By: Wayne Murphy Jr.
This week our assignment was to program a 2-3 minute song on a console that we had never used before. Some were assigned Hog, or Element, I was assigned the GrandMA 2. We use the GrandMA on PC with a command wing that was bought to go along with it so we have 6 physical executors along with the rest of the digital ones.
The song I chose to light was one of my newer favorites from the band Halestorm: I Miss The Misery, I wanted to choose a piece that would challenge myself design wise and program wise because with the MA I wanted to run it live off of all executors and not cue like a normal ETC Board. This would prove quite challenging but I feel like i came out on top with a win in the end. I ended up making an executor with different cues written in for the main sections of singing, some drum fills that occur a lot, the chorus, the bridge that I could jump between as the song was played live. This definitely proved a challenge with only 6 physical executors and the rest being digitial. (I think i ended up with 6 physical and 3 digital i had to use)
The other caveat of the project was we had to use a pre-visualization program, MA makes their own so I ended up using theirs. The Visualizer was nice because in our lab our touch screen computer is in the way of our “stage” so the visualizer screen gave me an opportunity to still see my design and even edit offline when I had to as to not disturb a classmate that was working in the lab at the same time i was.
In the end i have grown more in love with the MA and hope to get the chance to use it more. Below you can see some photos from my visualizer, and maybe in the future i’ll upload a section of the song.
Stage Lighting Projects 