USA - GLP's groundbreaking impression Spot One is among several of the German lighting manufacturer's LED fixtures that are presently dominating high profile touring productions in the US. However, while the impression series has extended its popularity with the arrival of the new X4head it has been the new fully featured automated Spot which is being seen as the holy grail by others.
Jackson Browne's lighting director/production designer for four years, Steve Comer, is one who admits, "I had been looking for an LED hard edge light for a long time, and when the Spot One came along it was just the fixture I'd been waiting for."
This latest tour expanded organically from its origins as a solo acoustic tour to an ensemble, with more and more musician friends set to join him onstage. And this called for a more theatrically lit show where stage positions and musicians could disappear into darkness, according to Steve.
Faced with carrying lighting on tour for the first time in 18 months the lightweight/small form factor of the impression Spot One was a logical choice. "About four years ago Jackson decided to shrink his footprint on the environment when he was touring and so we turned to LEDs for our lighting rig. While we dramatically decreased our energy consumption I still had to to use standard ARC or tungsten sources to get any sort of hard edges. So I had been waiting for the Spot One technology to arrive so that we could create a 100% LED rig."
First introduced to this innovative technology by Bandit Lites' Dizzy Gosnell he is using six of the fixtures with Jackson Browne - two on a midstage pipe and the other four on an upstage pipe.
"The Spot Ones have all the functions that I need for my show," Comer assesses. "They have a nice Gobo selection on two wheels, a great zoom and a great colour selection, with the white LED channel. But the big advantage I have noticed in the LED optics is the lack of a hotspot as well as crisp hard edges."
