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Spain - The Bilbao Exhibition Centre (BEC) was dressed for a special occasion recently for the farewell concert party for Hertzainak, spread over two nights.
Hertzainak was a leading light in the movement known as ‘Basque radical rock’. Their first records combined the provocation of punk with the dance rhythms of reggae and ska, maintaining the political situation in the Basque Country as the context of their songs.
Lighting designer Carlos Cirre was commissioned to design a show that would transport the audience back to the style of the 80s and 90s and evoke a retro spirit recreated by 100 fixtures from the catalogue of GLP. This included 35 of the new impression X5.
According to Cirre, “The entire stage ceiling was covered with X5 luminaires. Although it was a completely new experience for me, I think this was one of the great discoveries of the event, a

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UK - After 14m albums sold, including two No. 1 hits, and a fistful of awards from Grammys to Brits, Mumford & Sons continue to surprise fans by pulling out widely varied musical influences, from ancient folk to highly polished modern rock.
On the band’s current global festival tour, designer Ed Warren reflects this expansive sense of discovery with a background that uses a combination of video tiles and lighting, along with fireworks from Strictly FX, to convey dramatically different impressions throughout the band’s 90-minute-plus shows.
At times, Warren creates a bright, seemingly solid wall of light behind the group, using the majority of the 108 Chauvet Professional Strike 1 fixtures in his kit, which is being supplied by Neg Earth in the UK and Europe, and Upstaging in the USA/Canada. During other segments of the show, the designer will have video images
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The Netherlands - Successful singer-songwriter duo Nick & Simon (Nick Schilder & Simon Keizer) played six sold-out nights at Rotterdam’s Ahoy Arena, the culmination of their Nu of Ooit (Now or Someday) tour which also was the last time they will appear in this format, as after 17 years of performing together, both artists now intend to pursue solo careers.
Lighting was designed by Martijn Steman of Triple Showtechniek working closely with artistic / show director Ad de Haan from Live Legends with the help of approximately 220 x Robe moving lights on the live show rig, plus another 60 x Robe Spiiders appearing as virtual light sources within the digital scenery that defined the stage design and show aesthetic.
Jim de Brouwer from Live Legends created the set design in conjunction with Sander van der Ham of Bluepaper and creative Desiree van Giezen, wh

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USA - Moving lighting fixtures around at a festival often requires some careful logistics. Moving crews around calls for considerable skill too. George Cannon got a first-hand view of both recently when he was hired by Harford Sound to be the house LD at the That Tent at Bonnaroo.
“Harford Sound was responsible for the That Tent and the This stage at the festival,” said Cannon. “They had morning and night shift crews that would tag off around 6-7 PM. We stayed at an Airbnb about 30 minutes away from site. So logistics alone for all those crew was a lot. Harford Sound and Rock the House AV did a great job making this project rock. The job everyone involved did was amazing.”
Tasked with providing audio, lighting and full staffing for both stages from 8am to 3am daily, Harford Sound broke the project into two shifts. With a crew 18 deep, the company furn

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UK - Occupying the stunning Tudor courtyard, the two-week Hampton Court Palace Music Festival returned recently to this Grade I royal palace setting, dating back to the early 16th century and once home to Henry VIII.
Working within constraints of heritage buildings and tasked with creating a technical infrastructure for the event in recent years has been SWG Events.
A major investment in the manufacturer’s technology has enabled them to field an end-to-end solution (the latest acquisitions being further Torus T1215 speakers and SXC118 single 18in cardioid subwoofers). This is in support of their flagship WPL Wavefront Precision line array which was deployed as the main PA hangs.
All of which has this year delighted the many visiting sound engineers accompanying artists ranging from Gladys Knight, Kaiser Chiefs, Soft Cell, Kool & The Gang and Tom Jones, who

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USA - Ed Sheeran’s Mathematics tour has entertained more than 4.5m fans across three continents since it launched in Dublin on 23 April of last year.
Additionally, the tour has been a valuable proving ground for advanced sound reinforcement technologies. The tour was the first to carry Milan AVB networked signals from FOH mix through to the individual loudspeaker boxes - in this case, 212 Panther large-format linear line array loudspeakers from Major Tom. The tour also has been a test bench for Meyer Sound’s new Nebra software platform for network configuration and system monitoring, while MAPP 3D prediction software has streamlined the task of realigning coverage for varying stadium shapes and sizes.
“The network has been rock solid, and we’ve used Milan AVB as our primary input since early in the European leg,” says system engineer Adam Wells. “Wit

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Germany - Sefa Jeroen Vlaarkamp, known by the stage name Sefa (pronounced Sèfa), has been making waves in the music scene with his high powered hardstyle and hardcore scene music, with Frenchcore as a subgenre.
Joined by a group of guest artists at Cologne’s Die Halle Tor 2, Sefa shook up the famed venue during a four-and-a-half-hour show with a blend of musical influences coming together in a multi-sensory experience that combined the fiery intensity of hardstyle with the melodic influences found in Frenchcore.
With the technical support and lighting design of Guido Schütz of Laser Frame and Patrick Hirt of Creative Sounds Veranstaltungstechnik, the show captivated the audience.
Commanding attention at the centre of the stage was a grand piano. Adding to the visual impact of that piano, which was set up on a rolling platform, were the four Chauvet Profession

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Japan - Formed in 2008, the three-piece Japanese rock band My Hair is Bad recently wrapped up the Ultimate Homerun Tour with final arena series concerts in the Osaka-Jo Hall and in a Tokyo arena. The tour, which began in the middle of 2022 as Japan’s pandemic restrictions on entertainment began to ease, culminated with these two arena concerts that featured a special immersive audio experience.
The band’s sound engineer, Hironori Ochi had first learned of L-ISA technology from Masaaki Nagayasu, systems engineer at L-Acoustics certified rental agent Hibino Sound, who hosted Mr. Ochi to an L-ISA workshop in his personal studio. On discovering the capabilities of L-ISA, Mr. Ochi began working on the design of an L-ISA Hyperreal Sound system for the 10,000-capacity Osaka-Jo Hall arena concert.
“I received L-ISA training with L-Acoustics in the spring of 2022. The im

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UK - For the past 15 years, associate sound designer Hyder Khalil has been crafting the audio that brings the long-running London stage musical Wicked to life.
Working alongside sound designer Tony Meola, Khalil abides by Meola’s philosophy when micing shows: whether you’re working with instruments or cast members, get the mic in the correct place without being intrusive, and then get the sound as perfect as possible. With these goals in mind, microphones designed to provide authentic audio were the obvious choice when upgrading the theatre’s sound system.
DPA Microphones fits all of the sound needs for Wicked. After initially integrating the DPA 6061 Subminiature Lavalier Microphones, the theatre added the brand’s 2011 Twin Diaphragm Cardioid, 4055 Kick Drum and 4099 Instrument Mics to its lineup.
“As a whole, DPA makes things easier,”

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Italy - Vasco Rossi decided to delight his many fans again in 2023 with a short concert tour that criss-crossed Italy. As always, Giovanni Pinna was in charge of lighting, and made extensive use of Claypaky fixtures.
“The set design changed radically this year," says Pinna. “We mainly used 70-by-26m stages based around a triangle: there were three triangles of automated battens of different dimensions around a large central triangular LED wall. Each batten was fitted with a modular rig complete with all the lights.”
Pinna told us he deliberately chose to use only three kinds of moving light so that the stage was as uniform as possible. The ultimate goal was to achieve a high-impact, fully consistent visual result. Pinna used 148 Claypaky Hy B-EYE K25 units and 70 Claypaky Tambora Batten Squares as key lights, along with a few brand new Claypaky Skylos fixtures.

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Europe - Touring in support of their ninth studio album, Will Of The People, Muse are back on the road with long time audio vendor, Skan PA Hire. Building on two decades of trust between the bespoke audio rental company and one of Britain’s most intriguing and progressive bands, the Will Of The People tour delivers with impact.
The band have entrusted their nuanced repertoire to FOH Engineer Marc Carolan since 2001. “I’ve only missed one show since,” confirms Carolan. “It’s been incredibly satisfying working with them, and to hear their evolution; nothing has ever stagnated, and they consistently perform at the highest level.
“As musicians, they are very good at expressing specifics, so working out the audio brief for the tour is always an efficient process.”
Carolan, who is supported by FOH Tech Eddie O’Brien, has used Skan PA Hir

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USA - June is Pride Month, a month honouring the 1969 Stonewall riots, but also a time to celebrate members of the LGBTQIA+ community. Pride Month brings parades, festivals, and more events. “We love seeing how designers put on productions to honour the month and community,” says software designer Vectorworks. One such creation is from Ami Hanna, a production designer, technical director, and LSO for Luma Box Designs.
A stage designer for the Salt Lake City Pride event each year, Ami Hanna cites the community and her own sexuality as reasons why the event means so much to her.
Hanna took over the Stageline production for Salt Lake City Pride in 2015. She inherited the job from a colleague, Nick ‘Murph’ Murphy, who went on to start Murphy's Production Services.
Murph supplied Hanna with a detailed draft of the event’s Stageline 250 - a drawing he did in

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Italy - With a wealth of platinum and gold records to his name, Italian singer-songwriter and ‘father of Italian blues’, Zucchero Fornaciari, affectionately known as Diavolo in Reggio Emilia, celebrates his 40-year career this year with his World Wild Tour 2023.
The tour kicked off in New Zealand in April, before returning to Zucchero’s home- town of Reggio Emilia on 9-10 April where he played to capacity crowds at the RCF Arena, formerly known as Campovolo.
With these two shows, Zucchero inaugurated the new-look Campovolo, which now has a 35,000-seat capacity, and a purpose-built 5% slope that ensures optimal views and acoustics across the whole site, making the RCF Arena the largest outdoor music venue in Europe.
Zucchero’s lighting designer, Daniele De Santis, chose 60 Ayrton Cobras for the key feature of his lighting design for these two special show

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Switzerland - Each spring, the Cully Jazz Festival immerses jazz fans in a blend of music and picturesque scenery in the heart of Switzerland’s wine country. The most important event in Swiss Romande's vibrant cultural calendar, the festival was born in 1995 from the passion and dreams of two Daniel Thentz and Emmanuel Gétaz. Since then, the festival has grown from a humble two-day event, to one of Switzerland's most influential jazz festivals spread across nine days.
This year marks Cully Jazz Festival’s 40th anniversary, and the event now includes the entire village in its festival atmosphere. Year after year, the festival's demanding yet accessible programme attracts more than 70,000 festival goers. The festival line-up features musical performances across various genres and over three stages, including new Chapiteau, an outdoor stage, designed to elevate the live pe

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Germany - Prolights illuminated the world's largest inclusive sporting event, the Special Olympics World Games Berlin 2023. The event was all about visibility, social participation, empowerment, and integration, as 7,000 athletes with intellectual and multiple disabilities stepped into the limelight to take part in 26 different sports.
Under the artistic direction of Sven Sören Beyer, the collective phase7 performing arts was responsible for the creative concept of the opening ceremony, as well as its planning and implementation in collaboration with mediapool Veranstaltungsgesellschaft on behalf of the local organising committee. Technical services were provided by the POOLgroup and the lighting fixtures were provided by Lightpower, the Prolights distributor in the region.
On behalf of phase7, Flo Erdmann (von | BERG) developed the lighting design for the impressive

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USA - The US leg Tori Amos’ 2023 Ocean to Ocean tour kicked off in West Palm Beach, Florida in June with a fresh and varied setlist, ready to rouse fans across the States. The crew joining this year’s US leg are armed with an array of Green-GO Digital intercom products.
At the heart of the setup is a Green-GO DanteX Interface, which is directly converting digital audio streams from Dante to Green-GO and vice-versa without loss of quality.
“The Green-GO DanteX Interface was key to our system,” says Alex Penn, commercial director at UK-based 22Live, which supplied a complete audio system for the Ocean to Ocean tour in both Europe and the US. “The tour was already using an extensive Dante network that covered many jobs including the PA returns, and shared stage racks for both the FOH and monitor mixing consoles.
“Utilising the DanteX Interf

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Germany - On 18 May 2023, the sixth edition of the Tante Mia Tanzt Electro Festival took place in Vechta, Lower Saxony. Top DJs such as Netsky, Steve Aoki and W&W played on the 68m-wide and 14m-high stage in front of around 20,000 spectators.
As in the previous year, Eventures was responsible for the technical event equipment of the open-air festival in 2023. Tante Mia also relies on continuity behind the lighting console: lighting designer Milan Spira previously used a lot of moving lights from Cameo for the 2022 edition, and this time opted for the Otos, Opus and Zenit series.
For Milan Spira and his video partner Paris Yilmaz - who form the creative collective Clubkind Design - the challenge was to deal with the organiser's reduced budget: "We used fewer lights overall this year than in 2022 and also reduced the LED walls on stage. So the challenge was to make

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USA - Tempest’s new Oasis projector enclosures recently debuted in an inspiring outdoor projection mapping experience at the National WWII Museum in the heat and high humidity of New Orleans.
Expressions of America is an immersive night-time sound and light experience, transporting audiences to the 1940s through projection, special effects, songs and words of the everyday people serving the US during World War 2. Solomon Group carried out the install, which included a total of eight Panasonic projectors protected by Tempest Oasis enclosures. Medici Media (formerly known as Mousetrappe) were responsible for concept design and production.
“The Museum constantly upgrades its campus to appeal to a new generation of learners and keep the story alive through new and inventive ways,” says Barry Mendelson, audio/visual programmer, Solomon Group. “We were tasked

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UK - One of the UK’s longest-running leisure operators, Potters Resorts, has recently completed a multi-million pound refurbishment of the luxury Five Lakes resort in Essex, which they purchased in 2021.
The improvements include a new leisure complex, upgrades to numerous existing facilities and the repurposing of a former sports hall into the Glade Theatre, a multi-functional performance space equipped with modern sound, lighting and video systems.
Already an established DiGiCo user (the theatre at their original site in Hopton on Sea features an SD10), following consultation with Autograph Sound the company chose two DiGiCo consoles for the new facility, a Quantum 338 for FOH and a Quantum 225 for stage monitoring.
Autograph subsequently supplied the two consoles plus two SD Racks fitted with the new 32-bit SD cards and an Optocore fibre network. The FOH con

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UK - Gary Numan’s three-night, “one thousandth celebration show” residency at the Electric Ballroom featured an evocative David Howard lighting design that often split the stage into two sections.
“The design took inspiration from the concept of us living with, or living against, machines,” said Howard, of David Howard Lighting Design. “A lot of Gary Numan’s tracks explore this theme, and much of our design inspiration comes from this aesthetic. Being able to split the stage in two creates an immediate visual juxtaposition. So, for example, we did things like divide the stage between a Cadbury purple with an electric green and had a constant bass note of low-level fizzling strobe to mimic machine workings.”
Balancing this duality on stage was a distinctive triangular-shaped video wall made with Chauvet Professional F4IP LED panels, which, like the rest

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Europe - Muse are currently on tour, featuring songs from their album Will of the People. Matthew Bellamy (vocals, guitar), Christopher Wolstenholme (bass, vocals) and Dominic Howard (drums, percussion) have been playing arenas and stadiums throughout the US and Europe.
As the band’s FOH engineer for over two decades, Marc Carolan is making sure the sound quality on stage exceeds every expectation. To that end, Carolan employs the Austrian Audio OD505 WL1 for vocals on the Will of the People Tour. The OD505 WL1 is a solution for those in the band who are mobile during their performance and depend on a wireless system. In many live situations, ambient sound is a big problem and mic’s supercardioid polar pattern smoothly rejects unwanted interference and focuses on the voice.
Monitor engineer Matt Napier, part of Carolan’s team and on his first tour with the

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USA - The Suzanne and Walter Scott Aquarium in Omaha Nebraska features a stunning environment and a spectacular after dark light show, controlled by ETC’s Mosaic system. The Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) added special citation for ‘playful use of integrated colour to its outdoor lighting award’.
The playful element starts with the re-designed entry canopy that established the aquarium as the focal point of the Omaha Zoo. Blue stainless-steel panels with a rippled surface texture and a front canopy of perforated metal suggest a coral reef seen from underwater. The theme carries upwards to a roof decked with eight stainless-steel wave sculptures. The stainless steel oceanic-inspired structures reflect sunlight in daytime and become a pallet for dynamic lighting after hours.
Lighting designers Steve Gollehon and Jeff Frank of Morrissey Engineering were part

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UAE - Lighting designer Aaron Russ of ARLD turned to Elation Professional’s Proteus Excalibur and Proteus Maximus as the building blocks of a lighting design for the closing ceremony of the 2023 Dubai World Cup, a Thoroughbred horse race held at Meydan Racecourse each March and the world's richest horse race.
The brief for the large-scale production called for something spectacular and different, a show that highlighted the horse race, its creators and Dubai as the host city. The creative team delivered a spectacle with pyro glider planes, drones, lighting, video and fireworks all working as one choreographed scene to the delight of onlookers both live and on television across the globe.
Technology solutions provider Creative Technology Middle East (CTME) worked as a key supplier for the closing ceremony event, delivering a full turnkey solution of audio, video, li

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Saudi Arabia - Since 2016 when the Saudi government opened the doors to public events, MDLBeast has been at the vanguard of nurturing local musical talent, hosting live and online events, producing artists on its MDLBeast Records label, and establishing XP Music Futures to accelerate the growth of MENA’s music industry.
Since 2019, MDLBeast has also curated Soundstorm Festival, the Middle East region’s largest gathering of artists and fans with over 200 acts and three quarters of a million visitors over four days. For the most recent edition, the push to offer innovative experiences saw Soundstorm invite Polygon Live and their L-Acoustics L-ISA Immersive Hyperreal technology to create and curate a stage for VIP audiences.
Polygon Live is a 360°, immersive sonic experience where speakers play spatialised sound synchronised with an immersive light installation, whi
  1. Claypaky Skylos light up Glastonbury sky
  2. EM Acoustics powers Glastonbury Acoustic Stage
  3. WPS makes Access The Festival debut
  4. KV2 parties at the Rave Jam Music Carnival
  5. Claypaky lights Phantom in Bucharest
  6. DiGiCo blends Harmony of the Worlds
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