Jamie Schmidt of JLS Lighting has recently returned from touring the United States and Canada with that one man and drummer roots band Xavier Rudd.
According to Jamie, the tour was made a lot easier for him by his treasured Jands' Vista S3, the feature-packed console you can fit under your arm and is designed to be used with your desktop or laptop.
“I purchased my Vista S3, plus the M1 playback-only Vista control surface, last year and I couldn’t be happier with them,” said Jamie. “I was primarily looking for something I could carry onto flights as I tour so much. I had a good look at the market and the Vista just seemed the perfect fit for what I was doing.”
The portability of the Vista S3 was especially important on Xavier’s US tour as most of the gigs used the venue’s in-house rig.
“The Vista S3 was so easy to integrate into in-house systems,” commented Jamie. “I was also travelling with an ArKaos media server so all the files stayed where they needed to be and all I had to do was change the attributes of the moving lights – something that is simple with the Vista S3.
“The fact that I can basically change any fixture that I’ve got on the console to a different fixture really easily is fantastic and it really saved me a lot of time in the U.S. If I wanted to convert the functions of a Martin MAC500 to a Vari*Lite it could easily swap all the attributes across with the fixture pooling.”
Jamie found that technicians around the States were impressed by the Vista S3’s capabilities and it found many new fans. What Jamie had been concerned about was the backup service on tour but found that A.C. Lighting had consoles in the U.S. and that Briere Productions had consoles in Vancouver.
“I love using the timeline features of the Vista S3 and also the effects generators as they allow you to create your own effects easily and it means that you don’t have to go with the inbuilt effects.”
“The timeline feature is particularly useful on corporate gigs as it makes life so much easier than just using a cue list. I find that achieving off set looks using the timeline function is so simple.”
Jamie also enjoyed the Vista S3’s patching facilities that allow him to drag and drop fixtures across any universe and in any channel with minimum effort, and the fact that he could patch ArKaos into the fifth universe and simply link his laptops together to operate ArKaos.