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Joe Cabrera II selects Ayrton MagicBlade R effects for Tears for Fears Tipping Point World Tour
Tears for Fears has wrapped the North American leg of their Tipping Point World Tour 2022 as Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal treated fans to favourites from their new album as well as classics from throughout the years in an amphitheatre tour with lighting design by Joe Cabrera II who chose 48 Ayrton MagicBlade R fixtures for effects lighting.
Cabrera, of Los Angeles‐based Flash and Trash Works, served as lighting programmer on Tears for Fears’ previous two tours. He stepped up to fill lighting designer and programmer roles on the new tour whose production design was by Butch Allen of Blame Funnel Creative.
Picking up on the circular motifs from Tears for Fears album artwork, the show design featured a 30‐foot circle of truss upstage of the band and tipping down slightly over them. Echoes of that circle appeared in pairs of concentric circle truss at stage left and right. A projection surface behind the drummer occupied a large portion of the stage. To provide effects lighting for the show Cabrera mounted 24 MagicBlade Rs on the outside of the main circle, seven on each of the larger echoes and five on each of the smaller echoes. PRG Nashville, the tour’s lighting vendor, furnished the fixtures.
Like many Ayrton fixtures, the MagicBlade R offers infinite pan and tilt rotation. Its unique feature is a linear array of RGBW LED sources in‐line, with an extremely narrow 4.5 degree beam which allows for the creation of consistent, structural light curtains.
The MagicBlade's narrow beam and intensity gives designers the ability to create all kinds of virtual decor. Cabrera used two grandMA2 full‐size consoles and three NPUs for lighting control. ACT Entertainment is also the exclusive distributor of MA Lighting products in North America.
“I was very happy with the MagicBlades’ performance on the tour,” he reports. “They did exactly what I knew they could do, and I’m looking to maintain them in the rig when the Tears for Fears tour heads to Europe.” Caleb Eckerman was the lighting director for the tour. ACT Entertainment is the exclusive distributor of Ayrton lighting in North America.
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