grandMA3 Goes Live with Whiskey Myers Tour

Country rockers Whiskey Myers continue their 2024 North American tour with grandMA3 controlling lighting and video elements in a unique live application.  The tour is due to wrap in Las Vegas in November after playing some high-profile venues, including Red Rocks.  ACT Entertainment is the exclusive distributor of MA Lighting products in North America.

Brian Vaughan, Director of Production with New York City-based Live ReDesigned, which is known for crafting unforgettable experiences, serves as Production Designer and Lighting Designer for the tour.  It’s his second project with the band following Whiskey Myers’ acoustic tour last winter.  “We wanted a show that would look big but would fit in five trucks, so we’re utilizing tools in creative ways that make things look bigger,” explains Vaughan.  He has earmarked more than 200 lighting fixtures, 242 feet of Tyler GT truss and hundreds of ROE CB8 LED video panels for the tour. 

“We’ve been using MA lighting products since grandMA2 and were one of the first to use grandMA3 in native mode with Carrie Underwood’s Las Vegas residency,” he points out.  “It’s been great to see the evolution of the platform, its refinements and improvements and how they have taken our user feedback into consideration.”

“grandMA3 software is one of the platform’s best advances in a long time,” says Live ReDesigned Chief Creative Officer Nick Whitehouse.  “It’s full-sizefantastic and stable; we’ve done some huge shows with it.  grandMA3 is the future of lighting software.”

Tour lighting vendor 4Wall provided Vaughan with a grandMA3, a grandMA3 light and two processing units for the show.  Both the full and light desks are actively deployed, operating manually with the band performing raw and live with no timecode and no click track. 

“This makes it very challenging for the programmers and operators,” notes Live ReDesigned Associate Lighting Designer Clay Joiner, who is the tour’s Co-Lighting/Video Programmer with Vaughan.  “You need to know the music as if you were on stage with the guys.  It’s an old-school way of working using modern technology to give the show a traditional feel.”

“This is not a standard plug-and-play timecode show; it’s a show that uses grandMA3’s live features and runs easily with thousands of cues and the ability to play along with the band,” says Whitehouse. 

Joiner says, “What I love about the desk is that it offers a lot of versatility with macros, custom commands and syntax.  It’s very precise and smooth, and you can do almost anything you want,”

He particularly likes cue stacks’ notes and durations, which “as an operator, tell you how long transitions will be and how to anticipate what will happen next,” he explains. Appearances, which are sets of looks that can be designed to pool objects, presets, view buttons or windows, “is also huge,” Joiner says.  “You can see the verse, chorus and bridges, all color coded.  On a manual show, it really helps keep you on track.”

In addition to lighting, grandMA3 controls the PRG Mbox Studio media server, which drives three ROE CB8 LED portrait screens displaying live camera cuts and IMAG.  “We add video effects and color to match lighting on these surfaces,” says Vaughan. 

“We already had a profile for Mbox Studio for MA2 and were able to port that over to a new MA3 show file,” notes Joiner.  “If we had to build a new Mbox profile from scratch it would have been pretty intense, so this made things much easier.”

After Whiskey Myers wraps this tour, the band is expected to launch a small acoustic Christmas tour, which will also involve Live ReDesigned and the grandMA3.

“ACT has always provided us with a great deal of support, especially when we were one of the first to transition to grandMA3 software,” says Vaughan.  “It was nice to be able to talk to them, have them listen and then see the ‘what-ifs’ we talked about come out in new releases.”

“We have long relationships with both MA Lighting and ACT, who have been outstanding partners supporting us any time of the day or night,” Whitehouse concludes.