Lighting designer and programmer Valentin Nebati of TightLight enjoyed a busy 2025 working with several artists and projects, including as lighting director and operator for singer-songwriter and guitarist Jean-Louis Aubert’s acclaimed PAFINI concert series. This tour saw the superstar plus a full band play shows across France, Belgium and Switzerland, a mix of Zenith and arena venues, culminating in a massive finale at Paris’ La Défense Arena in December.
Nebati chose to work with a grandMA3 control system for lighting and video control after joining Jean-Louis Aubert’s creative team in February 2025, where he was working closely with lighting and set designer Jordan Magnée to create the show’s eye-catching aesthetic.
The two work well as a team. Their first collaboration was in 2018, so there is a great rapport and fluidity in their workflow that brings spectacular results to the stage. Usually, Magnée will have the principal ideas for the look and visual styling of cues and scenes, to which Nebati will add flourishes of detail and richness unleashed by his expertise as a programmer and love of music.
Nebati has been using the grandMA control platform since the start of his career as a lighting professional 15 years ago. He has been using version three since the software was first released and has been regularly running shows fully on grandMA3 since 2024.
For this tour, he used a grandMA3 full-size console for the arena shows; for the Zeniths and also for some of the festival slots that they played, it was two grandMA3 light, and for the finale stadium date, this morphed into four grandMA3 light and one grandMA3 full-size.
The PAFINI tour was a dynamic combination of the blockbuster hits of Jean-Louis Aubert – well known as frontman of iconic French rockers Téléphone – together with his newer and more introspective and complex solo works, all celebrating 50 years of status as a prolific and successful music artist and pop culture influencer.
The stage design was defined by an impressive semi-circular LED upstage surrounded with four concentric arches of LED, with lights popping through the gaps. Elegant and high impact, this offered plenty of scope for the creative lighting and video that helped make the performance so memorable.
In terms of lighting fixtures, for the Zenith shows, Nebati was controlling approximately 300 lights – about 225 moving lights from three or four leading manufacturers, plus strobes and blinders – which would be boosted to around 650 for the arena shows and the finale, all supplied by rental company MPM.
Playback video appearing on the screen surfaces was played through a Smode media server and fed into Nebati’s grandMA3 console Art-Net, giving him the scope to apply nuances and specific effects.
The grandMA3 was run completely manually – with split-second perfect timing. The ability to combine lighting and video sources brought an additional layer of organic harmony to the performance. “grandMA3 is a very powerful and flexible system for programming and running any show,” stated Nebati when asked about his choice of visual control. He used multiple grandMA3 system and software features, including Phasers, Recipes and attributes like specific time delay and fade.
Recipes is a function he finds invaluable, especially for festivals. “It’s extremely quick and straightforward to clone fixtures and adapt to using a different lighting rig every day by utilizing Recipes,” he explained.
Apart from this flexibility, he mentions the multi touch screen control and Gestures as useful, time-saving tools that enhance navigating the screens, streamlining an already fast and efficient process.
Nebati used the XYZ function to quickly adjust positions despite the projectors being rigged in an arc, commenting that switching between XYZ and PAN/TILT functions can be done very easily with grandMA3: “Being able to combine these two functions is a real advantage.” He thinks the Macros’ automatic naming/numbering of sequences is another handy feature, enabling the movement and re-ordering of multi-executor sequences if needed, and he also takes advantage of yet more adaptability with Recast on the Presets.
He frequently leans into the GDTF / MVR function for swift importation of fixtures to the patch, and highlights that when working with multisource fixtures, it is very important and quick to previs and program a design using the GDTF file.
“For me, it is this incredible functionality and power that makes grandMA3 such a brilliant control system. The workflow is great; the configurable screens enable me to change everything on the console if needed – all the parameters and executors – everything is possible in this software. It is also ideal to be able to personalise using Macros. I appreciate the fact that to achieve any one task using grandMA3, there are always three or four options to attain the same result – it’s a really comprehensive solution.”
