Britney Spears Onyx Hotel Tour

Well, it was good while it lasted. After six weeks touring the U.S. and another seven weeks in Europe this past spring, the Britney Spears Onyx Hotel tour was scheduled to tour North America again for another eight weeks this summer. Unfortunately, the pop superstar injured her knee during a video shoot and was forced to cancel the rest of her tour.

The fact that the tour was cancelled doesn’t taint Steve Cohen and Joel Young’s lighting design collaboration however. It’s just a shame that more people didn’t get a chance to see it. Joel and Steve are a great team who have worked together since 1991.

The video heavy show featured a number of theatrical looks, prodigious amounts of dancing and your trademark Britney flying number. Tightly integrated with video, the lighting looks were classic Britney too - big, colorful and active.

Journey of console discovery
Joel Young handled lighting programming duties and used a Martin Maxxyz desk.

Having used the WholeHog II for a number of years, the time had come for Joel to look at new lighting consoles, he commented. On his “journey of console discovery” as he calls it, he looked at pretty much everything that was available – WholeHog III, grandMA, Compulite Vector and Maxxyz. “As far as the Maxxyz, I liked everything about it more than I liked everything about any other desk if that makes sense,” he explains. “There’s no console that’s perfect but overall it was the console I felt most comfortable with when I sat down at it.”

On the Onyx Hotel tour the Maxxyz handled MAC 2000 Profiles, Coemar CF1200 Wash, Syncrolite 3Ks and High End Studio Beams, plus conventional fixtures. Lighting supplier was PRG/Fourth Phase.

Fast and flexible
Joel’s time with the Maxxyz began as a beta tester in early 2003 and he has played with the Maxxyz off and on since then. “There are a lot of features on it that I found really useful that really made it handy and speeded things up,” he says. “The effects generator on the Maxxyz is amazing. It’s fast and flexible. The fact that it treats effects as a parameter of a light and not as one entity allows you a ton of flexibility in terms of how you manipulate it. The fact that effects have end points means it doesn’t have to be a continuous effect, and then you can put wait times on effects so that every time it completes a cycle it has a hesitation before it starts another one. The way timing is implemented on the Maxxyz is great. The fact that you can edit timing as you do any other parameter, not actually load a cue in, is really handy.”

He continues, “The fixture filter is great as well. Whereas in a traditional console you build groups of thirds or fourths or blocks of three or whatever in the rig, in the Maxxyz you call up a bunch of lights and there’s a group selection fixture filter where I can grab lights 1-10 and tell it what I want to do, and groups of two. I can apply timing or color to a group and I don’t actually have to build a group. It’s a big time saver.”

Motorized surprise
Although Joel admits that he didn’t think he would like the Maxxyz’s motorized faders, they are a feature that he finds useful. “I didn’t think I’d like that, I thought it would be something that would annoy me, but they’re handy. I don’t necessarily want all my faders up for every song and I don’t want to have to remember which ones I have to pull down before I have to change pages. If I have effects that are intensity based or are sitting on another fader I don’t want to have to remember to bring that up or take it down. It just makes it easier in operation.“

Stability
For the entire Britney tour - two to three weeks in rehearsal, the European leg and the US leg – the Maxxyz never crashed once. “Not one time, not ever,” Joel says. “The stability of the console was just phenomenal. Yes, there’s development that needs to be done - it is version 1.0 software - but the direction that it’s going, the speed of the progress that they are making is pretty astounding.”

Having Control Products Segment Manager Michael Nevitt on board was also a huge selling point for Joel, he explains, as was Control Product Specialist Matthias Hinrichs. “I knew if I ever needed help, software updates or whatever, they would deal with things fairly quickly. I like the interface, I like the way the console felt and support was a big issue. I felt like they were interested in what I had to say.”

Despite the cancelled leg of the tour, Joel is staying busy. He just finished co-designing with Steve Cohen the lighting for the 2004 Van Halen tour, as well as a one-off Univision show for LD Alan Branton, Tribute to Heroes at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia.