Lighting for the recent legs of singer Shreya Ghoshal’s All Hearts world tour was programmed by Manu Jacob using an all grandMA3 control system solution for this section of the tour.
Brought onboard as a programmer by Mumbai-based show producers BToS Productions, he worked closely with the lighting design team from LAGFL Designs. “It was to facilitate this and also for the networking capabilities that I decided to make the switch to all grandMA3 for this project,” he stated.
The eight-week North American leg of the tour kicked off with a warm-up show in Mauritius and involved approximately 160 lighting fixtures, mostly Robe moving lights according to the original spec. However, the type of luminaire varied according to the venue and lighting vendor.
When the tour started in India earlier in the year, the artist was playing even larger venues, so the show was initially programmed using around 400 luminaires. In the US, several different lighting vendors were involved, depending on the venue and promoter, with Event EQ who are part of LMG Touring & Entertainment, supplying the most shows on the itinerary, coordinated for them by BJ Singh.
The lighting plot was initially drawn up in Vectorworks and imported via MVR (My Virtual Rig) to Depence 3 and then into the grandMA3.
Once the Grid was ready, he was also quickly able to use and update all his MAtricks. Ghoshal’s show has a wide dynamic range for lighting, with lots of bold, bouncy up-tempo numbers balanced with softer ballads.
Some parts of the show are run to timecode, so for these sections, Jacob used Recipes to assist the programming which he describes as “a seamless process”.
The show was run from a grandMA3 full-size console, and for the gigs, serviced by Event EQ, a grandMA3 light was provided for backup together with three grandMA3 processing units.
Manu, based in the beautiful coastal city of Kochi in Kerala, India, and working internationally, has also recently become an official MA trainer, working in conjunction with Hi-Tech Audio & Image.
