Welcome back to this series that intends to teach the basics of lighting for music.  This week, we are going to get into the cueing itself.  This won’t be how to write a cue or how to choose what to do- that is beyond what an article can do.  If you need that, the best I can do is suggest you watch some videos of others designs (especially from similar-sized venues) and try to get ideas that way.  Instead, we will concentrate on cue placement, timing and cueing options- whether to use a singular cue stack or lay out possibilities across your board that you improvise as the music plays.  

Cue Placement

How do you know where to place cues?  I’m a musician, so it’s always been fairly easy for me.  But if you’re not- you want to listen to the song structure.  Learn to identify major components of a song:

• Intro: could be instrumental, or could include vocals.  The brief bit before the verse comes in.
• Verse: I like to think of music in tension and release.  The verse builds tension 
• Prechorus: when there is a prechorus- it’s always a “palette cleanser” that provides variation before the chorus.  Usually it builds the tension.  Prechorus is most often used in songs with repetitive chord structure and rhythms.
• Chorus: the release.  Sometimes and explosion, sometimes the warmth of a fire.  This is the point of the song.
• Post Chorus: less common in song structure, this element again adds variation for repetitive songs.  
• Bridge: typically after a run through the verse, pre chorus, chorus and possible post chorus (twice), the bridge provides a contrast to the song as a whole.  Often in a different key than the rest of the song, the whole point of the bridge is to make you so ready to hear the chorus again.
• Double Chorus: almost all songs play the chorus twice before wrapping up.  Maintaining visual interest on the second chorus in this pair can be challenging and requires some craft.
• End: is it a long drawn out end or a button?  They both demand different things from the lighting.

In general, if you have a cue for each section of the song structure, you’re probably headed in the right direction.  If the song is choreographed, you will also have opportunities to accent moves from the dancers.  

Placement of cues

Alright.  I don’t often try to explain music to non-musicians, but I’m going to try.  It’s all about divisions and subdivisions.  Most music is written in 4/4.  Don’t mistake a time signature for tempo- which is simply how fast or how slow the song is.  4/4 time signature means that there are four beats per measure and each is a duration of a quarter note.  “One, two, three, four, ONE, two, three, four.”  Notice the all caps “ONE”?  That’s the downbeat.  It’s the beat that feels more accented than the others.  That accent helps you know where you are in the form.  Learn to feel the beats with the song.  If you can’t repetitively count to 4 over and over again, the next most likely time signature is 3/4 and 6/8.  3/4 is best explained as waltz time “ONE, two, three, ONE, two, three”.  6/8 feels more like a swaying ship. “ONE, two, three, FOUR, five, six.” Keeping track of simple rhythms help you know where to place cues and when the next section of the song is coming.

Timing of Cues- When to Press Go

The tricky thing about musical timing- even when you are “simply” trying to land a cue on the downbeat of a measure- is pressing your Go button on the downbeat means your cue is already late.  There is always a delay between pressing go and the physics of the lighting having time to adjust.  There is where the “divisions and subdivisions” comes in again.  Remember how I said in 4/4 each note has a duration of a quarter note?  Well, you can keep divine that one beat.  If you have zero clue what I’m talking about, think of high hats on an uptempo song.  They are not just hitting the quarter notes.  They are usually doing eighth notes (two hits per quarter note- chorus of TNT by AC/DC) or sixteenth notes (4 notes for every quarter note- chorus of Heart of Glass by Blondie).  For no reason I can think of, musicians verbalize sixteenth notes as “1, Ee, And, Ah, 2, Ee, And, Ah, etc”.  So often you need to press the go button on either the And of 4 “4, Ee, AND, ah” and sometimes even the Ah of 4 to get your cue to land correctly.  

Timing of Cues- How Long Should Your Cue Take to Complete

A cue has not only a start, but an intended ending.  You know, when the cue should be complete.  If it’s a 0 second cue, they are one and the same.  For everything else- you are strategizing where you start as well as where you end.  This is all about understanding the tempo/BPM of the song and how it can give you all the info about cue direction you may need.

BPM is something musicians refer to and it stands for Beats Per Minute.  You can start by downloading a free Tap to Tempo app on your phone.  As you are listening to the song, tap the beat on your screen.  The app will then tell you what tempo the song is.  If a song is 120 BPM (a common speed), that is 2 beats per second.  Knowing the tempo allows you to do the simple math to know that if you want a cue to take a measure before it completes in a song with 120 BMP- then it should be a 2 second cue.  I suspect this may feel intimidating to some of you.  I can assure you it gets MUCH easier with some practice and you probably won’t even need the Tap to Tempo app after a short while.

How To Lay Out Your Cues

First thing is first- let’s define “busking”.  Busking is the non-linear playing of cues and effects across several faders of your console to be able to improvise lighting along with either a band you’ve never seen before or a jam band, which is a band that always plays every song differently.  It’s a perfectly great way to light, and if you are the house lighting person at a venue- it’s probably the only way you can light, since there is no time to cue things for each act each night.  But it’s not my preference.

I prefer doing “single cue stack” cueing, where “nearly” everything is put onto a single cue list.  You still may have separate faders (for strobe and pops to white or other things), but the song is visually carried out in a series of cues on a single stack. The idea here is consistency.  I’m a planner, so I love consistency.  But Jam Bands, Jazz and other forms of music do not want consistency.  Hence- I’ve also done busking setups.

Home- a Music Concept

If it’s helpful- one more insight into how music works for the non-musician.  Songs are typically in a key and the first chord of the key (which is nearly always the first chord played) feels like “home” from a musical point of view.  I try to make the lights for each song have a visual home that I establish, depart from, and return to.  If the point of lighting music is to see what you are hearing, this is a foundational concept for me.  I can’t promise this is an industry-standard concept, but I am many other designers I know love it and use it all the time.  When you listen to the song (or songs) you are lighting- be sure to flag what feels like “home” in the song and maybe let that inform your design decisions.

Busking- One Way of Doing It

This is a big subject, so I’m going to round off a lot of details.  Basically, you plan your faders with intensities, positions, colors and effects on one or several faders per category.  You lay out possibilities.  When the song starts, you feel whether you want this to be a Green number (for instance), then start to build the song as it unfolds.  In this approach, keeping data separated is vital.  If you have intensity accidentally in the color cue stack, you will have a frustrating performance.  So keep it clean by keeping it separated.  Non linear consoles make this easy (MA, Hog, Chamsys, Onyx) while linear consoles require a lot more effort to produce the same result (Eos).  

I’m a tactile lighting programmer/designer, so I like putting things on faders because feeling the button hit or the fader move tells me things are going right and keep me from looking at my hands as opposed to the band.  But many people really enjoy using touch screens layouts for colors and such.  Here’s an example of how that might look from a tutorial series I did last year.

Notice the repetition of colors- that because the first row is for all color-changing fixtures at once, and the others rows are broken down by system of light (Backs, Tops, Whatever) and perhaps even odds and even within the system.  These are all macros that trigger cue lists I wrote.

Notice to the left there are icons for timing.  These are macros that overwrite the timing of the cue lists (all of them) so the cues roll in the tempo and feel of the song.  

Even with this screen layout, there are of course faders that do intensities only as well as positions and effects.  Speaking of which- make sure if you are doing a full evening that any additional pages of faders you may make match placement of the “this fader has positions, these faders have intensities, these faders have effects” pattern so your hands know where to go when you want something to happen.

Primary Cue List

I know I’m getting pretty specific here, but if I were doing a film concert, club scene or music video- I’d be using a primary cue list approach.  Biggest reason is the repetition (you want to be able to cut between any setup of the same scene, so busking isn’t going to work).  Second reason is- as I mentioned earlier- you will have to have the movement of the lights and the placement of the camera choreographed and accounted for in your cues well before you arrive on site.  I would also be using timecode to trigger the cues, but we’ll discuss that in the next tutorial.

Not sure what to say about the primary cue list approach.  I prefer this approach since I’m a planner and it makes it so the limit of my ability to trigger 10 or more faders at a time isn’t limiting my design.  Obviously, this isn’t going to work if you don’t already know the band.  This has to be pre-cued.

Though it is a primary cue list, there are always things I would have on faders.  Top on that list are inhibitive faders.  These fader will reduce the overall intensities coming from the primary cue stack.  These are mandatory for camera work- when the camera is facing a set of light, you just pull down the inhibitive fader for those lights till the camera is ok and the rest of the design plays as written.  But I also like to have inhibitive subs for non camera work, since sometimes in the moment you get the feel that it might be a good idea to pull back and build into a number.  Inhibitors are perfect for that.  You can also think of inhibitors for when the guitarist decides to step into the singers light at center.  Pull the inhibitor down for the normal guitarist area and return it when the finish their solo.

A Word About Color

I see a lot of new designers program their songs so the lights are all one color, or they are EVERY color. In general- limit yourself.  Typically, a song is a relation (visually) between two contrasting colors.  That’s it.  Blue and Yellow. Red and White.  Purple and Green.  Doesn’t mean that are a few saturations of those colors present, but the idea is to create a world that is specific and therefor limited.  It helps you create a sense of variation and creative arch to the concert and keeps you from throwing every color int her rainbow at every song- which is like emphasizing every word in a sentence.

Wrapup

Hopefully this gives you enough information and maybe even inspiration to start setting some cues for music, whether you have a gig lined up or not.  Next week, I’ll do an overview of Showcontrol methods such as timecode, OSC, MSC and others.  You certainly don’t have to have your cues automated, but there are certain applications (music videos, concert or club scenes) where it really helps your editor to be able to cut together (if they actually synchronize the action to the music).

If you find good examples of small club lighting design on Youtube or whatever- share them in the comments.  It’s great for people to have examples of how to make not that many lights look good!

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Mark LaPierre is a programmer in film and television based out of Albuquerque.  He grew up in live entertainment and has been a designer/programmer for musicals, concert dance, live music, circus and corporate.  Mark is a proud member of IATSE and an ETC Eos trainer.  If you enjoy his content, please consider commenting on his posts on the website to appease the Algorithm.