Mercury Lounge
The Mercury Lounge is a mainstay of the Indie Rock community in New York City, one of the anchors of the Lower East Side where once
the garment trade was the principal industry but now it's wall to wall clubs and restaurants. On a given weekend night you can probably see 30 to
40 bands within a 5 block radius if you run in and out of each venue quickly enough.
I've been working with Andrew Vladeck in this location, and a few others nearby, for 8 years or more.
Before him, I worked with several other bands in this space too, so it's been a kind of home base for me in terms of lighting rock musicians.
During this 15 year span, they've never replaced the lighting board, but fixtures have occasionally been moved around or upgraded. At the moment,
there are 8 par cans working as back light (4 colors with a pair in each color, White, Turquoise, Red and Blue). There are 3 ETC Source4 Ellipsoidals
on a Front Pipe, providing a clear colored face light system as well. In total that's 7 working dimmers.
I like Andrew's music, his stage presence, and the whole energy of his folk-rock-meets-NewOrleans-meets-quirky-lyrics vibe,
but normally I do not enjoy working with the house's 16 channel NSI light board if it is not in good repair
(dirty potentiomenters usually caused flickering when I slid a fader up or down). I knew this could be solved by bringing with me a laptop running DMXIS.
I wanted to stretch myself though, and remembering from past gigs that it's nice for Andrew's setlist to be able to manually override
levels a lot of the time with often 2 or more faders going in different directions at once, I brought a Playback Wing too.
Here's how it all worked together:
- 1) Playback Wing connected to Ethernet switch (2)
- 3) Motion Tablet Computer connected to Ethernet switch (2)
- 4) DMXIS connected via USB to Motion Computer
- 5) DMX to Microplex protocol converter connected to the DMXIS
- 6) House Dimmers going into that black box converter.
For this rig, I used one fader for each of the dimmers (7 total working that night) and that left me 3 more for general purpose things.
I dedicated one of those to the Grand Master, one to the Beats per Minute knob, and one to the Amount of Sound Tracker movement.
Various buttons on the wing were assigned to things like Bank & Preset Next/Last, Changing mode to Preset Manager, picking specific presents from a list, etc.
Video I took
In typical rock'n'roll fashion, I was riding into town just in time to arrive after the sound check,
and so I had to take what was there as far as lighting placement, focus and color. They have upgraded sound desks recently, so in their booth there's now about
6" between the end of the sound board and the wall; this is where normally the house lighting console lives. It works if you lean it steeply against the wall,
but not if you try to set it down in a normal operating condition. I had my hands full just getting a table set up near the booth and putting my still pretty
small footprint of gear on it , but I plugged in all my stuff before the room opened,
in less than half an hour, and made the DMXIS equipment control the dimmers quickly and easily.
Then I practiced with it a bit during the warm up act, taking time to assign my Wing Faders to the correct channels, writing a few looks, etc.
When Andrew and friends came on, all was ready, and I just had a lot of fun from that point onward.
The video I took is choppy because it was a handheld camera being operated WHILE I RAN DMXIS, but you'll get the idea.
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