MQ500 Stadium with Noisia at Rampage

Lighting designers Manuel Rodrigues & Lorenzo Fattori with the MagicQ MQ500 Stadium console for the Noisia ‘Outer Edges’ Tour @ Rampage 2017 – Antwerp (BE)

Photography by Michel van Rossum.

The Noisia ‘Outer Edges’ tour lighting design is by Manuel Rodrigues of deepred.tv

Rampage is one of the biggest Drum and Bass parties in the world and has a capacity of 18000 people. The lighting rig consisted of more than 260 Moving lights, 110 Martin Atomic Led strobes, 60 Chauvet Geyser smoke machines, a bunch of conventionals,various CO2 and pyrotechnic flame devices. About 30 DMX universes in total were used. The lighting rig was designed by Leon Driesen whose help in preparing for this show was invaluable. Manuel a long time ChamSys user usually tours with the MQ80 Compact console. For this show a larger console was required, so naturally Manuel called on ChamSys latest console the MagicQ MQ500 Stadium console. The MQ500 console was provided by Swing located in Belgium and the backup MQ100 was provided by LG licht en geluid located in Holland.

“We chose ChamSys because of its great lighting control and flexibility. Thanks to the Clone and Morph capabilities of ChamSys we are able to adapt the show from a small club to a stadium in a few hours” comments Lorenzo Fattori. One of the more unique and killer features of the ChamSys platform is the ability to copy pallets through artnet. Particularly when you haveo 260+ movers to program positions for. Manuel Rodrigues has a series of 6 generic positions on his Noisia rider which he first captures and then adapts / combines using the linked palettes feature thus making the custom Noisia, Outer Edges positions.

Thanks to the ability of copying palettes via network, Manuel and Lorenzo were able to prepare this stadium show on location in just four hours, grabbing palettes from the house console. 

“This must be a record!” comments Lorenzo who also commented “It’s our first time with MQ500 Stadium, the desk looks really robust and we loved the stadium layout, a lot of space for windows and a lot of buttons”.

Manuel Rodrigues has also been a pioneer in bridging the gap between Ableton Live and ChamSys. This research has resulted in M2Q, acronym of Music-to-Cue which acts as abridge between Ableton live and ChamSys. M2Q is a hardware solution designed together with Lorenzo Fattori an Italian lighting designer and engineer. M2Q listens to midi messages sent from Ableton Live and converts them to Chamsys Remote Control messages, providing cue triggering and playback intensity control. Noisia ‘Outer Edges’ is a completely synchronized show and M2Q was the right tool for the job. A reliable, easy and fast lighting sync solution.