Lights

[nic salsus]

but seriously, i am bummed you guys make way more than i do

It's ok Jimmy. I feel sorry enough for your abject poverty that I'm tempted to ask your mailing address so I can send you the used GHS flats I tried to a couple years ago that came back to me when you'd moved. Found the envelope the other day packing to move myself.

 

[JimmyM]

dammit, i put a forwarding address in with the post office. that's lame they returned it.

obtw, pm sent.

 

[fishstix]

The led fixtures we've gone with come really close to the output of par 56 cans but have better saturation (24 1 watt leds). Plus the price on them really came down in the last 6 months. The draw back we get is some weird shadows due to the placement of the light sources. However, they have overcome that recently as well.

A few fixtures with a decent controller fed with a signal from your kick drum channel will get some decent results. Just change scenes/shows between songs and you'll be doing better than most bands out there. However, nothing is better than actually having a knowlageable lighting tech/crew that knows your music/band.

It seems that led fixtures are the future of lighting (especially for bar bands where power can be a real issue). However, this is all based on my very limited knowledge of the topic. That said, we couldn't be happier with our leds after a couple hundered shows with them.

 

[JimmyM]

well i'm fortunate that our band can play with just turning the lights on and leaving them on, so i really don't need anything fancy. just a couple whites or no color pinks to wash the front and one for our drummer would do me.

 

[nsmar4211]

I played under a LED system last week, we just set the 4 can sized things to white and didn't run any programs (since no one knew how to use it). Great that they weren't hot or blinding, but the white wasn't white.....it made everything a weird color (the bright yellow rope was orange!).
I wasn't impressed really...didn't feel like they threw the light very far. My home depot 85 watt floodlights were outperforming them.

I'll be looking at this lighting stuff myself, stage looks wayyyy better even with just the three floodlights and my one Toys R Us flashing light versus normal dark bar corner.....

 

[Craig_S]

One of the clubs I play frequently has a LED system. It's really hard to get a warm white from them. With red, green, and blue all on full, everything looks blueish. Dimming the blue leaves too much red. Cutting the red leaves too much green. I ended up fiddling for a while to get it to a place that was close enough. The final settings on the faders, if I remember correctly, were blue @ 33%, green @50% and red on full. This yielded a warm, yellow/orange. I know... It seems weird.

I prefer my setup, even though it's a little warm. I have 16 par 38 cans, two dimmers and a foot controller, right now.

 

[agedhorse]

Note that there's quite a difference between the "retail" grade LED fixtures and the real pro touring LED fixtures. Color balance is getting very good, the white fixtures can be trimmed from cool to warm white (either using binned whites or a few ambers mixed in) and used in conjunction with RGB fixtures can do an outstanding job. Brightness is getting very close to 1k pars in the whites and in the saturated cooler colors (blues, lavs) can exceed a 1k par. These are typically $1.5-2k each for non-movers and $3.5k-8k for movers, but the pirices are coming down and the quality improving all the time.

One chief challenge is to remove the heat generated from the semiconductor junction of the LED. There is heat, about 60-80% of the power is converted to heat, the rest is light. Some of these 250 watt LED fixtures need to dissipate 150-200 watts worth of heat and keep the junction cool for long life.

In a properly designed fixture, there is a very little and gradual light fall-off versus time, and generally (varies from manufacturer to manufacturer and for different applications) there is roughly a 30% loss at the end of 50k hours. That's a wicked long time, and for the most part there is not a large drop-off at the beginning which is attractive to architectural designers/users.

I recently completed a custom LED lighting project for a special client, an in-home museum wing where I built custom LED strips based on 1 watt white LEDs... about 600 watts worth at 3 watts per linear foot. Custom driver electronics, custom circuit boards (200 feet worth) and PWM dimmers. I turned out very cool. Cost was not for the faint of heart. This was before you could buy anything off the shelf too.

 

[nic salsus]

I recently completed a custom LED lighting project for a special client, an in-home museum wing where I built custom LED strips based on 1 watt white LEDs... about 600 watts worth at 3 watts per linear foot. Custom driver electronics, custom circuit boards (200 feet worth) and PWM dimmers. I turned out very cool. Cost was not for the faint of heart. This was before you could buy anything off the shelf too.

So what do you feel the advantages were with LEDs in this particular system over say MR16s, small fresnels or whatever other incandescent fixtures you'd traditionally use in gallery type lighting? I'm thinking about how I'm going to light a boat I'll be living aboard...experiences like yours are pretty valuable to me. How seriously did you investigate an "off the shelf" system before you built one from scratch?

 

[Barisaxman]

The band that I do sound/lights for (and in turn the rig owner does the same for our band) just upgraded from 16 PAR56 cans to 12 PAR64 LED's. There are definitely drawbacks, as the yellows and whites are nowhere near as good as a good old fashioned gel, but the benefits outweight that in my opinion. We still use par 56 for facials, but instead of having groups of colors on the backline, any fixture can be whatever color needed, and you can create some great effects by highlighting a particular musician with one color. Lots of variety with a fairly simple setup.

A few pics of the new rig at:

Link Removed

 

[agedhorse]

Great question!

In this case, it was for general area lighting rather than spot lighting of specific pieces (it's a museum of motion picture theatre technology) and the area was about 1200 square feet with a beautiful redwood T&G ceiling, so uplighting off the tops of the bottom chords of open timber trusses was done to highlight the material (using warmer white LEDs) and then downlighting was done seperately using a cooler white off the bottom of the beams. The challenge was getting even, relatively shadowless (for multiple point sources) coverage over 1200 square feet and doing it at low power density with a specific high tech theatrical look was the driving force.

Using off the shelf parts was not much of an option, this was 3-4 years ago and the products were VERY limited and breath-takingly expensive. The cost of this project was over $20k using custom components, the cost using the only off the shelf components was about $60k.

With the products that are coming on the market now, it's a totally different ballgame, it would end up being about $20k now and I expect $10k within the next couple of years.

The advantages in this case were lighting style, uniformity, and low lighting power density (efficiency). For marine use, there's a pretty wide variety of lamps to work with, and expanding every day. Definately worth looking into IMO.

So what do you feel the advantages were with LEDs in this particular system over say MR16s, small fresnels or whatever other incandescent fixtures you'd traditionally use in gallery type lighting? I'm thinking about how I'm going to light a boat I'll be living aboard...experiences like yours are pretty valuable to me. How seriously did you investigate an "off the shelf" system before you built one from scratch?