My Reggae lights could be seen from space!

On Saturday I ran lights for the Reggae in the Valley 2011 show here on Maui at the Yokouchi Pavilion and got to use my favorite lights thanks to Bruce at Village Audio.  Using 4 of these 2500 watt architectural wash lights I got to blast the entire pavilion with color.  These babies crank!  I also had 8 Elation Design Washes and Spots.

I focused some of the lights on the glass roof, the support columns and side grills and even the surrounding buildings and palm trees.

The backdrop is made of 5 white screens which deploy out of the roof above. Their motors are controlled by a computer installed in one of the pavilion columns.

I used the Elation moving lights to focus gobos onto the screen, overlap them and rotate them.

It made for some funky looks.
I had to program positions for the moving lights the night before, but it took a couple days before that just to get the lights into this new ETC Ion console.  As I found out later, there's a glitch in the software that makes it difficult to record submaster faders with only moving light attributes.  I prefer to run lights manually instead of using canned looks.  This is what makes lighting fun, playing it like an instrument.

Bright idea?

I printed my theatrical lighting plot onto a T-shirt.  That way when I'm working on the lighting rig, I can just refer to it.  Better yet, I can point out certain lights or circuits to the other lighting techs I'm working with.  But I must admit that the old lamp doesn't shine as bright as it's aged so in those moments when you stop to try to remember what the hell it was you were working on, it pays to have the plan within view.

I KNOW you like it...

A little over a year ago I had an idea for a custom bass guitar in the shape of a shovel.  I created a couple of images in Photoshop and posted them on this blog here.
I called it the Gravedigger and followed this image with another of some guy playing it.  Of course, I didn't actually build it but I'm hoping somebody actually gives it a shot.

What I noticed from my blog stats was that a lot of people were looking at the shovel bass, mostly from Europe.  Musicians discussed its paint, pickups and design on a few guitar forums, like this one, and some people were actually questioning if it was real or Photoshopped, which gave me a chuckle.  As the post received more and more hits I began to occasionally search for "custom bass guitar" in Google Images and recently found it had actually climbed to reach the #1 spot.

Currently, the two images I posted are #2 and #3.  Not bad!  Shows you're interested.. Now will somebody please make it!?