American electronic musician, Skrillex entertained South African fans in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban at the start of March 2013. The main technical supplier in Cape Town was Gearhouse, while in Johannesburg it was supplied by CES and in Durban by Insane Sound.
At the Wavehouse in Durban, lighting and video freelancer Thomas Peters assisted with the lighting.
"Reading through the Skrillex rider and adjusting accordingly for Durban, Vimal Rawjee (Insane Sound) and I came up with what we thought would be a viable rig for the show, which the production's management (Skrillex's Production Manager is Baptiste Chavaillaz) quickly approved," explained Thomas Peters. "While we did not have most of the first-choice fixtures available in the quantities requested, the substitutes we offered were all perfectly acceptable. The MMXs blew the touring LD away: they really hold their own.
"With the help of freelancer, Herman Wessels, we flew a front truss in two sections to account for the curve of the roof beams and built an MPT ground support on stage to give us the 3 overhead trusses as requested in the rider."
Having done his research beforehand, Peters was expecting some serious blinding from the Atomics and Moles. With this in mind, he decided a separate fixture type was needed to maintain the maximum headroom at all times on each outlet.
"The Molefayes were patched carefully to two Avolites Powercubes and the Atomics on single lines to a dedicated Socapex Hot Power distro. The rest of the rig, being all reasonably and comparably low-powered Sharpies, LEDs and MMXs, was patched to another dedicated Socapex Hot Power Distro. Data-wise I kept the Atomics to their own universe as well, effectively minimizing any opportunity for any 'Umtagati problems' in the rig during the show."
The entire control package came from MGG Productions. "We ran a grandMA Series 1 Full Size with a Series 1 grandMA ultra-light for backup to an NSP2 on stage, all on v6.701 software and via CAT-7 Cables with three gigabit ethernet switches," Peters adds. "The Fullsize was the same one used in JHB the night before so Mark Gaylard from MGG express air-freighted it down for us so we already had the LD's show file loaded when he walked in- a real confidence booster!"
For the opening DJs, Peters ran a Yamaha Motif XF7 to trigger executers set to Flash buttons on the grandMA Ultra-Light via MIDI which allowed him to approach the rig from a "musical" rather than "cued" angle. They were able to have two people operating at the same time, one literally "playing" the music on intensities while the other handled colour, gobos, focus and movement. "We stuck to the C-Major scale because the white keys are a hell of a lot easier to hit when you're partying every bit as hard as the punters," said Peters.
Andrew Nissley Skrillex's LD, brought some interesting additional custom hardware of his own- a modded Marshall 4-button footswitch, a netbook running a custom-written Max/MSP patch and a Novation Launchpad control surface that all triggered the console to give him the absolute maximum amount of flexibility possible.
