President of GLP Inc., Mark Ravenhill said “Since we started our US operations in 2009, we have been endeavouring to support more and more of the valuable associations within our industry, and we are very proud that we can now call ourselves members of USITT.”

USITT is a not-for-profit Corporation and is operated exclusively for charitable, educational and scientific purposes.

Carl Wake, Technical Director of GLP Inc. added, “We are very excited about working with, and supporting the organisation and in particular its student membership in any way that we can. Having done many years of product and application training through my career, I see some exciting opportunities ahead.”

Reporting a busy attendance from all four days, distributors and customers alike gave a great response to the new showings, in what was definitely an upbeat environment.

The fixture has a motorized zoom, changing its beam size from 10 to 26 degrees, whilst maintaining a strong output.

"We needed a small moving LED fixture that was fast and had a zoom," commented Vicken Hekimian, Scene Change Sydney Director. "The GLP Volkslicht zoom was bright, fast and compact plus it was provided by Show Technology who supply great after sales support and have always been very supportive of Scene Change. Having Show Technology as the supplier gives us a lot of confidence in the product."

All of Scene Change's purchasing decisions have to meet the following criteria: it needs to be excellent quality, be able to be installed quickly, be reliable and be fit for the purpose. The GLP Volkslicht zoom meets those demands and more.

"The price was attractive too - the purchase price versus the rental return is great," added Vicken. "They're quick and easy to install which is a priority for us as usually we have very limited time to set up a show and have short deadlines. We need a reliable fixture that is easy to transport, can install easily and is quick to set up. These weigh only 8kg each and four of them quickly pack away into a small case."

Often the venues that Scene Change work in have low ceilings and larger moving head fixtures tend to look obtrusive and aesthetically wrong.

The Volkslicht Zoom uses 60 Luxeon Rebel LED's in an RGB configuration to give a broad mixing palette of colors from its primary saturates, through to the more subtle pastel shades.

"The color mixing is very good and the dimmer curve is great," remarked Vicken. "Plus it has a white mode which can be useful."

Long-serving LD Ian MacDonald designed the lighting to be diverse — partly scaled to fit 1000-seat theaters, but sufficiently organic to upscale effortlessly into arenas and amphitheaters. In the case of Synthetica this involved five different set-ups, and each included GLP’s new Spot One LED moving heads.

MacDonald’s search for the Spot One was stimulated by his desire to have an all LED arena lighting rig. “This is becoming the norm these days … less power and lighter fixtures are always a huge plus, especially when playing smaller venues with limited power,” he said. “I was looking for an LED profile moving fixture that could be as good as, or better than a standard moving light fixture.”

And GLP’s groundbreaking spot provided the solution. First introduced to the fixture by Marty Anderson and Louis Racine from Midnite Hour Productions the LD was immediately aware of the Spot One’s versatility. “I was particularly impressed with the beam intensity and the RGB color mixing,” he said.

The Toronto-based rental company spent time testing and rigging the GLP Spot Ones in the cube design that MacDonald had conceived. Each GLP Spot One was mounted in an individual cube which was then linked in pairs with caster wheels for easy transportation.

All cabling was pre-rigged in a 4ft x 4ft x 2ft cubic truss. The six upstage towers measured four cubes high (16ft), with each cube containing an LED wash fixture, LED white strobe and four LED strips. The six flown vertical towers were three cubes long, each containing a GLP Spot One (18 in total), an LED RGB strobe and four LED strips. The downstage right and left truss were made up of four cubes with LED wash fixtures and LED strips. These trusses were custom fabricated for the tour by Midnite Hour.

The band themselves chose a specific color palette for the Synthetica tour consisting of blue, red, magenta and LED white. “The great thing about the Spot One, is they have rich color — especially the reds,” noted MacDonald.

The Spot Ones were assigned a particularly versatile role … variously functioning as solo lighting FX, crowd sweeps and band top lighting. Reviewing the show, the LD said, “I really enjoyed the speed of the fixture and the gobo wheel selection. In fact I would totally use them for future tours with Metric and other artists.”

He also praised the support provided by Midnite Hour — although since the Spot Ones performed flawlessly throughout this was hardly called upon.

“The Latin American market has been growing with interesting speed in the past few years,” commented Mark Ravenhill, President of GLP US Inc., continuing, “We have had plans for a Latin American operation, but needed to ensure that we had the correct structure in place to support it 100%. We have that now and can ensure that customers benefit from our high level of customer service.”

Peter Hald commented, “I’m delighted to be joining the GLP team. They really have a great product line up with leading edge technology which I can’t wait to bring to the Latin American market.” Hald has recently been working in telecommunications, but is no stranger to the industry, having previously worked at Danish manufacturer, Martin Professional for a number of years.

Speaking of the appointment, Ravenhill added, “Peter is a great addition to the company. His knowledge of the Latin American market is a huge asset, and on a personal level, it’s great to be working with him again.”

Incorporating 19 quad color RGBW LED’s, each rated at 15 Watts, in a breakthrough design, the X4 offers a single homogenized color output from its unique looking front lens across a wide color spectrum and with high output. Janowitz could immediately see how he could put this feature set, with its impressive 7:1 (7°-50°) zoom ratio, to good use.

Given a free hand with the band’s lighting he admits, “There is a tremendous amount of mutual trust — but I have a pretty good sense of the type of visual landscape they are comfortable performing within.”

In fact he had originally been planning to put the 120RZ into the new MMJ design until coming across GLP’s latest solution by accident … and in the nick of time. “By chance, my associate, Ben Price, was prepping another one of our shows [also serviced by VER of Glendale] when [GLP Inc president] Mark Ravenhill stopped by to show him the X4 back in May. I was in Europe and Ben called me in the middle of the night to tell me about the fixture — he was so excited that he forgot about the time difference.”

The timing was perfect as Marc Janowitz was in the process of finalizing the set design with the MMJ crew. “We managed to get the new fixture into the discussions just in time for everything to fall into place.”

On returning from Europe Marc got to review the fixture at close quarters. “I could see right away what the potential was and didn’t need to compare the X4 with other washlights.  I needed to see that they were at least as bright and feature packed as previous impression fixtures and no bigger or heavier.

“Seeing the addition of the white LED and how it created an even better option for high transmission pastel colors — plus the overall homogenized output sold me immediately.  No more looking at red/green pixels when mixing ambers and oranges!”

The creative element is designed around a festoon-like hanging system, fabricated out of a modified truss ladder, which forms the architectural centerpiece.  These consist of ten soft, swooped hanging positions suspended between the trusses in the overhead grid, with five of the X4’s on each.  These festoons travel pre-rigged and cabled, and once the grid is hung, are fully deployed in about 10 minutes.

Marc describes the new X4’s as “bright, lightweight, diverse” and the zoom as “remarkable.” He qualifies this by saying, “It enables me to use these fixtures for an overhead beamy washlight plus a groundrow cyc light … the zoom is outstanding.”

One particular feature that is working well within the MMJ design is the macro effects channel.  “I utilize the center cluster only and point all the fixtures out to the audience.  Since the architectural structure of the design was meant to emulate strings of festoon lights, I was able to create the look of bare bulbs hanging over the stage with the X4.  I would go to this look during the set break and then stay in it for the first few songs out of the encore (typically ballads or solo acoustic songs).”

Speaking of the impression footprint in general Marc relates, “Since many of my clients require designs that will tour well in restricted logistical situations, such as bus trailers, and rock clubs, the combination of minimum size, weight and power consumption is perfect.  But they also pack an excellent punch. “These are not just club fixtures — they hold their own just as well at 30ft trim as they do at 12ft.”

The lighting designer has already underpinned his commitment to the new fixture by promptly deploying a further 28 X4’s in a different context on the Autumn tour with Trey Anastasio Band. “I imagine I’ll be logging quite a few ‘lamp-hours’ on this line and its offshoots in the coming months … so it’s a good thing they are LED!” he smiles.