Elation Cuepix Panels Versatile Design Element for Pablo Alboran Tour

	pablo Alboran Terral tour

Spain's biggest selling artist of the year, singer-songwriter Pablo Alboran, toured the country recently beneath a cover of Elation Cuepix Panels on what was arguably the biggest tour in Spain this year, his popular Terral tour. The young musician, who has sold over one million albums and topped record sales in Spain for an incredible 60 weeks, has also reigned over the charts in Portugal and is popular across Latin America.

One of the largest AV rental and production companies for live events in Spain, Fluge Audiovisuales (www.fluge.es), supplied the Cuepix Panels for the Spanish leg of the tour, which kicked off in May and played large arenas and outdoor venues in every major city through October. "The Cuepix Panels were an important element in the lighting design for this tour," stated Chus Fernandez, who created the lighting design for the show and also served as tour op. "We used them to reinforce different lighting scenes with their solid colors and also to create shapes, text and pixel-mapping effects that supported the video content that the LED video screens behind them were displaying."

Fernandez split 12 Cuepix Panels across four different truss lines above the stage (three Cuepix Panels per truss). All four truss fingers had adjustable-speed Kinesys chain hoist motors attached to them, which allowed them to change their position (height and angle) at different stages of the show. Fernandez liked the look so much the Cuepix Panels were used in nearly every song. "They're very versatile regarding the different design options possible," stated Fernandez, who was using the fixtures for the first time. "The concentric distribution of the Cuepix Panels in this design, in arrays of three units per truss line above the stage, and the added flexibility of using variable-speed chain motors to move those truss lines during the show, was very satisfactory for us and allowed for varied and distinctive lighting looks throughout the concerts."

Rental and production company Fluge, who operate branches across Spain as well as in Panama City and Shanghai, supplied all of the lighting, audio, and video equipment for the tour and also furnished the crew necessary to run each concert smoothly. "When I originally saw the intended lighting design for the tour I quite frankly thought the Cuepix Panels would be more of a 'filling' lighting element," said Fluge tour technical project manager Dani Sanchez. "But once I got to see them in action they were an integral and important element of both the lighting and the video design of the tour."

Cuepix Panels are versatile LED matrix blinders with 25 RGBW LEDs per panel (five by five) and are increasingly proving to be popular lighting effects for both installation and rental applications. For the Terral tour, it was their brightness and quality of color that were the most important. "The Cuepix Panels are very bright and the colors they output are very rich and dynamic," Fernandez says. "They blend very well in all the different lighting scenes, both with their solid colors and when they are being used with video content and graphics. They helped me to reinforce the different lighting scenes with the other lighting fixtures in the rig."

Fernandez ran video content via a media server that was distributed to the Cuepix fixtures through Art-Net. The lighting board DMX commands were sent to an Art-Net input of the media server and from there on to the Cuepix Panels, which were used in 75 DMX channel mode. "It was great to be able to feed them video content," Sanchez said, "but it actually made a bigger impression on me when they were outputting solid colors and especially the richness of the white color they project is excellent."

Sanchez continues, "They are frankly very reliable fixtures. We had them on the road for over 50 concerts and we had only one minor issue with a power supply. From my experience, most other fixtures need repairs more often than that." After wrapping up the Spanish leg of his Terral tour in October, Pablo Alboran has taken his show to the US for a number of concerts in November.