Creative Stage Lighting Adds Clay Paky Alpha Spot QWO 800 ST Fixtures Then Sends Them on Tour with moe.No sooner did North Creek, New York's Creative Stage Lighting Co., Inc. take delivery of Clay Paky's Alpha Spot QWO 800 ST fixtures for its inventory than they deployed eight of them for jam band moe.'s continuing US tour. "In the 800-1,000W range of new age automated spots, it made immediate sense to us to add the QWO 800 ST to our rental and production fleet with its competitive features and price point," says Creative Stage's George B. Studnicky IV. "Not only does the unit stand out from 1,000W units, at only 800W it has a very sleek and compact design." Studnicky firmly believes that Clay Paky is "listening to clients and establishing themselves as the new premier automated brand in the US while maintaining affordability and not letting brand-name pricing get in their way. With the success of Clay Paky's Sharpy, you can imagine that the fault of overpricing may have been tempting to commit." Clay Paky's Alpha Spot QWO 800 ST uses the latest MSR Platinum lamp, an 800W light source that produces an intense sparkling light - according to the company, brighter even than older 1,200W lamps. The Alpha Spot QWO 800 ST is equipped with optical features placing it at the top of its class, including a very wide zoom range from 7.6- to 55-degrees, a uniform beam distribution at all zoom angles and a unique stay-sharp-zoom feature that locks images in focus while zooming. The fixture is small, lightweight, silent and has low-power consumption making it an excellent tool for TV, theatre, corporate events, and many other demanding lighting applications. Jason Huffer, lighting designer for moe., selected eight QWO 800 STs for the theatre-size rig that accompanies the band on tour. "It's not a huge production," he notes. "They're on the upstage truss and meet my needs for something lightweight, not too large, yet with a great feature set." Huffer first saw the fixtures in an online video. "They sounded like a really cool mid-range fixture," he recalls. "The wide zoom range and focus seemed great. Kevin Parsley also from Creative Stage Lighting had just demo'd them and liked them; we said we'd take them on tour if Creative bought them. So it was a perfect opportunity for both of us." Huffer finds the Clay Paky Dyna-Cue-Creator function for doing projection work "very intriguing." Dyna-Cue-Creator simplifies programming with a special channel featuring sophisticated combinations of customizable multiple effects. He likes "the thought put into the fixtures' software." He also says "the wide zoom range and keeping gobos in focus while zooming is very important" for his work with moe. "The band does a lot of improvisation and it enables me to do a lot of on-the-fly stuff. I love it when the fixture does all the technical work for me. It's really great!" A.C.T Lighting is the distributor for Clay Paky in North America. Francesco Romagnoli, Clay Paky area manager for North and Latin America, comments, "The QWO has received a number of accolades from the industry recently and we're proud see that as well as the fact that lighting designers are starting to embrace the benefits of one of our newest fixtures." See Clay Paky and Creative Stage Lighting both at PLASA Focus: Stamford, November 12-13. 
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