The house itself consists of four trusses, three onstage, each with 24 par cans plus 6 Futurelight moving heads per truss, and another 10 movers dotted around the box truss above the dancefloor.
 
The Sapphire 2000 was originally specified for the installation because of it’s flexibility and reputation as quick and easy live desk to programme and playback. It’s easy Legending function and plenty of Pages, allows everyone to use as much space as they need. Other advantages include plenty of pages of Palettes available - enabling each band to have their own preset positions, and to select colour, gobo etc., on top of them in ‘Takeover’ mode. This is particularly handy when there’s insufficient programming time to plot all the cues.

“The other beauty of the Sapphire is it’s simplicity” states Farmer, “With 4 bands each night (on the Carling event) and multiple LDs to keep happy, some of whom had never used the desk before, and others who were very new to lighting, a 10 minute crash course in recording memories and chases was sufficient for most to be able to program the bulk of their shows”. 

Once they’d done this, he’ll generally power programme the moving light cues they wanted or copy the looks they liked that were already stored in the desk. “Its also easy to take information from a cue using the desk’s ‘Include’ function, and to modify it into the new look or speed, and re-record it” states Farmer.

Starsailor on the Friday night proved a challenging gig. It was LD Ollie Metcalf’s first show with his touring rig, and he wanted to bring in everything including his own Sapphire 2000 desk.

He used 4 angled Slick Lite-Beam Trusses upstage, arrayed around a central video Screen, with the trusses were dead hung from the house truss. Friday night at the Astoria is also the incredibly popular G-A-Y club night, a banging disco that kicks off immediately after the main show ends, so a hasty exit was required.

Metcalf’s trusses featured Studio Spot CYM and a Studio Colour 575s, on the upstage house truss were 2 Cyberlight Turbo's and 2 Studio Colours, and on the downstage house truss were 2 more Cyber T's for solo effects, fitted with custom gobos. The Barco G5 Projector was also rigged on the front truss.

The floor featured 4 Cyber T's upstage of the backline, used for aerial beam effects, and two Studio Colors on the downstage edge. The total system was 8 Studio Colour 575s, 4 Spot CYM's, and 8 Cyber Turbo's, 2 Avo Buffers, a small PD, a few bits of Litebeam and - of course - the Sapphire 2000 Console.

Metcalf was able to pre-program much of the show with his Avo Visualiser system in the comfort of a design suite at CAV. All he had to do, programming wise, at The Astoria was set up the alignments to the house dimmer system. He enthuses, “The house crew Snakey (Farmer) and Baldrick were storming in getting the trusses in for us to rig our upstage stuff, in giving me DMX lines for stage from FOH and DMX info for the dimmers”. It was easy to run both Sapphires side-by-side, with some lights cross patched, without hassle. Metcalf’s crew members were Morgan Evans and Roger Griv. 

  
NME Carling Award Winners