hits and new material. Contributing to the dynamic lighting frame for this free-flowing energetic performance are 100 Chauvet Professional Maverick MK Pyxis and ÉPIX Strip Tour fixtures, supplied by Elite Multimedia.
Justin Kitchenman, who has been Luke Bryan’s lighting designer since 2012, is using 20 floor-positioned Maverick MK Pyxis fixtures to line the thrust and B stage, as well as the upstage side of the set behind the band.
In addition to the Pyxis units, Kitchenman is deploying 80 ÉPIX Strip Tour linear fixtures. The 1-meter RGB units

Norway - Klubben i Røverstaden is a new venue in Oslo offering a broad range of concerts and club concepts. With its 750-capacity it has an intimate atmosphere, but at the same time caters for major touring acts, both national and international. Earlier this year, it took delivery of the first DiGiCo SD12 system to be installed in a Norwegian club, supplied by DiGiCo’s Norwegian distributor Scandec.
Røverstaden, which directly translated into English means ‘city of outlaws’, is situated in the basement of a three-storey building in the city centre, in what used to be the slum of Oslo, an area that was famous for moonshine and brothels and where outlaws ruled. Its proximity to the royal castle prompted the demolition of the entire area, but in the 1960s it became a bohemian hang-out and the building housed Club7, followed by Sardine's. These were iconic venues and fro

South Africa - Kilowatt AV has taken productions up a notch since acquiring 200 Absen D2V indoor panels. The panels have been on shows continuously for the past eight months on events including Ultra Music Festival, Adidas Product Launch, Food Lovers Market Annual Conference and a long list of others.
“We were the first in Cape Town to see the Absen demo by DWR and the first in the Cape to place an order,” comments Neil Zaayman, chief operating officer at Kilowatt AV. “As with most new products there were initial teething hurdles, but it was more around understanding how the screens like to be programmed rather than product issues. The screens have been amazing and have added huge production value to our events.
“The biggest motivation for the purchase was the pitch, and black face LED. We've seen high-res LED on the rental market for a while, but the Absen sol

USA - When an artist tours as regularly as country music’s Luke Bryan, and returns to many of the same markets year after year, a fresh lighting design is a must. Bryan’s production and lighting designer Justin Kitchenman gives each tour its own distinct look and for 2018’s What Makes You Country tour is thrilling audiences with an innovative design that features adaptable lighting pods full of compact Elation ACL 360i beam effect lights.
Luke Bryan’s latest tour launched 31 May in Toronto with the country star playing dates in the U.S. and Canada through October, many of them large stadium shows. Nashville-based production provider Elite Multimedia Productions has supplied the lighting, LED video and IMAG video technology for the run.
While keeping past designs in mind, Kitchenman sought to give the 2018 outing an original look while incorporating a m

UK - A vibrant village of custom-created performance spaces and entertainment zones, Farr Festival recently returned for another successful edition, helped by the sounds of Funktion-One systems used across the festival site.
Woven around a wooded slice of countryside, just half an hour outside London in the county of Hertfordshire, Farr Festival is a wonderland of themed spaces equipped with quality designed sound systems.
Dave Millard, founder and owner of Full Fat Audio (FFA), has been an intrinsic part of the event since its early years nearly a decade ago. In addition to running FFA, he holds a sizeable stock of Funktion-One loudspeakers, which he pairs with his own amps to create sound systems that are a perfect match for Farr’s bespoke aesthetic. Working with supplier support from Zion Audio, Millard uses this Funktion-One/FFA pairing to produce systems for al

UK - Evolutionary Arts Hackney (EartH) will become the first European venue to install L-Acoustics’ L-ISA hyperreal sound system.
The project, a multi-purpose arts hub to launch in the restored Savoy cinema in Dalston in September, has been created by the team behind Village Underground in Shoreditch, founded by Auro Foxcroft. EartH will be curated to span art forms and a multitude of genres and voices encompassing an international live music programme, performance art, special talks and debates, comedy, and film.
The venue’s theatre has installed the L-ISA system to offer audiences enhanced clarity, more natural sound, and a wider sound panorama.
The L-ISA set up comprises a frontal system of five hangs of seven Kara flown equidistantly across the front of the stage, with a central sub system of four KS28 flown in end fire configuration in front and above

Lithuania - Audiotonas, Martin Audio’s Lithuanian distributor, recently installed one of the manufacturer’s newest line arrays - the Wavefront Precision Compact (WPC) at Jonava Cultural Centre.
The venue, which seats almost 700 people, organises various events, which have already become annual fixtures in the calendar, such as the Midsummer Day (Joninės), contemporary art forum Homo Ludens, national festivals of choirs, street musicians, children’s pop choirs and others. Thus, the demand for a good PA system was high.
After surveying the site, Audiotonas’ sound engineers, under the project management of Vytautas Stasiukaitis, considered that eight flown elements per side of the WPC array would provide the best solution because of its optimised coverage and outstanding overall performance.
The WPC is a new breed of optimised line array featuring scalabl

Europe - Belgian creative engineering specialists WIcreations are involved in the design and fabrication of three bespoke set elements - all optimised for air freight - to be used on a series of epic outdoor shows on Roger Waters’ current Us + Them world tour, which launched with two seminal shows in Rome and Lucca, Italy.
A pair of 16.6m-high circular PA towers grace the stage, complete with integral tracking systems on the onstage side for the rigging of 10 moving light fixtures, and on the downstage side for the sound cluster’s wind brace.
The second WI object is an industrial style stage roof - ‘roofette’ as it’s known on the tour - comprising a set of imposing cantilevered steel beams which can be fitted with clear roof skins in case of rain.
The third area in which WI is involved is a truss and beam rigging system, devised to securely rig

South Africa - The South African Roadies Association (SARA) hosted its fourth Annual Live Event Technical & Production Conference (LETPC 2018) at The Sunnyside Park Hotel in Parktown, Johannesburg, the current home of the LETPC. The three-day event attracted over 120 delegates from across the globe.
The LETPC conference has become one of the foremost platforms for international live event professionals to meet, network and discuss critical issues that are affecting the sector with topics such as such as health and safety, production, event management, venues, artist challenges, DJ and producer issues, technical advances being interrogated by the speakers and audience alike.
LETPC 2018 featured a range of local as well as international guest speakers, and as was intended once again, to expose the South African live event, technical and production sectors and practit

USA - Founded in 2012, Opera NEO hosts 30-35 aspiring young performers each summer, providing intensive operatic training, mentorship, and invaluable performance experience.
The 2018 Opera NEO Summer Opera Festival included performances of Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow and Mozart’s Idomeneo, each presented with a live orchestra in a unique open-air amphitheatre in the hills of San Diego, California. The 2018 season marked the first year the festival utilised Coral Canopy for sound design and audio production services, which centred around an Allen & Heath SQ-5 digital mixer at front of house.
“The SQ is a beast and I continue to be amazed at the capabilities of the console,” says Alan Chang, principal of Coral Canopy. He adds: “With mics across the orchestra and a large chorus of performers on stage, I relied heavily on the Chromatic chann

USA - Maksim Chmerkovskiy, Peta Murgatroyd, and Valentin Chmerkovskiy epitomised the elegance of ballroom dancing on their recently-concluded Confidential Tour. The trio, who are noted for their roles on ABC’s Dancing With The Stars, also told moving personal stories during their 90-minute show. Supporting the choreography as well as the biographical narrative of their performance was a multi-faceted lighting design by Peter Morse that featured Chauvet Professional fixtures, supplied by RK Diversified Entertainment.
“In recent years, I have done the lighting for a number of tours produced by Faculty Management that included both the Dancing With The Stars Live tours, and Dancing With The Stars alums Derek and Julianne Hough,” says Morse. “When Faculty and Butch Allen, who did the production design for this tour, invited me to come on board, I wa

UK - Signify reports its successful collaboration with the National Theatre’s River Stage Festival. The River Stage, which provides a diverse range of free entertainment over a five-week summer season, once again benefitted from an array of the latest stage lighting products from the Philips Vari-Lite brand, including the new VL800 BeamLine.
Built outside the National Theatre on London’s South Bank, the River Stage presents diverse entertainment from visiting companies including Sadler’s Wells, HOME Manchester and music experimentalists, Nonclassical. Using the latest fixtures from the Philips Vari-Lite and Showline brands, lighting designer Huw Llewellyn was able to provide rich and varied lighting designs for the wide variety of performance styles.
“Without Signify’s support, we couldn’t do what we do with River Stage,” says Llewellyn. “Acts ra

Estonia - Tallinn’s Nuku (Puppet) Theatre is world renowned for its inventive and creative programming and staging of around 250 performances a year across three venues, which will typically including eight new productions during each season.
Located in the heart of the charismatic Estonian capital’s Old Town area, the theatre underwent extensive renovations in 2015/16, which resulted in the new 400 capacity main Ferdinand Theatre being created. This is run together with the Small Stage with which can accommodate 200 and the Oval Hall with 80.
Head of lighting Madis Kirkmann and his team of four look after the lighting for all three venues and have had Robe moving lights in the house for some time, including 300 and 600E Spots and LEDWash 300s and 600s which are currently lighting the Small Stage.
Robe first came into the building in 2013 after all eight sta

USA - This year’s Electric Daisy Carnival, known to most as EDC, powered into action with a three-day flagship festival in Las Vegas, Nevada. Winner of the Festival of the Year award at the Electronic Music Awards 2017, EDC has grown since its 1991 launch to become one of the world’s leading electronic dance music festivals, and this year’s event, held in the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, cemented EDC’s position as North America’s largest EDM festival.
Over 400,000 visitors flocked to Vegas and EDC organiser called upon Tenfeet to help deliver visuals to match festival goers’ expectations. Working alongside Insomniac and LEG, Tenfeet was responsible for the lighting design, media control and supply, as well as programming and operating. Following on from the Vegas event, EDC goes global with Tenfeet adjusting the design into a touring version.
Tenfeet knows Gre

USA - Formed in 1996 in Palm Desert, California, the Queens of the Stone Age developed a style of riff-oriented, heavy rock music. Their sound has since evolved to incorporate a variety of different styles and influences, including working with Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl, and Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan who has been a steady contributor to the band.
For all this time Josh Homme, Troy Van Leeuwen, Michael Shuman, Dean Fertita and Jon Theodore have been a constant in the worldwide Rock’n’Roll circus, touring and performing old and new songs, always dedicated to keeping the spirit of innovation and autonomy alive and moving forward.
This motivation also applies to lighting designer Emmanuelle ‘Gigi’ Pedron who has given the band a unique look onstage. Using a grandMA2 full-size as her creative tool of choice, she has also transf

USA - It’s a 4th July tradition: the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular at the Edward A. Hatch Memorial Shell on the Esplanade along the banks of the Charles River in Boston. The event featured the celebrated orchestra, under the direction of conductor Keith Lockhart. This year, Michael Berger of LA-based Full Flood utilised Claypaky Scenius Unico and Mythos 2 fixtures, supplied by 4Wall, to support the production.
The Independence Day spectacular showcased an all-women guest line-up featuring Emmy award-winning Fight Song artist Rachel Platten, Rhiannon Giddens of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls, and Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Awards-winner, Rita Moreno.
“We needed to make the orchestra the star of the show and provide opportunities for the guest artists to shine as well,” says Full Flood’s Micahel Be

USA - The 32-city North American leg of Erasure’s World Be Gone tour takes place on multiple levels, literally and figuratively. Made up entirely of LED linear fixtures, the matrix-like set features a collection of tiered mini-stages. Vince Clarke plays keyboard in an upper centre-stage cubicle, flanked by kinetic dancers on slightly lower portals, while his partner in the synth-pop duo, Andy Bell, holds forth on the floor, his vocals soaring above it all.
Weaving the complex set together, while supporting the full scope of Erasure’s music, is balanced Matt Waterfield-designed lightshow run on a ChamSys MagicQ MQ80 with a MagicQ Extra Wing.
Waterfield is drawing on the output of some 230 fixtures supplied by Christie Lites in his show for the tour, which is in support of Erasure’s 17th studio album. “I have been designing for Erasure since 2017,” he sa

The Netherlands - At the end of July, 50 Dutch engineers got the opportunity to enjoy a demonstration of Yamaha’s Rivage PM7 digital mixing system at Hilversum’s Wisseloord Studio.
Wisseloord Studio is likened to ‘the Dutch Abbey Road’ having seen an array of major musicians record at its premises. Those include Afrojack, Chris Brown, Elton John, Foo Fighters, Metallica, Michael Jackson, Paul McCartney, Steve Aoki, Sting, U2 and many more.
On 30 July, attendees were welcomed to Wisseloord with a tour of the studio complex, including its renowned mastering room, conducted by the studios’ chief creative officer Malik Berrabah. This was followed by an introduction to the Rivage PM7 system in Studio 2, conducted by Yamaha’s Ruben van der Goor and Jan Prins.
All were then invited through to Studio 1, where Jamiroquai FOH engineer Rick Pope was waiting with

UK - Video production company Media Flare has added three Hippotizer V4 Boreal+ Media Servers to its hire stock of nine Hippotizer V4 and Hippotizer V4+ media servers.
Media Flare’s freelance TV lighting designer Tom Sutherland comments: "Our Hippos have never let us down, and with the V4+ models' new features and enhancements providing even more creative flexibility, for us it was the only way to go. It's great that I can rely on a media server which can cover such a range of productions and budgets."
Freelancer programmer Nick Hansen adds: "Hippotizer Media Servers are so user-friendly. The Output Manager side is incredibly powerful and flexible, enabling us to handle things when a show's technical needs can change quickly during production. Also, we are really excited by the potential of Notch, which we will definitely be using on future projects to manipulate c

UK - One of the highlights of the UK summer season is the Henley Festival - a traditional black tie event for Martin Audio partner RG Jones Sound Engineering, spread over five days.
The company has serviced the event for 36 years, and in recent times they have fine-tuned their coverage of the main stages with Martin Audio MLA components, including the tricky Floating Stage.
As festival technical manager and head of sound, Jim Lambert, says: “The Floating Stage has always been a challenge in that the front to back of the arena is only approximately 30m, but it is extremely wide, and with the introduction of general admission tickets outside the arena we are being asked to cover a width of something like 100m. The MLA Compacts more than rise to this challenge and yet also enable us to keep to the fairly strict off-site noise limits set by the Council.”
It agai

UK - The beautiful surroundings of Kew Gardens in south-west London, containing the world’s biggest Victorian glasshouse, provided the backdrop for the facility’s annual six-day music festival, aptly titled Kew The Music.
Now a consolidated part of London’s summer festival tapestry, for the past four years rental company Capital Sound and their loudspeaker partner Martin Audio have enjoyed a growing presence on the site.
Working with promoter, Stuart Galbraith from Kilimanjaro Live, and production manager, LarMac Live director Ian Greenway, they tailored the sound system for the clientele that typically brings picnics and folding chairs to the Royal Botanic Gardens to witness a succession of concerts that this year included Steps, Björn Again, Gypsy Kings, 2Cellos, The Human League, Boyzone and Jools Holland.
Despite having a number of Martin Audio

South Africa - DWR Distribution, the Signify distributor in Africa, reports that Philips Showline SL Punchlite 220 luminaires and a Philips Strand 200 Plus console have been installed in the Conservatory Hall at the North-West University School of Music and Conservatory in Potchefstroom. The new equipment will compliment all the concerts and music productions, such as the cabaret and annual pantomime.
Dr. Yvonne-Marié Brand, acting director of the NWU School of Music & Conservatory, comments: “The new equipment is a huge upgrade and has greatly improved the lighting in the hall. More light, no noise! We are really impressed with it.”
Headed by Andi Rodgers, DWR Distribution installed three lighting bars on which 12 Philips SL Punchlite 200s were hung, with a Philips Strand 200 Plus console for control.
Brand adds: “The feedback from the technical crew

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