John Bilyk, a well-known and colourful figure in the Canadian and American stage lighting communities, died on the evening of 11 December 2022. He was 70 years old. He passed away at home peacefully, after a nearly year-long battle with brain cancer, and he is survived by his wife, Tracey. Bilyk had a storied career in stage lighting that spanned 40 plus years. However, one of Bilyk’s early formative work experiences was with a men’s clothing store in Winnipeg owned by Marc Raymond. Raymond later co-founded Westsun, which grew to be a major Canadian production and installation company. Soon after,…
Author: Jacob Waite
GLP lighting featured heavily at a major EDM event recently at the Campo Pequeno Bullring in Lisbon. The Moment Lisbon was promoted by Israeli-based Rapyd, a worldwide payment solutions company, and delivered by their experience brand, The Moment, as part of a recruitment drive. This was the closing event in a series of three major parties in Europe through 2022, the first two being in Berlin and in Zadar, Croatia. This latest extravaganza formed part of the Websummit conference, and was in the form of a competition-based incentive/recruitment campaign to ‘Hack the Galaxy’ (with 8,000 people winning tickets). The lighting…
The AES welcomes Bruce Olson as President for 2023, the Society’s 75th anniversary year. Olson, whose term of service began on January 1, is an AES Fellow whose decades of active service to the Society have helped shape international audio standards and practices, while he has further contributed to the Society as a Governor and Chair, Treasurer, and committee member of his local AES section. “Bruce is perennially an invaluable driving force in the AES and to the industry as a whole,” stated immediate Past President, Josh Reiss. “His depth of experience within AES leadership and his industry acumen, as…
When FOH Engineer, Mark Kennedy was prepping for Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ months long Raise the Roof Tour of Europe and the United States he knew there was only one mixing console to specify — a Solid State Logic Live L550. “Over the past couple of years, I’ve used many other consoles,” Kennedy said “It just sounds so much better than anything else. It’s the only way to go.” Kennedy first worked on an SSL Live while working with UK electronic band Faithless on their 20th anniversary tour in 2015. When he started working with Plant in 2018 —…
Waves Audio has revealed the V14 update for the Waves eMotion LV1 live mixer. With this update, the LV1 now supports 32+2 faders via dual Waves FIT controllers, more plugin DSP power via multi-server support, and tactile control of plugins via the Waves FIT Controller for eMotion LV1. The latest eMotion LV1 V14 update supercharges Waves eMotion LV1 live mixer with new features, such as the ability to mix freely with practically unlimited DSP. The eMotion LV1 V14 can connect to up to four Waves SoundGrid servers, plus four more for redundancy, allowing users to mix with high plugin counts…
Jason Lovins Band, an independent Christian rock group based out of Kentucky, has been touring consistently in houses of worship and college campus ministries since its formation in 2001. “We’re on the road about forty weeks a year,” said the band’s Production Manager and sound engineer Chris Music. “It’s a big operation.” The band’s audio needs are handled by a 96kHz 64-channel Allen & Heath Avantis console. “We’ve loved using the Avantis,” said Music. “We used to have some external plugins included with our touring rig, but the Avantis’ dPack upgrade has eliminated the need for most of those.” Allen…
SIXTY82 has launched TPM29S, a new 29cm box truss that is up to 25% stronger, yet fully compatible with the M29 series box truss. By introducing TPM29S, the first in SIXTY82’s new TPM Truss Series, Sixty82 has re-invented the M29S box truss, to deliver a new product with a wealth of added benefits to the end user. TPM29S is up to 25% stronger than similar box trusses enabling it to withstand the most demanding conditions. An improved design of the diagonal braces helps to increase the strength and stability of the truss system, while the new optimised shape and dimensions…
HIVE has announced it will launch two new products, hold live demonstrations on Panasonic booth #3J500 and run video playback on Leyard Europe’s stand, #3D800, at ISE 2023 in Barcelona. Visitors to the show will be the first to see two new 1U rack mount pieces of hardware, Player_3-Pro and Player_4-Pro. Both units will run the feature-rich HIVE software and will be available to order at ISE. Developed utilising the team’s combined 60 years’ experience in entertainment technology, the new hardware features include a 10G Ethernet connection, SMPTE LTC Timecode In/Out and balanced L/R XLR audio outputs, alongside the 4k…
After the release of the internationally established and widely used Depence² multimedia show design and visualisation software by Syncronorm three years ago, the next release of the Depence system is live. With the release of Depence R3 on 3 January 2023, a new milestone has been reached, which will not only offer lighting designers many features that have been developed after intensive exchange with the worldwide Depence community, but which are also unique worldwide. In addition to the already extensive and comprehensive multimedia visualisation, it is now possible to integrate and visualise complex fireworks in Depence shows. In addition, there…
KL Profile FC is a next-generation professional-grade LED ellipsoidal lighting fixture from Elation Professional. With a 92 CRI full spectrum engine featuring a 305W RGBMA five-colour LED array. This unit offers performance and an output of over 10,000 lumens. It includes a ten-piece designer gobo set of high-resolution glass gobos to load into the included 16-bit rotating indexing motorised gobo holder slot, which can be controlled manually from the fixture via the rear encoder dial for standalone control or via DMX. www.elationlighting.com/kl-profile-fc
Status Quo spent much of 2022 playing a series of UK theatre shows, followed by festivals, arenas and theatres across Europe, before rounding off the year in UK and German arenas. Along with the band every step of the way were Yamaha PM5D-RH and M7CL mixing consoles which, like the band, show absolutely no sign of slowing down. Having played what the band estimates to be more than 6000 live shows over just shy of 50 years, Status Quo wouldn’t continue to pull in big audiences each year without every gig maintaining a high standard. Key to this is the…
Staged for the first time at the Cagliari Lyric Theatre in Sardinia, Arthur Laurents’ two-act stage musical West Side Story, with music by Leonard Bernstein and loosely based on William Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet, was a guaranteed success. The staging offered by the Cagliari Lyric Theater was derived from three major US musical institutions: the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Houston Grand Opera and the Glimmerglass Festival in New York State. The performance, which blends the language of traditional opera with that of the musical, took place from 15 to 23 December, bringing to a close the 2022 opera…
In the next phase of Power Logistics’ plans for expansion, the temporary power specialist has appointed a European Director to lead its newly opened office in Maastricht, Netherlands. Experienced international sales and marketing professional, Patrick Elissen, will be spearheading the company’s EMEA operation from the centrally located office. Situated in close proximity to both the German and Belgian borders, the new office is just a short hop from many major European cities. The news follows the company’s announcement in November that it had established a permanent base in Cork, Ireland, and is part of an ongoing programme of growth that…
EM Acoustics will return to ISE for the first time since 2020 after a year of significant growth. Celebrating 20 years in business, the full management team will be present as the company looks to actively forge new links across Europe and worldwide as well as continue to build on current relationships. Visitors to the stand will be able to see a representative selection of EM’s ubiquitous EMS Series that offers a wide range of products for a variety of applications, both fixed and mobile, plus the full range of award-winning Reference Series point source loudspeakers. This immensely successful product family – currently comprising…
The Women’s International Music Network (the WiMN) reveals Judy Collins, Noelle Scaggs and Shelly Peiken as the first announced honorees at the upcoming 2023 She Rocks Awards. Recognising women who stand out as innovators and role models in the music industry, the 11th annual live awards event will take place on Thursday 13 April 2023 at 6.30pm at the Ranch in Anaheim, CA during the NAMM Show. Tickets to attend are on sale now here. Judy Collins is an award-winning singer-songwriter esteemed for her imaginative interpretations of traditional and contemporary folk standards and her own poetically poignant original compositions. Her…
Heavy metal band Gwar recently wrapped the fall North American leg of their Black Death Rager World Tour, in which Claypaky Sharpy Plus Aquas played a key and unusual role. The tour marked the third for Nick Drake as the band’s Lighting Designer; he is also a Light Technician with Richmond, Virginia’s Lite-Tek Entertainment, a lighting rental and production company which supplied the fixtures. Lite-Tek has a history with Gwar, which also hails from Richmond, having worked with them multiple times over the years, including providing lighting and studio space for the band’s 30th anniversary live stream from Lite-Tek’s warehouse…
Following its acquisition by HME, Clear-Com implemented Lean, a continuous improvement approach where all members of the organisation can bring their informed opinions on how to improve things into a structured process to be incorporated into the whole. Lean tools were initially developed within the manufacturing disciplines but have gradually expanded to impact Product Development, Support, and various other back-office activities. Our parent company HME stays current on Lean through membership in the Association for Manufacturing Excellence and coordinates various activities through both dedicated team members as well as ‘Lean practitioners’ across a variety of departments within the business. Since…
In a bid to prevent tour managers from frantically sifting through their inbox to find that one important email with guest list information, a promoter contact, or a parking plot, tourmanagement.com – a platform developed by touring professional, Roeland Veugelen and fine-tuned by over 200 bands and crews – allows tour managers to focus on what is really important when on the road: creating memories for concertgoers with the fewest headaches possible. While touring with Belgian singer-songwriter Milow in 2008, Veugelen began developing an online tour calendar that could do the planning of individual band and crew members and centralise…
