Techland

What's New

Lighting was our area of upgrade most recently, leading to a number of automated accessories.  We decided to go with many automated accessories rather than just two to four full-featured moving lights, which wouldn't see as much use.

We now own Seachangers, which allow full color mixing (CMYG) of Source Fours, and can either be wash lights (the Seachanger Wash XG), or profile units (the Seachanger Profile XG).  We own some of each.

In essence, we now have all of the building blocks of a moving light.  If we need a fixture that has color changing capability and iris capability that also needs to be able to hit any spot on stage, we can do that easily by putting a Seachanger Profile in a Source Four, putting a DMX Iris in it, and putting a Rosco I-Cue on the end.

In the world of sound, Qlab  has won us over as the most flexible and easiest to use sound playback software we can get right now.  We use the software in conjunction with Echo Audio's Audiofire 12  interface, which provides twelve balanced inputs and outputs as well as MIDI through a FireWire connection with our Mac show control computer.  Qlab beat out SFX in a number of aspects when we set out to get a new sound design playback program.  The ease of use and the low price for so many features really makes it great.

Elsewhere in sound land, we've upgraded our consoles to Yamaha LS9s.  In Harvey Powers, we have an LS9-32.  In the Tustin Blackbox, an LS9-16 and three one-rackspace Yamaha DME Satellite processors replaced a large 32-channel analog console and almost twenty rackspaces of processing (EQs, dynamics processing, and a massive delay matrix), and the new system is far more flexible and all settings can be recalled instantly.  The new system in the blackbox also uses Cobranet for connection with the output processors, so the console can be placed in the house and connected to the house speakers via a single Ethernet cable.