I found my fire, by the way. Now that I'm back designing and doing stuff, not just grinding out repaired fixtures or cleaning dichroic glass all day, I feel much better.

Tour is going well. Actually, "tour" is a bit of a misnomer, since it's more of a string of one-offs and festival dates. It's just like a tour, except we get to go home a lot and get quite a few days off in between dates.

Here are some fantastic pictures of the first two shows for your viewing pleasure!

The first two shows went pretty well. The first night we had an incredible Martin MAC 2000 profile / wash rig that was a pure joy to work with. (All the conventionals were Source4s, too, which was just gravy.) That show had a GrandMA, a console that I've never used before, and really have had only a crash course on programming. I was saved by the great lighting director at the house, Murray, who was kind enough to act as my programmer as I directed the looks onstage, and once the cues were all written, I ran the show. The second show was also a Martin rig, but the spot fixture were the Performance variant, which was sad. The Performance fixtures are directed toward the theater market, and because of that they have fewer gobos to make room for a framing shutter module, and the gobos they do have are all breakups. The fixtures were also unreliable, two of them going down during the show, but that's less of a reflection on Martin and more of maintenance thing. The console that night was a Hog IPC with a few playback wings. I've used the Hog 1000, but the Hog 3 software is just different enough that I was a little shaky programming at first. I also screwed up early on in my programming in a way that caused problems later in the show...somehow, a cue got stuck on that set an iris chase, which was the look I wanted for one song, but for whatever reason that look started tracking through to all my other songs. There were some fairly weird looks on the stage while I struggled to fix that, and the lighting guy there had to help while I kept running the show. Eventually we got it fixed and the show went as planned.

All in all, it wasn't a terrible night. It was obviously not as good as I wanted to be, but it wasn't super-disruptive, and I don't think it affected the crowd's enjoyment of the show. The production manager was understanding, and it was a decent show, all things considered.

Right now I'm back in Nashville for three days off, and we're heading back out on Thursday for a string a shows starting in New Jersey.

Exit, stage left. Sparks