Platinum Austrian recording stars Christopher Seiler and Bernhard Speer do more than create memorable music. With each song, they tell stories of everyday life, offering bemused, philosophical observations of situations that everyone has experienced at one time or another.
Helping to turn the pages of these musical tales with supportive visuals is the duo’s lighting designer Niklas Fuchs, whose involvement with them is a story onto itself. Fuchs began lighting Seiler und Speer, using a ChamSys MagicQ MQ100 Pro, in 2015 when they released their inaugural album. His first show with them was at a small (750-capacity) club in the Alpine resort region of Tyrol, a far cry from their more recent appearances, where fans are counted in the tens of thousands, and TV audiences in the millions.
Through all the growth and changes, however, Fuchs has maintained a sense of spontaneity in running lights for his clients, which is in keeping with their own approach to music. “I don’t use timecodes; it is not part of the personality of this group,” he said. “I see it as my personal daily challenge to hit every cue at the right time. It’s much more fun behind the desk this way!”
Fuchs’ style and his pure joy in lighting was on full display this summer when he lit Seiler und Speer at Nova Rock. Each song in the band’s set had its own Cue Stack with plenty of bumps and effects. He also controlled three live cameras on a media server, all without time coding. Instead, he relied on his user-friendly ChamSys MagicQ MQ100 Pro supplied by MartinKames.com.
“Martin Kames was the equipment provider for this show, as he is for all Seiler & Speer shows,” said Fuchs. “The MQ100 is my trusty touring companion since I started doing lights. I learned on it from Martin Kames, trained on it, and it went through rough roads, beer showers and power failures with me. The show file for NovaRock is based on one Martin and I created when I worked for him with this console. I’ve been using ChamSys since 2012, and have worked with various models, including the MQ500. All Chamsys products are very intuitive for me and unbeatable in performance.”
Aside from the intuitive layout, Fuchs says that having cue stack control on a large number of Playback Faders, and being able to route his first Executor Page to the Play/Pause Playback Buttons was critical to helping him run the complex NovaRock show.
“There are so many time-saving features to this console,” he said. “I like to be able to edit cues easily on screen. Plus the clone and merge capabilities are indispensable. We had 90 moving fixtures and tons of pars in our 12 universe NovaRock show. We also has a media server running Resolume and it all was controlled with this desk. ”
The Multi-Emitter Colour Picker feature of the MagicQ also came in handy during the NovaRock show, which progress through a wide rainbow of hues. However, Fuchs mostly limited himself to only a few colours on each song.
“I like to not to have too many colours at once,” he said. “Generally, I stick with two. “The band will have some songs that are funny party tunes, and others that are more serious, representing dramatic situations in life. All of them need to be reflected differently with colour.”
Keeping pace with the twists and turns of Seiler und Speer’s storytelling music is one of the most rewarding things about lighting the band says Fuchs. He does it with as much verve and spontaneity today at large shows as he did at that small Tyrol club where it all started.
