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.)

[JWylie91]

I am also a Theatre Tech for a College and can sympathise with your situation. I'm working with the full size FLX so apologies if some of my workflow suggestions isn't viable for the s48 as I haven't actually been hands on with one of those, for the most part I believe that the suggestions should work.

I feel there is an element of having to be firm with the staff around you in terms of helping them understand the actual amount of work that goes into the technical side of theatre. Just accepting that plotting on the morning of a show is okay will not help ease your workload or stress. One thing that we are looking to implement this year is to build a visualisation of our space in Capture Visualisation software. I will then be taking phantom ZerOS into the rehearsal spaces when the pieces are nearing completion allowing me to spend more time programming the lighting requirements for each piece.

When working with really tight schedules for things such as external lettings I will watch a piece and record colour, beam/shape and position palettes only on a main playback and use the other playbacks faders as intensity masters for different fixture groups. This way I can pull in and out various groups of lights whilst being confident that whatever I pull up will fit then overall look and style for the piece. Recording attributes this way will allow me to specifically make sure my front lights will always be a suitably white colour. 

I don't know if any of this is helpful but yeah, the main piece of advice would be to try and highlight that they are requesting too much from a solo technician and you deserve appropriate time on a day prior to the show day to set the tech. 

[bootlace479]

On 10/13/2026 at 9:22 AM, Davidmk said:

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?

 

Good points, I was trying to keep it short, but realising my situation is sort of unique. Unfortunately, there is little option to recruit extras, or reduce the demands. Working in a college, which runs all sorts of A levels. It's in financial crisis, and generally other courses are struggling. The Performing Arts course numbers, results and progression onto conservatoires and university's is absolutely through the roof, which is great. We have our own building, with lots of studios, so kind of get left alone, but unfortunately our main 'theatre space' is a multi use hall. More and more people are booking said hall for stuff so we get less time in it. Myself and all teachers have raised this and we get shot down, so we are where we are.

I have a 10 x 10 Harlequin dancefloor, with 4 bars above. 3 bars above the dance floor, 1 bar above the audience area - these are the front facing, 4 fresnels. The three bars above cover rear middle and front of the 10x10 floor, and booms at the bottom of these 3 bars. My group pallettes are arranged by stage location, stage split into 6 separate areas - USR, CSR and DSR and the same for SL. 

4 moving head profiles, located at each corner of the 10x10 floor. Fresnels and Pars on booms. a couple of pars thrown up top for washes. Not ideal but it's what we've got.

On 10/13/2026 at 9:22 AM, Davidmk said:

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

I COULD, but i often get asked for cool white vs warm white depending on the piece, or red front for example. If i locked the fronts to white, i'd lose that. That is something to think about. 

On 10/13/2026 at 9:22 AM, Davidmk said:

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?

Has to be plotted, as during the show I'm running mics, and just have to press go on the lighting - which i manage with clever script marking.

On 10/13/2026 at 9:22 AM, Davidmk said:

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?

We have a few profiles that are in set locations that get used for solos and duets, and these work and are restaged. It's mainly the larger group pieces that are heavily choreographed - usually big show numbers from different musicals. I will tend to try and design based on that musical.

Palettes yes, but Intensity group? Are you referring to the ICPBCSE (??) snapshot type thing?

I believe SmartTag > Cue Only is set, at least this is how the S24 in our small blackbox is set - as the only lighting tech, I don't see why I'd have set them differently. Can't get in the hall till next week to confirm sadly.

On 10/13/2026 at 11:49 AM, JWylie91 said:

I am also a Theatre Tech for a College and can sympathise with your situation. I'm working with the full size FLX so apologies if some of my workflow suggestions isn't viable for the s48 as I haven't actually been hands on with one of those, for the most part I believe that the suggestions should work.

I feel there is an element of having to be firm with the staff around you in terms of helping them understand the actual amount of work that goes into the technical side of theatre. Just accepting that plotting on the morning of a show is okay will not help ease your workload or stress. One thing that we are looking to implement this year is to build a visualisation of our space in Capture Visualisation software. I will then be taking phantom ZerOS into the rehearsal spaces when the pieces are nearing completion allowing me to spend more time programming the lighting requirements for each piece.

When working with really tight schedules for things such as external lettings I will watch a piece and record colour, beam/shape and position palettes only on a main playback and use the other playbacks faders as intensity masters for different fixture groups. This way I can pull in and out various groups of lights whilst being confident that whatever I pull up will fit then overall look and style for the piece. Recording attributes this way will allow me to specifically make sure my front lights will always be a suitably white colour. 

Happy to hear from someone else in similar position... I'm also the set designer, builder, painter, maintenance guy... can you relate? 

I have been looking into Capture, and actually we've unlocked a small funding stream this year that may mean we can actually access that. This would actually ease things up massively, as the tech days could become tidy things up. The worst bit is, the actual team i work with, the teachers and people who choreograph and teach the singing are on my side, they help limit cues and manage student expectation as much as possible, but those managers above us have no idea what we do, or what we even mean by tech days. a couple years ago we had tech weeks, but this year we have literally only got two days available, so it's really cramming everything in!

If you can, could you unpack what you mean by recording colour and beam and position onto playbacks and intensity on others? Maybe this is FLX specific, but I want to explore slightly, as mixing faders sounds like what i'm looking for. My idea is to busk the piece the first time I'm seeing it, and record the bits i like as I'm doing that, then run the piece a second time with those recorded cues and just tweak from there, and so far I've not worked out a comfortable way of doing this.

[kgallen]

Hello and welcome!

I’m not sure if you’re the chap I replied to on Reddit. If not, do you also know about all of the training videos? There are some buttons at the top of the forum somewhere ^^^^