Concert Lighting, 3rd Edition

11 LIGHTING CONSOLES

The tremendous advances in console design, especially computer engines, cannot be overlooked, but it would be unfair to say that they came about purely because of rock & roll demands on the established manufacturers of the 1970s. It is true that the most complex manual boards of the 1980s, with flash buttons (instant-on buttons), chasers (grouping to auto-timed changes), and pin matrices (shunt boards allowing one fader handle to operate random dimmers), were not available as standard items in the theatre consoles of the 1970s. Up until that time, most lighting consoles were pretty much the same, except possibly those that had a manually set group of presets that could be attached to the console. There were some very ingenious ...