What I bring with me....

Some of you are young and impressionable and may think what I do is possibly cool and you may want to run around and do cool lighting gigs too.

I must be busy, there is like at least three months between my posts... oh well.

My wife was out of town and I needed something to do so I organized my tool bag and gig case.

I take my tool bag to everywhere. It usually sits in my car when not in use... waiting for its next time to be useful.
Tools are sometimes hard to find at church so it usually stays close by when I am working on a project...
There is at least a 90% chance what I am going to need is in my bag - it makes me feel a bit more confident walking into a room.

Here are a few snazzy pictures:



And its beloved contents:



Yeah, mind blowing, I know!

The List:
>Hammer
>Long philips head screwdriver (great for reaching into Martin 518's
>Klein 10-in-1 screwdriver (if you don't have any tools, start with this one)
>SAE and Metric hex keys (a must if you are going to work on movers)
>Random box cutter thing
>Flash drive (with a few pdfs and show files)
>Locking pliers
>Diagonal pliers
>Needle Nose Pliers
>Linesman pliers
>Wire cutter/stripper
>electric tape
>white board tape
>Crescent wrench with safety (you better show up with this)
>5 pin to 3 pin dmx turnaround
>3 pin to 5 pin dmx turnaround
>Gerber multi tool
>Mini Mag
>(sharpies)
>Grease pen (for writing on gel)
(not pictured but here in spirit)
>Multi-Meter
>Polarity Checker (not pictured)

Thoughts on multi tools:

I will have my little Gerber multi tool on me at all times... that is how nerdy I am. On a show, its nice to have one on you...You maybe on a ladder or away from your bag and need something right there to make the party happen. Whether you buy a Gerber or a Leatherman its up to you, its a great product. Both companies guarantee their multi tools for life. I've sent mine in on more than one occasion with a broken plier and a broken knife. I got a new one in the mail a week later. I have always used Gerbers. I've lost 2 Gerbers in 7 years, which is pretty good I think. I dont feel bad losing a Gerber that I spent $30 on ebay as opposed to a $80 Leatherman Wave I bought new. Gerber's knives always seem kind of dull, Leathermans always seem to rigid. I once owned one of those cool "the pliers pop out with a flick of the wrist" versions of the Gerber... I didn't like it and sold it to a friend. The one I currently own is an older version of the Gerber Evo model.

I really miss my Legend 800, it is missing in action.... Christmas is coming up.

Whatever you decide in a multi tool make sure it at least has these:
>Pliers
>Flat head
>some form of good philips head that wont strip.
>a tweaker (great for older DMX switches)
>knife
>saw... (seriously, this has come in handy on more than one occasion)

Everything else is just icing on the cake...

So yeah.... Next blog I will talk about my super awesome gig case...

Trackspots!!!

I love these lights. I first started working with these lights back in 98 at the Murray Hill Theatre.

I always wanted my own set. Eventually I did, and had a great time with them, and made a lot of money with them. I've used them in small rooms and big rooms with no problems.

Around a year ago, I sold them to a church in Seattle with hopes of getting something a bit more modern. Long story short, I couldn't, I almost purchased a set of Martin Mania 600's but I couldn't find them at the right price and I as worried that Martin was going to randomly discontinue them and not offer parts.

I turned back to Trackspots. I had one left from my original lot and purchased one more from eBay.

Thanks to Craigslist, I was able to purchase 6 more Trackspots out of a club at an amazing price.

Well, I got them on Christmas eve and started tinkering with them after my family went to bed. Powered all of them up and started making a repair list:
1 blows fuses when it gets power (bad logic board)
5 needed new pan motors
2 had shutter related problems

Since the pan, color, gobo, and shutter motors were the same exact motor model - I stole all the motors out of the fixture with the bad logic board an was able to give each fixture a working pan motor. As for the shutter problems, one was missing a set screw the other needed the shutter to be hammered out. After my parts swapping party was over, I had 5 good working Trackspots with a pile of spare parts giving me a total of 7 moving lights to my name.

Each fixture needed a massive cleaning as they spent all 12 years of their life hanging in a smoke filled club.

I went to High End's forum and followed some pretty detailed cleaning instructions.
Once a day I during my Christmas vacation, I would take one fixture completely apart and gave it a massive cleaning outside.

Trackspot torn apart before cleaning:





After cleaning:




After cleaning I brought each fixture into my dining room and re assembled them:

My son thoroughly enjoyed this part:




Happy Trackspot!



After re-assembly, I let each fixture run on test mode in my laundry room(how cool is that, a test mode on a "cheap" fixture) for several hours. It's pretty funny, when the fixture heats up, it smells lemon fresh thanks to the scrubbing bubbles.



Overall it was a fun experience. Trackspots are old, but well designed, and even now you can get amazing tech support from High End almost 10 years after being discontinued.

Maybe next Christmas I will find some Technobeams out of a club for a good price.

Youth room awesomeness

Post Youthquake - I took all the gear to New Life to play with at work.

We took down our home made sails and quickly threw up the corrugated
plastic from our old set in the sanctuary. We lit them up with my
LEDs which looked awesome.

Also, because 6 Martin 518's wasn't enough for a youth stage, I threw
in my 6 trackspots for more 90's moving light flavor giving us 12 movers.

We basically maxed out our poor little Fat Frog controller. Andrew
did a great job programming and busking the show.

Best looking youth room lighting system in town.

Here are some pictures from our "hunger and thirst" worship service at Follow:

(rehearsal)
















Small Group Prayer:


More pics are here on the Follow Facebook page.

Youthquake Live at Paxon Revival Center

I love working Youthquake live.... it brings me to new venues that have their own challenges...

Last year I brought out 4 Trackspots and 4 LEDs. Since then I
seriously sold that entire setup.

I came back the next year with 8
Trackspots, 6 new 1 watt LEDs, and my new Radiance hazer.

For a relatively cheap setup in a 5000 seat room, it looked great.

You will notice the other element that changed is the truss
configuration - I was trying my best to hide the "architectural"
elements of the room via some black drops and hanging Youthquake's
screen from my truss along with some movers.







...I figured out how to make chamsys go into "high contrast" mode:

Woman's conference set

(first post in 100 years)

So, I wanted to break away from the "three screens of death" video look
for a while on the big stage for this woman's conference at the nlcf
and make the stage look a bit more girly.

We first raised the center screen. Then took 30ish strands of
Christmas lights in hung them in three groups coming down the
catwalk. After that tedious process was over, we hung some sheer
fabric on front of the lights. The effect looked great.

The next thing we did was reset our projectors and screens to a 16:9
ratio. We did this to be able to hang lanterns under the screens and
so we didn't have this giant awkward square where the center screen
should go.

The set looked great. The funny thing about switching the screens to
a more wide screen look made the stage appear newer. It's funny how
we are programmed to think that rectangles are more futuristic and
hip than squares.

The plan was to keep this look through the Sunday after the conference.
Well, we went to power our center projector back up and imagine our
surprise whe. The stupid thing wouldn't start up. One of the fans
stopped working so it told the projector not to turn on. So we sent
the projector off to Sanyo. We kept our woman's conference look up for
2 more weeks.

A few pictures:

Zephaniah Tabernacle Concert

Another awesome gig.

Zephaniah Tabernacle (I had to google it to get the spelling correct) is a church in Springfield about a mile from the house Jenn and I used to live in on Laura Street....

This was their first "worship concert" with their new band/praise team and a live recording. We setup the night before at midnight, right after tearing down from youthquake the night before.

Before:



After:



Before:



After:



All in all it was a good show.

The majority of the effect lighting came from 4 10' truss uprights with a Trackspot and a pair of LED 64's mounted on top. 8 Pars on a pair of tripods provided basic front light.

The back truss lights were ran by Chamsys on Andrew's laptop. I am still amazed at what you can do with the software and a USB>DMX box.



Here is a video of the band (and conregation) having a party between songs:




More pictures can be found on the good ole photobucket There were three cameras shooting the event for a promo video, when I get the DVD (and figure out how to rip DVD's) I will post the video for my MANY readers.



This is one of the ONLY shows in 10 years of lighting at various churches where the pastors invited me to come pray with the band back stage



I found this door sign - maybe I'll add "minister of education" to my resume and enclose this picture to prove it:


Believe it or not, I saw my second gold church chair less than 24 hours after seeing the first one at Paxon

Youthquake Live @ Paxon Revival Center Church

Paxon is a 5000 seat church with metal halide gym lights for house lights. I really didn't want to use their house lights so we put 8 cans on tripods in the balcony with red/orange gel for house ligthts. It was a little dark but it was much better than the alternative.

Andrew actually ran lights from his laptop on stage... This was the largest event Andrew had to program for.



I basically ran the church's installed lights off a cool older NSI controller


Before:



After:




Before:



After:



To make the room "seem" smaller I suggested putting something cool in the back to distract from the under balcony area that seated 800 people. I borrowed some spandex thingees from Chets Creek and lit them with some led pars. One random thing that came to mind was lining the path under the balcony with Christmas lights - it turned out pretty cool.



3000 kids showed up.

YQL did communion for the first time. It was an event that I was really glad to be part of.