Lighting director/programmer Graeme Nicol has parlayed his many years experience using the grandMA to employing the console on Shakira’s Oral Fixation tour, now wrapping up the year in the singer’s native Colombia, Chile, and Argentina. A.C.T Lighting is the exclusive distributor of the grandMA in North America.
“I find you never stop learning on the grandMA,” says Nicol. “There’s always something new to learn to use the console to the max. Shakira’s tour is more of a rock show than I’ve been doing lately with a lot of flash and boom. We have an interesting set up of 134 moving lights run via SMPTE. The keyboard tech runs tracks, which are striped with SMPTE. He starts his tracks, which sends SMPTE out to me, and the grandMA runs the lighting cues. It’s a very interesting concept.”
The show’s complement of moving lights consists of 34 Clay Paky Alpha spots with custom gobos, 40 MAC 2000 washes, 48 PC beams, and 12 VARI*LITE 2402/2500s. Eight Atomic 3K strobes and hundreds of egg strobes are also featured.
In addition, the bitmap feature on the grandMA was used to program a number of images and words (i.e. the word “No”) on a huge 'pixel screen' comprised of a 10x18 wall of background PAR 64s.
“I’ve been on the grandMA a long time and like it,” Nicol reports. “The last show I did used a different console, and I was very frustrated not being able to do what I was used to. When Shakira’s tour came up one of the selling points for me was that the gig was on the grandMA.”
"This is another tour that employs a team of consummate pros, Abby, Dan, and Graeme. I know that they appreciate the grandMA and that the grandMA has allowed them to do things easily that they would find difficult, if not impossible. When you couple this with the style and pace of Shakira’s show, the result has made us all proud," comments Bob Gordon, president and CEO of A.C.T Lighting.
Abigail Rosen Holmes is the lighting designer for the tour. Daniel Boland, the original lighting director and programmer, left the tour in Nicol’s hands when he left to work on another show.