L5 Controls Large Rig and Media on Thompson Square’s US Tour

Photo by Stephanie Brunner ©44 Designs

Jands’ flagship Vista L5 console is controlling a large rig on popular American country music duo Thompson Square’s ‘Just Feels Good’ tour, which features over 80 moving lights and a large configuration of HD video screens.

Thompson Square consists of husband and wife, Keifer and Shawna Thompson. The group have received three fan-voted American Country Awards, a CMT Music Award, and were crowned the 2012 Academy of Country Music’s Vocal Duo of the Year – the first new duo to win the award in 20 years. They are now one of America“s biggest country acts, selling more than 2 million copies of their GRAMMY-nominated hit single, “Are You Gonna Kiss Me Or Not”.

Jeff Lavallee from Nashville-based lighting, rentals and production company, 44 Designs – which holds a large fleet of Jands Vista consoles – supplied the Vista L5 to lighting designer Larry Foote for the tour.

“Jeff and I had a vision for something simple but powerful, with a different, big look – that would push the visual boundaries and be unique on the Country Music touring circuit,” says Larry. “Jeff and 44 Designs surprised me with a brand new L5 for this tour – I love the T2, which I used on last year’s Thompson Square shows, but now I’m obsessed with the L5, and especially its big screen!”

Dealing with the ever increasing use of both media and LEDs, the Vista L5’s sleek design is dominated by a stunning 21 inch High Definition Wacom display that provides a crisp, detailed image showing a huge amount of information in a flexible, clear and easy to understand way.

“One of my favorite features of the Vista system is the Timeline, as that’s where the bulk of my programming is done,” continues Larry. “Another great aspect is having multiple layouts. I have my main whole rig layout, a house rig layout, a fast programming layout (just all my fixtures in straight lines by groups), and a matrix layout. The L5’s big screen makes the job of programming using Vista even easier than before.”

Larry’s rig for this year’s enhanced Thompson Square tour is comprised of Platinum Beam 5r, Mac 301, Krypton Kr 25 and Atomic 3k fixtures. The video rig utilises PixelFlex 18mm panels on custom frames, and Ayrton Magic Panels.

“I also love the Vista’s fixture editor feature,” says Larry. “I like to go in and tweak the profiles, so that I can personalize the fixtures – for instance, giving names to macros that best suit them.”

Larry is also using the L5 to drive ArKaos Pro media servers running the new MediaMaster Pro 4 software, which output content to the HD video screens.

“We have all the Kr 25s and Magic Panels pixel-mapped through two ArKaos machines that I built specifically for this tour,” explains Larry. “We’re using a mixture of custom and found content, and the L5 is handling it all with ease.”

The L5 has an Intel Quad-Core i7-2600 (3.4GHz) processor and 8GB of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM). This combination is ideal for even the biggest show, where using lots of fixtures, LEDs and media servers can place significant demands for power on the console.

The Vista range includes a choice of portable, flexible control surfaces and self-contained consoles all running the same Vista v2 software.