Killswitch Engage took the Filmore stage on 3 June to kick off their summer tour with Machine Head, they transformed the iconic downtown venue into a throbbing hotbed of metallic intensity, complete with their razor-sharp guitar riffs, vicious percussion, and raucous stage diving. Moving with the multi-platinum band every step of the way was Vinny Shaw, mashing buttons on his ChamSys console as he busked his way through their jam-packed 18-song 75-minute set.
“I am a big fan of strobes and strobing, yes!” said Shaw. “Whether it’s classic strobe rolls and stabs or creating wipes and patterns, or beam elements, I am strobing. I have sync and random strobe FX for most fixtures in the rig. With Killswitch Engage, we don’t even use a click, so having several different strobe cues to fire easily is key.”
Providing firepower for the strobing and the rest of the show was as collection of 26 CHAUVET Professional fixtures supplied by JDI Productions that Shaw tended to keep off the stage deck to provide room for the band. “KSE is a very physically active group of performers who move around a lot on stage and often dive off the stage,” he said. “This makes it important to keep the lighting in tidy contained areas so the guys can roam freely.”
Helping Shaw cover the stage with light as the band jumped and weaved across it were his rig’s 12 Rogue RI FX-B moving yokes. “I had six of my FX-Bs on upstage towers to use as side light, which was great to cover the band as they moved around,” he said. “They were also ‘light curtains’ that framed the set.
“The six other FX-Bs were arranged along the downstage edge to illuminate the drum riser ‘pile of skulls’ set pieces,” continued Shaw. “We also used them in big uplifting moments, such as when we had waves of open white beams. The effect was held back for key moments, this created the feeling that there were many more fixtures in the rig. Since we had the upstage catwalk, we could use the FX-Bs to frame the stage area.”
As for the rig’s 12 Color STRIKE M fixtures, Shaw positioned them on mid-stage set carts, to backlight skirts, slow chases and punch through with colour bumps, grid wipes and strobing. Also contributing to the shows defining strobing were the eight STRIKE Array 2C units.
“We had the STRIKE blinders across the stage upstage towers,” detailed Shaw. “We worked them with the house rig blinders and the Color STRIKE Ms to get as much punch as possible, which really fit the moment in this case.”
The band toured with a 30’x15’ LED wall, and Shaw ran its content on Resolume. “Each song in the set had a layer with one to six clips,” said Shaw. “I patched Resolume into my ChamSys as dimmers and then mapped via DMX over Art-Net. Firing a songs main cue triggered the clips and set lighting colours, based off the content main colours. Clip timings and loops was handled in Resolume. I also took the NDI feed back into ChamSys as a monitor on my execute window and at times fed this to a pixel map of the touring Chauvet floor package.”
It was, noted Shaw, a case of using new, cutting edge technology to fire up versatile fixtures that created screaming in-your-face old school looks for a metal band that can accurately be described as “timeless.”
