That is awesome, inspiring, joyful, exhausting and cool! Cirque du soleil collides with the drumline.

They have taken to building playgrounds around here with durable ways for the kids to make to percussive type music... that dome of drums on the stage would be an incredible add to the playground concept... steel drums could bolt right in to a geodesic climbing dome and be very durable.

I'll bet Gene Krupa would have loved that show.... he was getting there but he didn't have that army of drummers to back him up. :)

http://www.drummerworld.com/Videos/genekrupa47boilerroom.html

Well OK, so thats not the actuall clip but now we are getting an understanding of what you do. John said it perfectly in post #10, "you have to know how to do a little bit of everything". Lets see here, you spend one hour for every minute of a show to come up with a design, did I get that right? Thats 120 hours for a two hour show just to design the lighting. My average kitchen design will take me about 12-16 hours (im guessing) for a custom job, thats nothing! Im really impressed and have often wondered how it all come together. I think you have a very cool job!

Jeff C

Amen Brother!

But seriously,that show was performed in a church? What kind of church? They had more gear than the national guard?

I appreciate all the comments. Jeff your math is correct. For most concert productions, the average song will require 3-4 hours to program. Of course, there are the solo piano or guitar ballads that are quicker but some of the more complicated pieces take longer. It's not unusual to spend 8 or more hours on an opening or closing song.

What is frustrating is when artists come in to sound check, noodle around and decide to change an ending to a song or some other change along those lines. It takes them ten minutes of rehearsal to figure out and takes me another hour to reprogram. It's those times when I say to myself "I should just go back to playing drums!"

We always program ways to improvise things should someone decide to add a song at the last minute and that is an entirely different discipline and even more complicated these days as all the video elements are controlled by the lighting director as well.

I will say that music has given me a significant edge as I can learn the material as fast as the guys on stage and timing of cues is never a problem. So if you want a shaft of light to hit the drummer on the e of 4 when he hits the china cymbal... No problem. If you want to add a Batman "POW" on a video screen at the same time, I've got that. It's a great deal of fun, but I am no stranger to the 18 hour work day. Heck I've had work days that have been well over 48 hours.

By the way Jeff, if I were to create a custom cabinet solution, I would spend a lot more time than you and the end result would look like something that would be a fantastic storage solution in a ten year old's tree house.

Actually I believe both of those video clips were performed in churches. Certainly the clip of "How Great Thou Art" was a church about 30 miles east of Nashville. The demo clip was possibly shot at Grace Church in St. Louis but I am not sure.

Contemporary churches are very different from what many may recall from 40-50 years ago.

Oh I've been to church once or twice in the past 40-50 years, Just not so much a big "stage" area, particularly to accommodate flash pods and flames etc.

A little OT but....When I was a kid I was told by a Sunday School teacher that drums were the devils instrument! How's that for chasing an aspiring drummer away from church!!!