Entec Lights Gurdas Maan Shows

West London based Entec Sound & Light supplied the lighting design, equipment, and crew for Punjabi pop/singer/songwriter superstar Gurdas Maan's recent sold out shows at London's Royal Albert Hall (two nights) and the LG Arena at Birmingham NEC.

The lighting design was created by Entec's Ryan Brown. With no production rehearsals, scant on-site programming time and some seriously high profile shows ahead of him, he took full advantage of Entec's newly updated WYSIWYG system to visualize and pre-plot the show in their Northolt HQ. This proved "Absolutely invaluable" he comments.

It's the third time that Entec has worked with Maan's management, UK Box Office, who approached them to create a fabulously elegant" light show after being inspired by seeing archival images and hearing about previous projects that the company has undertaken.

Gurdas Maan's spectacular career has spanned 30 years during which time he's recorded over 27 albums, written over 200 songs and raised the profile of Punjabi music worldwide, in the process becoming the most influential and prolific Punjabi singer ever.

They wanted a geometric-looking lighting rig with a definite architectural look to be an eye-catching core to the show, so Brown decided on a central spherical truss flanked by three chevron-shaped trusses per side, all flown at different heights to enhance the overall stage depth.

In total, the rig featured eight trusses. The 19.5'-diameter circle upstage was the visual hub, and this was joined by six gently curved "eyelash" trusses -- as they were dubbed -- and a front truss that was used to facilitate lighting positions for washing the stage.

To enable patterns, color, and texturing to be projected onto the circle, the centre section was fitted with a stretched projection screen surface.

Brown chose eight Clay Paky HPE 300 moving lights to be positioned equidistantly around the perimeter, and these enabled - through texturing, coloration, gobo effects, and some nice programming -- the circle to become the centerpiece that everyone imagined.

The circle -- and all the other trusses -- were toned with a total of 24 i-Pix Satellite LED bricks.

Each of the chevrons was rigged with two Philips Vari*Lite VL3000s, two Martin Professional MAC 700 Washes two Mac 250 Beams. The front truss contained six bars of six PARs for general washing, some more VL3000s for rich colors and bathing the stage in a fabulous quality of light and four Mac 700 Washes.

It was an expedient rig that had to go a long way, and do and be many things, including cover Maan and his 11-piece band for a four-hour show. The lighting also had to be judicious enough not to be distracting to the band, and, in addition to all these requirements, the gigs were recorded for DVD, so the stage and performance areas had to be lit with that in mind.

For control Brown used a grandMA full size console, which is his desk of choice for all major shows.

Utilizing the Entec WYSIWYG suite enabled him to pre-visualize the whole show, which was an improvised (rather than pre-cued) operation, taking the modus operandi of busking to new conceptual levels. He had not seen or heard the show prior to the first gig, and with minimal lighting instructions from the artist, very rapidly had to familiarize himself with the radically different structure, style and rhythm of Punjabi music, which made the task all the more challenging and fun.

Entec supplied a four-person crew consisting of rigger Pete Schofield, the unflappable Simon Chandgler Honor as crew chief and Sven Jolly on dimmers, complete with Andy Emerson who assisted for the RAH shows.