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| Lighting designer Paula Trounce is
a firm fan of the Avolites Tiger Touch and Pearl Expert consoles and the latest
Avolites TITAN software, having used both Avo products on tour with acclaimed UK
singer/songwriter Kate Nash. Trounce is also the house LD at London’s famous Shepherd’s Bush Empire venue, where the house desk is an Avo Diamond 4. Avolites is very much her desk of choice. She's been using Avo consoles since her early house operator days in the 1990s, where she started at the LA2 in central London. |
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| The first show that she designed
and programmed for Nash was done on a Pearl Expert running TITAN after which
they asked her to tour with them. So she had a show everyone was really happy
with, but an expedient budget meant the decision was taken to utilize house rigs
rather than tour a production. The ideal opportunity arose for Trounce to try out the Tiger Touch whilst on the European leg of the tour. Above all, the ability to pluck her original design straight from the Pearl Expert and plug it directly into the Tiger Touch proved a great solution. Portable enough to travel with her on the bus Trounce was able to fixture exchange her way all around Europe. “It worked absolutely brilliantly for incorporating the house fixtures each night, translating and upgrading my positions, colours and palettes and allowing me to have my basic show every night,” she says. |
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| The original show design featured
8 spot and 8 wash moving lights so if the venue had only 6, then those first 6
would get patched into the console as whatever brand they were – and would
behave exactly as per the originally programmed fixtures. Trounce was impressed with the comprehensive fixture library in the Tiger Touch and also with the ease and speed of updating these online if she needed a personality not yet in the archive. For the more recent Kate Nash UK tour, they took a small production rig comprising 6 x GLP Impression moving LED wash fixtures, 4 Sky Pans, some funky custom drapes and a projection system, together with an Avo Pearl Expert running TITAN. All the lighting kit was supplied by Siyan. Again they patched into house rigs for the main overhead lights in each venue …. and it all worked seamlessly. |
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| There are many things Trounce
likes about TITAN. The Kate Nash show - complete with her witty, intelligent,
acerbic lyrics - has involved a fair amount of busking and live operation over
the top of preset looks and TITAN is an ideal architecture for this modus
operandi. It brings all the power and functionality of the D4 to the smaller Avo
user interfaces. “It’s amazing to be able to programme in the same way on the
smaller consoles,” she concludes. In creative terms, she wanted to make a "soft beautiful stage" for the poppier songs; very vivid and saturated with texture supplied by the shimmer organza drapes, projection and LED up-lighting. For the harder stuff, the whole look changed to be scarier and more aggressive. "Kate was very much into the theatre of the show which was great," says Trounce, stating that it really suited her personality. |
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| In addition to all the creative
and practical advantages of TITAN, Trounce says that the support and service
from Avolites is every bit as “outstanding as its reputation!" They are always
there for you whenever you call or need something – and there is an incredible
vibe at the company". Trounce was also the main console operator for the high profile 2010 BBC Radio 2 Electric Proms at London's Roundhouse, for which she used an Avo Diamond 4 Vision. She used a D4 earlier in the year when designing for Australian band Cat Empire. Kate Nash is on tour again in December in Germany, for which she will again be taking a Pearl Expert TITAN. |
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