Lighting Designer James Scott deployed 60 new Martin MAC One fixtures on the UK/EU leg of the Reneé Rapp “Snow Hard Feelings” tour. The fixtures were supplied by Siyan, purchased for their rental inventory from Martin UK distributor Sound Technology.
“The MAC One was offered to me by Tom Grant at Siyan,” Scott explained. “We were in discussions about the best choice of fixture for what I wanted to achieve on the tour and he suggested this new kid on the block. Bright, compact and fast. He had my attention.”
The LD’s first involvement with Reneé Rapp was at the start of 2023 when she was playing a sold-out Kentish Town Forum show. Regular collaborators, Tawbox brought him onboard to design staging and lighting for the one-off performance. Following a USA tour which he was not involved in, the tour made its way to UK/EU and Tawbox got back in touch and requested a refresh to the lighting for the end of the touring run.
“The concept and staging layout was mainly inherited from what was already on the road in the USA,” he continued. “I was given certain parameters to work within, such as retaining the band layout and the square LED video wall. In addition to that I had to design a lighting rig that was scaleable and quick to load in and out. The immediate attraction of the MAC One was the compact size of the fixture. Forget about the eye candy effects for the moment, the MAC One, on paper was very attractive due to the stated output, beam range and the compact size.”
Thus in the final design for the tour, a total of 60 MAC Ones were rigged on vertical towers either side of the main square LED wall, with six runs of H-frame rigged with 10 fixtures on each. Depending on the venue the design scaled up and down, with the smallest version still featuring 36 MAC Ones.
“The fact the MAC One can produce a clean parallel beam and also an old school “ACL” style look where the beam converges really gave me some nice aerial effects to play with,” he said. “Wind out the zoom to around 40% and you are gifted a lovely “fullness” to the beam which can produce a stage wide wash whilst still maintaining some definition to the light produced.”
Subject to the house rig in each of the venues, the MAC Ones were sometimes paired with Martin MAC Aura PXLs, where the exacting colour calibration of the MAC Series came into its own.
“Colour matching between all of the latest generation MAC fixtures are always spot on,” he confirmed. “Even in the most basic control mode you still have access to everything you need to produce the colours you require.”
“The fact the MAC One is a single source really lends itself to the fresnel lens, you don’t see any chromatic aberration all you are working with is rich beautiful colours from a large aperture lens considering the small footprint of the fixture itself,” Scott added.
Reflecting overall on the MAC One in use on the tour, Scott concluded, “I was highly impressed, they filled the role perfectly. I like the rigging options available and the fact they are easy to handle and manoeuvre really helped the crew on the road.”
