Headlining this year's festival on Sunday night, was 7th Heaven. Lighting designer Zach Scott added punch to the band's MayFest appearance with a ground package that was anchored by Rogue R2 Beams by Chauvet Professional.
"There's a large and loyal following for 7th Heaven in Chicago and the Midwest. One of the things that draws fans to this band is its incredibly high energy level." said Scott. "My goal is to reflect this energy level by producing a high impact lighting design - and the R2 Beams allow me to do that. I love the look of the beams, especially when I'm on the festival circuit."
Scott has plenty of opportunities to use the Rogue R2 Beams along with the lasers, LED video curtains and other fixtures in his ground package at festivals. A mainstay of the Chicago music scene, 7th Heaven seems to appear at an outdoor festival every weekend during the summer. Described by the Chicago Tribune as a "band of workhorses," the group averages 200 shows a year. This not only keeps Scott busy, it's also made him quite adept at setting up rigs in a heartbeat.
"There are some shows where we only get a 30-minute changeover. My entire rig needs to be up and ready for the show in that amount of time," said Scott. "So, I tend to favour compact fixtures that are easy to set up and have a lot of output. I also do programming in advance. Each song the band plays is cue stacked in my console. This allows me to design and program more complex looks to complement the music."
For the MayFest ground package, Scott mounted four Rogue R2 fixtures on vertical truss towers across the stage. The four other Rogues in his rig were positioned on guitar cabinets. He also used two Chauvet DJ Intimidator Beam 350 moving fixtures (positioning them on drum risers), along with LED pars, laser beams and two upstage LED video curtains. He controlled his rig with a ChamSys MQ40 console.
(Jim Evans)
