How are lights in concerts and festivals synced so precisely to the music and the artist. My question regards both the mechanical lights and the human operated ones like spotlights.
In: 8
There’s a booth where they’re hooked up to a controller (generally computer these days).
They have schedules for which lights are on at what times through the event. The computer handles this. If a light is supposed to move, it is handled by the controller. Based on the task schedule, the lights rotate or tilt.
In a lot of cases, the people onstage have to rehearse being at specific lights and staying with them as they move. The lights people have to practice getting it in sync with the performers, but the performers have to practice being in sync with the lights.
Often, lights do need to be manually controlled, but less often than you might expect with how good the computer stuff is these days.
Source: Worked as a stagehand part-time for part of my college years, now in IT. It was a cool job, but not something that I could expect to make a career out of.
The lights are controlled by a human operator who uses a computerized system for certain pre-set effects (such as chases) but who also uses their own instinct, experience, and intimate knowledge of the band’s predetermined setlist to manually trigger those presets and sync the overall ambience and effects with the show. The light show is a planned thing that was developed along with the development of the setlist, the staging, the pyro, the sound, and everything else that happens on, behind, or beneath the stage.
Working a light board is quite similar to playing an instrument with the band.
Source: I did this for years and it was sweet as hell.
Just like computer games.
Audio hardware at the concerts are connected to wide variety of tools such as equalisers. These tools can process and filter audio data to observe for a desired pattern/behaviour such as beat drops or volume levels. Then, they relay a data package to the light sensors. So when there’s a heavy bear drop, this is detected and the spotlight glows. If the volume is low, it rotates around slower. If there’s a guitar, the spotlight flashes in-between. Just giving out some examples 😅
These light sensors are preprogrammed before concerts to help artist to handle the show easily.
For manual controls, it’s the same but instead of an automated process, producers/artists do it manually with keypads/buttons/etc.
I used to be a sound engineer for about 7 years and did a few shows as a lighting director when I had to. There are a couple ways of making this happen depending on how technologically advanced a certain production is.
For smaller or simpler shows, you would have your lighting director (LD) manually operating a lighting board to the music being played as they hear it. This is the best option if a band is more fluid and playing off of each other.
For more elaborate productions, where a band (or in some cases just the drummer) is playing to a metronome to keep everything precise, the lighting changes can be automatically mapped to that same metronome. This is also the way that shows with a video element can synchronize a live performance to prerecorded elements. With smart lighting fixtures that can spin around and change colors, this can become really deep really quickly if your LD can program these things.
Spotlights are pretty much always directed by the LD calling out directions into a spotlight operator through an earpiece. When I was working in the industry, there were some lighting companies that were trying to develop spotlights that could automatically track people on stage but I don’t think it’s a common thing yet.
Most if not all of the lights are pre-programmed in some way. The lighting designer just spends a lot of time before a show creating animations for all the lights in a way that matches up with each song. Sometimes it might be entire songs, sometimes it might be different lighting “cues,” that the operator can set off with a button, and sometimes the operator just finger drums on the light buttons.
Check out this guy’s YouTube channel, he does some pretty great videos showing what it takes to produce a light show for big shows: [https://www.youtube.com/@christianjackson/videos](https://www.youtube.com/@christianjackson/videos)
There’s a few tricks often used at modern shows. Some light patterns are manually triggered by a lighting engineer watching the show, listening to the music, knowing the songs, and using a lot of intuition to trigger those effects in time with the band. These effects can either be manually drawn or come as presets in the program. Commonly when the lights flash rapidly during heavier parts of songs, that’s manually times to switch between a default good resting image and the flashing effect which is a preset.
There’s also sequences of effects set up in an order for specific songs for intentional effects. An example I had built a sequence for was a band I worked with would play Bohemian Rhapsody which has a very famous progression and is a very interactive song. I had patterns built for the very call and response nature of the song and would advance through the sequence in time with the music.
For more generic songs, to maintain an interest curve in the cooler effects, and to give both the musicians and audience a break so they didn’t get overwhelmed by constantly moving lights, there are other static profiles used or drawn just to sit for a while. Usually very mild colours and less harsh brightness that got turned on and left there untouched for a song or two. These profiles also included times when the band is taking a break for a few minutes. Static lights that are very dim just to see the person addressing the crowd or so that the band can see what’s on stage but that’s contextual.
While there’s a lot of stuff that gets rehearsed to achieve a very specific effect, there is quite a bit that is done on the fly. The softwares we use very often have a real time animation to see what the lights will do so there are times when those are setup in advanced and run or we just think “it’s been a while since we’ve used the lasers and I know it’d fit here so screw it, let’s use some lasers.” Much like how musicians often throw in their own improv, lighting and audio engineers often do the same, sometimes for creativity and sometimes to compensate for the performers doing their own thing. I’m not going to build a super structured pattern if I know the guitarist has a solo they never play the same twice. I’m either gonna leave that one to be very general or make something simple that I can control and alter to keep up with stuff like their movements or vibe.
Source: have done both lighting and audio engineering for the majority of my life for moderately big profile acts (orange county choppers, the stone pony in new Jersey, did a show where Bon Jovi’s keyboardist showed up which was really fun)
Edit: kind of rambled a lot so the structure of my comment isn’t the most coherent, most of that insight stems from personal experience and how I built my shows
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