Currently on tour to promote their second album Fuego, Xeria incorporates the versatility of LightShark to easily adapt their own show to venues of different sizes.
Live performance venues come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, which doesn’t make things easy for lighting designers, who are tasked with enhancing artistic performances by creating impressive light shows.
In these situations, having a tool that fosters creative expression and also allows integration of lighting with the audio system and the band’s MIDI signals is a huge advantage, especially if it's so easy to use that the band doesn't need a technician to set it up at each venue.
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For lighting designer Alex Conde, the solution to this problem is LightShark, a range of DMX-based hardware lighting consoles manufactured by the Spanish company Equipson.
Conde, founder of Aconde Design—a company specializing in interior and exterior lighting—recently used LightShark with great success when he was tasked with designing the lighting for the band Xeria, who are currently touring Spain to promote their new album Fuego.
My main responsibility was to design the layout of the lighting equipment, program the lighting for each song, and automate the MIDI commands with Xeria’s Cymatic Audio LP-16 MIDI audio system and an IRing MIDI 2 adapter. For this tour, Xeria is using four Equipson Mark Beam 201 moving heads, eight Equipson Mark Mbar RGB 4 lighting bars, and four Equipson Mark MF 1500 VT smoke machines. To ensure the lighting setup matched their music, I used the LightShark LS-Core to create a full setup with static lighting and moving heads. As this tour visits large stages at festivals and venues, as well as pubs with smaller stages, it was important that the lighting could be adapted to all types of spaces, he explains.
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Originating from Toledo, Xeria has become a standout band in the Spanish alternative metal scene, known for their melodic, intricate music and for blending different musical styles with powerful lyrics focused on social and current topics. The band consists of Félix Gacho on bass, Carlos Z on guitars, Víctor Herrera on keyboards, César Manjarrés on drums, and Marina Sweet on vocals.
The Fuego tour currently spans 13 cities, with more dates likely to be added throughout the year. The band is opening for Celtian, who is also promoting a new album, and shares some dates with Headon and Heleven.
For Conde, choosing LightShark was an obvious decision since he has been successfully working with this award-winning product since its launch in 2018.
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I use LightShark to program all my live show projects, such as designing the tour for the band Sôber in 2021, which involved OSC commands and Millumin software. The Xeria project is very similar to that, except it involves moving heads. I integrated an LS-Core into the audio system, which was very beneficial for the band because the LS-Core is rack-mounted. There are 12 cue lists and more than 500 cues and performers recorded, with commands to trigger the cue list and performers activated by MIDI. Thanks to the intuitive nature of LightShark’s interface, along with the ease of editing cue lists and updating palettes, the band members can now add steps or cues to each song themselves, update the cue lists for each show, and easily update the focus position palettes without the need for a technician, he states.
Conde adds that the band learned to use LightShark in just two days and are now thrilled with the creative freedom it gives them. “They enjoy the independence LightShark provides because they can now update the show themselves, improving cue list steps, changing colors or movements, and revising positions”, he says.
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Although Alex Conde is using LS-Core for this tour, the LightShark range also includes the LS-1 hardware console with assignable faders and rotary encoders; the LS-Wing Open Sound Control (OSC) hardware controller; and three multi-protocol DMX streaming devices—each compatible with a different number of DMX universes—collectively known as LS-NODE. Targeted at all types of venues, from small theaters to large stadiums, these products have already changed the world of traditional lighting control systems by offering users a hardware console with a web-based interface accessible from any smart device, such as smartphones, tablets, and computers. With LightShark, lighting engineers have the ability to control up to eight DMX universes and over 4,000 DMX channels. Moreover, the range is fully compatible with equipment from other manufacturers, as the products work with industry-standard DMX and ArtNet lighting protocols, as well as any operating system (Android, Linux, Windows, and macOS).
Conde believes that Equipson's LightShark brand is enabling both large and small bands to create more creative shows with ease.
I’ve trusted LightShark since its inception, and it has great potential. Additionally, learning to use it is very intuitive for people without technical knowledge, such as venue directors or musicians. In my experience, the ease of use allows musicians and small bands to design a creative show with a smaller budget compared to Avolites, MA, or Chamsys, he states.
