Busking Tips FLX S48 - Theatre

[bootlace479]

I work as the sole theatre technician in a performing arts college. For the shows, I run lighting and mics and backing tracks.

Every year we run Showcase / variety shows, mostly Musical Theatre numbers, big group pieces to solos and everything in between, as well as some dance - Contemporary Solos and duets all the way to large group commercial pieces. I put each piece onto it's own playback, because often orders change last minute, or if we do multiple nights, not every piece is in every night. There are also some band nights, with the music course putting stuff on. We have an S48, and a rig of 36 colour change LED fixtures.

The issue I have, is that as each year goes by, we get more students, and less time in our theatre space. I have gone to THE TOP to complain about less time, and there is nothing I can do to extend this.

This means we're often teching on the morning of the show, which involves lighting every piece and running a mic plot (Thank god for theatremix). My workflow is fairly quick using groups i have preset, but I'm still struggling to get things done as quick as I'd like, as i find the recording of cues can be a bit clunky, and this is what takes the time. I'd like to get to a point I can busk my way through a piece recording cues as I go, and then run the piece again once cueing through it. I tried with having a bunch of set playbacks and using a combination of these with syntax, but I also found this a bit clunky - maybe its me! My main issue with the groups is I have set locations for each part of the stage, but sometimes I want some side colour and some front white, but the group selects all the fixtures here and would colour them the same, meaning i have to then go and select the fronts and recolour them...

I know a certain amount of this comes down to how fast I am able to work, but I'm wondering if anyone has any tips for this with this desk? I have unlimited time with the desk, but not unlimited time with the pieces, so I can configure the desk any way i want with a view to getting things moving quickly when in the space with the company. 

[Davidmk]

There's a lot to unpack in this, it certainly looks like there are unreasonable demands for one person and limited time so perhaps there need to be changes there and, if the time cannot be increased then either the demands must be reduced or they hire another tech.

That said, there may be ways to simplify things but I'm not clear what your rig consists of and where things are located.

Does the rig include moving heads?

Could you reserve some fixtures for front-light that you can keep white?

Do you have to plot everything for every piece or can some be pure busking?

Can you impose some restrictions on what can be requested? e.g. Offering set colours rather than mixing to order, specific marked points on the stage for set pieces like solos/duets?

Are you making use of palettes and intensity groups?

When you record playbacks are you using tracking or not?

(Full disclosure my background was in theatre - musicals/drama - but for the last 26yrs I've worked in a music venue almost exclusively pure busking for bands. I have zero knowledge about running sound.)