Band Lights

[bzb]

Hi Bobby,

Are these bright enough for normal use on stands or trusses?

I looked at some of these at GC

http://www.guitarcenter.com/Venue-LED38 ... 1446819.gc

and was surprised at how bright they were compared to regular lights.

I guess we could buy a couple of the Chinese ones and see if they work for us.

Doug

It really depends on what you want - what look you're going after.

If you watch my youtube video above, the first scene is two Chauvet Colorstrips ($170 each) in a color fade mode. The Colorstrips are insanely bright. The cool thing is you can put them in colormix mode and adjust the intensity to whatever you desire. My crowds don't seem to mind full blast, though.

Those Venue ones are overpriced. I got to take a look at them at GC last time and cracked one open. They're almost exactly the same build - quality and design - as the Chinese junk I got They're actually Par 36 size, not Par 38. I confuse them a lot, but there is a slight size difference.

The pic below was the test in my living room. You can see how the light shines is bright all the way up to the air registers on the wall at 15'. Personally, I think they're bright enough on a stage. But then again, I don't want shit shining on me when I'm playing.

If that's the style you *want*, I think the cheapos are all you really *need*. IMHO, the Colorstrips are a better wash light than just about anything else out there for LED fixtures (for budget minded DJs and bands, at least). They create a true wash of color rather than spotlights. Even the 10mm Par 64s make big dots on the floor/stage.

When you step up to the far pricier 1W and 3W diodes, you get a wash from just a couple LEDs in a fixture. We're talking a Par 64 might have 6 LEDs in it. They're actually using small strips of 3W diodes now to light salt water fish tanks and grow hard corals - something that used to take multiple 65W compact fluorescent fixtures or a big 400W metal halide lamp.

[mattaudio]

Speaking of this topic, does anyone have good suggestions for attaching LED lighting to the top/bottom/side of PA speakers?

[bzb]

Need more detail. Do you mean LED strips, like you nerd out... I mean customize... a computer?

Or do you mean attach a Par can?

[Radian]

You can see them in the video:

Dude, I swear that's Rocky Rococo getting his groove on to Madonna!

[mattaudio]

Need more detail. Do you mean LED strips, like you nerd out... I mean customize... a computer?

Or do you mean attach a Par can?

Well, I'll leave it open ended... What would YOU dou to light up a band? Would you use separate trees? Would you try to get lights on your mains?

Right now, my mains are EV SX100s (soon to be 4 DR200s, I hope) or sometimes I use my SRM450s if I have no need for my amp rack.

I currently have 4 LED par38s, 2 halogen DMX scanners (i set around my drums), and about $500 to buy more lights.

[Ron K]

Buy the real thing for a fraction of the price.I've heard lots of the big guys moving to these. Lots of light from 1 can and any color you want.

http://www.nwlightingfx.com/LED_Series.html

They also have arc bulb movers. Not the wimpy halogen bulb ones but the real 250 and 575 Discharge bulbs that will cut through anything you can throw on a large stage.

For the price you cant beat them. Quality is decent. I know 3 company's using these and they buy them and bring them in and replace some screws and other fixture items that tend to come loose from heavy transportation. If you ever put your gear in a large Diesel truck and hauled it around you would know what I mean. Chauvet and ADJ types wont hold up to the vibrations even in a foam lined case. What most do is remove screws and lock tight them especially the moving mirrors and gobo wheels inside along with the servo motor mounts.

http://www.nwlightingfx.com/Work.html

[Gauss]

Best non-stadium band set-up I saw was four truss towers, with color wash and 4 scanners. They also put out oriental rugs and lit incense and had their own mobile 'front-of-house' both. It was pretty intense.

If it were my band, I'd do half that size with two T-bars, two colorstrips and two scanners, mounted at the side of the stage and rigged to a simple DMX controller, with a scene/chase for each song.

[Ron K]

Best non-stadium band set-up I saw was four truss towers, with color wash and 4 scanners. They also put out oriental rugs and lit incense and had their own mobile 'front-of-house' both. It was pretty intense.

If it were my band, I'd do half that size with two T-bars, two colorstrips and two scanners, mounted at the side of the stage and rigged to a simple DMX controller, with a scene/chase for each song.

Were those LED fixtures or standard incandescent washes with arc scanners etc.? I've found the LED and the halogen scanners to be rather anemic. Are there any newer scanners in LED that are priced reasonably and perform like Arc bulb scanners?

There was a forum member here who went all LED with a bunch of the chauvet color strips and other wash lighting.I thought that looked pretty decent as far as nice rich colors went but he had to use quite a bit of them.

Here one guy uses 8 Arch Bulb 250watt scanners and two front wash lights and 2 hazers. His show is very nice and very effective. He has the scanners across two 10 ft sections of aluminum tri-truss and crank stands with a cloth black backdrop.He uses an AMdj show designer I believe and all in all a pretty decent show.

I only use two powerful wash lights from the front only. It gives me plenty of colors and plenty of light even for a 40ft wide stage.Since I dont really do lighting this is as far as I'm willing to go for an extra 50 bucks and something I dont really have to run during the course of the night.Reach over every now and then and change the color with the touch of 1 button. Works for me.Occasionally I will throw it on audio and let the music flash them again 1 button!

[guitarkeys.com]

I am not talking from first hand experience, but I read some studies / experiments that compared lumens of LED lights and a typical par can and their was quite a difference in the amount of light that the LED put out (LED was weak). The paper did make the distinction that as the cost of the LED went up the quality got better, but I remember looking at the numbers and simply being blown away. Cost wise, I decided to stick with typical par lights as LED are very, very costly.

Just recently I bought my first LED light and am waiting on its arrival. I will give a first hand analysis when it arrives. I only got one because I wanted to run some tests to see just how many will be required if I go for a full setup.

Will be interesting.

Jamie

[jcmbowman]

I am not talking from first hand experience, but I read some studies / experiments that compared lumens of LED lights and a typical par can and their was quite a difference in the amount of light that the LED put out (LED was weak). The paper did make the distinction that as the cost of the LED went up the quality got better, but I remember looking at the numbers and simply being blown away. Cost wise, I decided to stick with typical par lights as LED are very, very costly.

Just recently I bought my first LED light and am waiting on its arrival. I will give a first hand analysis when it arrives. I only got one because I wanted to run some tests to see just how many will be required if I go for a full setup.

Will be interesting.

Jamie

As someone who seems to be getting more lighting gigs lately than sound gigs, I've been looking into LED lighting pretty heavily over the past year or so. I've got some cheapo american DJ fixtures that I picked up at an estate sale for next to nothing, and I've had the opportunity to work with some of the true pro-level LED fixtures, and there is a HUGE difference. While the costs are continuing to come down, it's still a matter of getting what you pay for. From where I sit, the balance is still in favor of Incandescent fixtures unless you're very limited on power, or you have a lot of money to blow.

Some of the current limitations of inexpensive LED fixtures are:
1) Poor build quality. I'd rather spend $500 for a fixture and know that it's going to keep working that spend $125 on a fixture and not know for sure from one show to the next if I can count on it not crapping out halfway through the night. The inexpensive ones are just not made to travel.
2) Sub-standard components. I've had serious issues putting cheap LED fixtures in the same DMX chain with traditional dimmers and scanners. The electronics in the cheap chinese crap fixtures are definitely the cheapest of the cheap.
3) Low light output - Unless you're paying the premium for fixtures made with 1 watt or 3 watt LEDs, you're never going to come close to the output of an incandescent.
4) Poor light quality and color mixing - Most of the professional tour-grade LED fixtures use RGBA or RGBW instead of RGB to achieve a broader range of colors, some have also started switching to multiple LEDs in a single chip/lens to eliminate the color ghosting that occurs when you try to color mix with a cheap RGB LED fixture. (For instance - when you try to get purple by mixing red and blue you will usually see a fringe of red light on one side of the throw and a fringe of blue on the other side.) Also, the better (and more expensive) LED fixtures have much more intelligent electronics to handle color shifts and fades much more smoothly. My american DJ Par64 LEDs are VERY jerky when trying to execute a slow fade. I haven't measured yet, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they only have 32 or 64 steps from off to full on for each channel (R,G,B) even though DMX spec is 256 steps. The more expensive ones have circuitry to to smooth out the hard steps, and some even allow you to double up the DMX channels if you have a controller that can handle it, giving you 65,000 steps from black to full on. I've rented some of the PixelRange LED fixtures, and they behave like this.

So - if you're just trying to spice up your bar stage presence a little bit, go ahead and grab a few LED fixtures, but if you're looking to make a investment in lighting and don't have a huge budget, the time of the LEDs is not quite here yet.

[guitarkeys.com]

That seems pretty spot on. I got one to try out for back lighting/color washing. Truth is, many of the places I've played at (like most places) aren't set up to run sound equipment, much less a small light show, so power becomes an issue and having one light that can do multiple colors would be a little easier on setup as well.

I'm not expecting this thing to knock my socks off by any stretch of the imagination, but if I could get several, find some colors that work well, and use them at parties for uplighting etc.

Cracks me up because I think of one of my friends who bought led light bulbs for their house. I expect them to start resembling moles over a period of time as you can't see anything in there!

Jamie

[bzb]

OK, here's something I do actually know something about.

LEDs will, in fact, put out more useable than a traditional halogen fixture if wattages are equal. The beauty of LED is that most of the input energy goes to the light, not heat. An incandescent is 2% efficient - 98% of your power goes to heat. A halogen is about 4% efficient. LEDs, on the other hand, are up to 80% efficient.

What does this mean? It means that, yes, a single 3mm diode will not match a 6 Watt fluorescent, let alone a 40W filament bulb. However, you cluster a bunch of 10mm diodes together and they will match, if not outright beat, any similar fixture with the equivalent power consumption.

Additionally, in most cases - including our use here for band lighting, as well as my area of more interest in salt water aquariums - lumens aren't really what you should be concerned with. LEDs have a much tighter focus than halogen bulbs, so the "throw" on LEDs is far better.

The other thing is that you *can* in fact run a boatload of LED fixtures on the same circuit as your PA gear. It's not recommended, but sometimes it's unavoidable.

A Par 64 can loaded with a 400W bulb is matched visually in a stage setting by a Par 64 with 183 10mm diodes - pulling 30W.

After seeing many, many setups and buying and experimenting with lots of different ones, I went with two ColorStrips for my wash lighting. I wish I had taken pictures at the wedding I did last night, but I was quite busy with the crowd the entire time. The reception hall was about 50'x70', and I was setup directly in the center of the 70' wall. The ColorStrips would light up the entire room in a wash - I had them pointed straight ahead at the other wall, approximately 15' up. They're using 384 5mm LEDs each.

With the exception of the DMX controllers, LEDs are so incredibly simple. They're solid, so you're not going to break them. They last for thousands... possibly tens of thousands of hours. If anything really goes wrong, it's usually the power supply or a shitty soldering job. Everything comes from China nowadays - when it comes to LEDs there's no compelling reason to go with an expensive unit over a cheap one. An expensive one has just as much statistical possibility to break down during a gig as the cheapies. The bonus with the cheapies is that you'll probably be less afraid to crack it open and fix it yourself.

To show you how simple, I present to you this from DJF:
$10 homemade LED par cans




OK, onto your setup. I would indeed go with two trees, but you're going to need a DMX splitter for convenience. Chauvet DMX-2x or Data Stream 4 will allow you to split your DMX signal - I'd go with the DS4.

Build yourself some bases for the Par 38s, and use those as uplights. Two uplights behind the drum kit, and two uplighting your mains (or just clamped to one of the legs of the speaker stand). If your mains aren't on stage with you, I'd do 4 uplights behind the band. Run DMX from two channels, if necessary.

The grab two ColorStrip ($178 each) and center mount the scanners on each tree. Run DMX to each tree.

That puts you right around your $500 budget with some pretty cheap trees. Later on, if you want a dope EFX unit, grab a Martin EFX series, at least the 600 if not the Wizard.



Edit: I do agree with JC on a couple areas:

1. Yes, the fading is better on more expensive fixtures. Not enough better to warrant the incredible price jump, IMO.
2. RGBAW is definitely better, but most colors are possible with color mixing even on the cheap fixtures. I don't really notice any bleeding effects on my cheapo Chinese ones. Pic below is red+blue mixed at 100%, resulting in a pink/purple.
3. LEDs are not ready to replace everything yet. We're still a couple years off from great scanners, yokes, and effects. Unless dots are your thing.

[Sydney]

In the context of the bulk of the target audience of this forum ( in small bars and clubs ) LED are the valid direction.
Realistically Big Stages and Theaters are NOT the concern here.
However there is an enormous difference in their lighting requirements.
An LED fixture, nor a cheap PAR64 can, cannot be compared to a Stage lighting fixture like an ETC Source 4.
Differences include:
The light from LED fixtures is NOT coherent;
And their photometrics is not adequate for the throw needed in stage and theater.
( I've lit plenty of performance pieces )

Syd

[mattaudio]

I have 2 ellipsoidals and 2 fresnels I salvaged from a dumpster... I used to use them with 8 incandescent pars, they were good controlled lighting with a soft amber gel in them. Maybe I should mix those with LEDs, just for when I need some amber on the band. LEDs can do the rest.

[DrDoug018]

3) Low light output - Unless you're paying the premium for fixtures made with 1 watt or 3 watt LEDs, you're never going to come close to the output of an incandescent.

Interesting. That was the opinion I had going into this. However when I wen to Guitar Center late last week, they had two trees set up, one with 4 traditional incandescent (150Watt) bulbs

http://www.guitarcenter.com/American-DJ ... 1428184.gc

and one with 4 LEDs.

http://www.guitarcenter.com/American-DJ ... 1440355.gc

To my surprise, the LEDs were much brighter than the incandescents. Granted the LED system was $200 more but I was surprised that they were so much brighter.

Doug