Now in its sixth year, Swedish festival Summerburst has to date taken place at two distinct cities: Gothenburg and Stockholm. With audiences of over 100,000 already visiting each venue for a weekend of electronic music, the festival’s organisers have opted to open up a third venue for this year’s event. Vingis Park in Vilnius, Lithuania will be the first venue to host Summerburst Baltic, the line-up of which boasts the likes of David Guetta and Steve Angello.
For the past three years, lighting design duties for Steve Angello have been the responsibility of Jon Trincas, who is also the creative director of Zeal, a company that provides design services to a wide range of artists and festivals including the lighting and rigging production for Steve Angello’s headline show at Creamfields last year.
At the festival Trincas used the MA Lighting grandMA2, supplied to him by Ambersphere Solutions: “For me, macros were the biggest selling point of the grandMA2. With the nature of the shows we deal with on a daily basis, I have to find ways of creating and updating my showfile in very minimal time, sometimes only an hour on site. The file is built in a way so that I can adapt effortlessly on a daily basis. The show is completely busked and on the fly so I have to have everything at my fingertips.
“With the macros I am able to update a few groups and run the macros to update all my programming like effect selections, intensity chases and various other elements of the show.
“I also use layout views with the grandMA2 to create a custom bespoke layout for my show. Here I have all my colour presets and various other fixture elements laid out in a fashion that I find comfortable and efficient.”
Trincas always specifies a grandMA2 with a grandMA2 Light as a networked backup. During time away from global festivals he uses MA platforms offline to create new shows both for Steve Angello and other clients of Zeal.
“I find I am learning new features on the console all the time. For example, I now also run Lasers via the grandMA2 giving me more control over show elements and keeping everything in time. I start every show with a base file that I’ve created. From start to finish I can have a small show cloned and ready to use on site in under an hour. The larger types of EDM shows take a bit longer. Being able to recall presets from previously used fixtures is also a massive time saver. There are some shows where we literally fly in and go straight to site and do the show. Being able to recall presets from used fixtures and then a sneaky import of a few positions from the house file I am able to go straight into a show with no on-site programming time.”