Your Light Show Roots???

[allthatwhichis]

http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/...d.php?t=124375

Here is 90% of my "roots", with pictures and a few videos. I'd elaborate more, but I got to go to work...

[Banthai]

Adrian ... i hope your summer ( now about to start ) is better than the one we just had ...

I remember meeting up with you guys in feb 2007 ... ( our winter ) first day i got badly sunburnt walking down St Kilda beach,

anyway, my story .....

First got interested in Light and sound in the late seventies when as a teen formed our first band ( and still in the same band today with all the same members )

as an electronics engineer i decided to build all our own lighting gear and also our desk, all analogue of course.... we ended up with a 30KW light show and a 10kW PA ... not bad for a band just starting out




we then aquired our first laser in about 83 .... only a red 30mW hene ..... but a huge long tube for its power ..... this was fitted with the latest scanning device ..... 3 motors and 3 mirrors and 3 speed controls.... instant spyrograph but the audience was impressed

over the years we were giging more and more and as we played larger venues we ended up selling the PA and light rig as most venues supplied their own ..... but the laser stayed ... and other gimics such as this




as most of the band members including myself moved to different parts of the UK, we then went through a quiet period for about 15 years ... meeting up ocasionaly, over the last 5 years we have been giging again only doing about 2 - 3 festivals / gigs a year and really enjoying it

and lasers are now a big part of our show this last foto is from july 08 thanks to Neil ( chaos ) for that ....




so thats it .... lasers lights sound music ..... love it


all the best ... Karl

[mixedgas]

What do I win for best essay?

It really started with a donated oscilloscope with a 3" crt and three vacuum tubes (got shocked a lot!). It wasnt very useful, so I asked a engineer at where my dad worked how I could draw a circle or something, which led to a ac transfomer and a Resistor-Capacitor 90' phase shifter. That led to adding some analog oscillators using XR3808 chips for lissajous patterns.

The science center in pittsburgh (90 mile trip each way) had a rear projection display with a hene and two analog oscillators driving a pair of open loops, with 4 pots, two for amplitude, two for frequency, a sort of bright laser oscilloscope. periodically a set of relays hit to return it to presets to get people's attention when it was not in active use. Need I say more?

Henes were 400-700$ at that time. My first laser was a heathkit, using a bar code tube when the bar code industry drove the tube cost down. Diodes were a lab curiosity at the time or only pulsed IR and very expensive. Heath got the cost down to 275$ for the kit, I still have it, and it still lases. Dad insisted on a minimum of a B+ average for my junior year of high school to get the laser. Thanks DAD!


After much digging at the library in college, I found a article in Laser Focus World about a company making laser show software named Pangolin, and Pat Murphy told me about LSDI's
accelerator 124s, and sold me a copy of LSD1000 for amiga for 50$, then I had to find a amiga, then dare to crack its case and DC couple the sound chips to drive the galvos. My first galvos were open loop GSI ripped out of a microfilm printer , and nonstandard ones at that. Pat Also gave me L. Michael Roberts (no relation) phone number and I ran up a 120$ long distance bill talking to Michael in Toronto. At the time LMR offered "Laser School" for 200-300$ a weekend in Toronto, my first vacation and long drive alone. There was NO ilda test pattern, and I had to figgure out how to retune the amps alone, based on a one page instruction sheet, in a dark basement with .95 mW of red. At the time, Pangolins product was a output card for the Amiga for 900$ or so with 4 channels, x,y, 0-5V blanking and a 0-5V color output.

Laser school turned in to Laser FX, The light Show Conference, Where I met my best friend and sometimes business partner, Karl Rothweiler. Karl now runs Laser Wizardry in Phoenix.

As for the first show I ever saw, that was in 8th grade:

First show I attended was laserium pittsburgh, 8 eight bit images in the whole show, using ZAP, off eproms, and a massive analog console they wouldnt let me see. Pink floyd show and a family show based on Blue Danube, 2 hours that rocked, for a whopping 8.95 a person.Ran live using analog rotators off a 4 head projector driven by a white light SP164 Krypton with NO argon, ie one scan head for 568 yellow, one for 647 red, one for 530 green and one for 482 nm blue. All ran with pots and joysticks and a 8 track reel to reel tape with FM encoding for storing a basic show in 7 khz audio bandwidth. Keep in mind at this time color TV was high tech, and computer graphics was a rare thing, at 200 x 300 resolution and maybe 16 colors, and little or no animation unless you had a mainframe or worked on a cad system. So a laser show with just abstracts was a mind blowing experience for the average person.

The laserists covered the control console and the projector with a black drape before and after the show, you didnt get to see any hardware, and dont bother asking how it worked. Quote "Mirrors, just moving mirrors, one for up and down , and one for left right and thats all I can say"

On the way out, the projectionist and engineer , smiling, handed me a note with the words:

General Scanning, Watertown Mass.

By a freak chance, the local university library had a copy of a rare 1970s book called Laser Art and Optical Transforms, by a guy named Tom Kallard, the only book besides LMRs handbook ever written on laser art , that was a 15 mile round trip bike ride for a 9th grade school student, and it had GSI's address in it. GSI sent me a data book on the scanners, which were 1100 each for closed loop, and scan amps were on the order of 700 a piece. There was no such thing as a dual amp board as you guys know them, and all the gear was 19" rack.

moving to a few years later:

MWK got 3500$ for a used or rebuilt 60X argon at the time. My first argon tube was a beat up old 60X tube without the head or PSU, donated by a tube refurb company, and there was NO ebay for finding a head to put it in. Nor a discription anywhere of what voltage or currents it needed, leading me to start contributing to Sam's laser FAQ as a senior in college. It just covered HENE's back then. Home Internet was a new thing, mine was a 286 with 512 megs of ram, then 486 and a modem at 18 kbits a second. Compared to my TRS80 at 16K of ram and no disks, I thought I had been given a mainframe! I repaired 50 AOM RF drivers in trade for a 60X head and a gold box psu. Somebody, I suspect a xerox service tech, mailed me a schematic for the gold box, with no return address, which lead to a business attempting to repair them for hobbyists.

First professional laser Job was Sea World of Ohio,(now a parking lot) for a few months, with 3 171s , two 30 watt argons and a 7 watt krypton. I got fired by the VP of entertainment when the laser show equipment provider complained about my boss having me write up plans to install Pangolin. He dreaded the possible loss of selling single images in EPROM for 400$ a frame. What he had on the VP that got him to can me I dont know... But the veep did take me out to a expensive dinner to let me know about my firing. I did learn a hell of a lot about installing cable and Orcas (killer whale) and dolphins and managing animals and xenon arc followspots. As for Aligning lasers, the alignment course was a SP service technician aligning a new tube, that tube cost 17,000$ and the guy billed them 810$ for a extra day of teaching me and cleaning the other two heads,, plus travel expenses. Some day I'll tell you guys about helping to install the transducers for a system to talk to Shamu (all the animals do have real names besides shamu) using a 286 and a first generation soundblaster, I had to get wet for that one :-) The junior technician at the park was really used for pulling cable, and I must have pulled 10,000 feet underground, as at the time the boss wanted all sound and control done from the engineering office, we could monitor any audio track of 20 or so from any of the 6 or 8 venues from the engineering office, which at the time was state of the art.


BTW,
I attended the last performance of the guy who ran my first show last year, by accident (yeah right, God?) and didnt know if I should punch him or buy him a beer. Got invited back to be a guest console laserist, but havent done it yet.


nough said,

Steve

[James Lehman]

Whoa! Hold the phone Carl!

What is the name of your band?
Which one are you in the picture?
What kind of music do you do?
Do you have original recordings?

James.

[colouredmirrorball]

Hey all
I have started five years ago with doing the light on parties. I started with just a toy and now I have a semi-professional light equipment. I built up slowly and look where I am now, member of Photon Lexicon ! Now, I just do parties al LJ with my equipment. I bought my little 40 mW green laser a year ago - what an improvement! I think I am bitten by the virus now...
Maybe I will upgrade it with a blue/violet DVD-burner, but that is for another topic, within a few months.
Just my little life story - as I look back at it, it seems like it has only started 5 years ago...
Florian

[Laserman532]

http://www.photonlexicon.com/forums/...ht=laserman532

[Banthai]

James asked

Whoa! Hold the phone Carl!

What is the name of your band?
Which one are you in the picture?
What kind of music do you do?
Do you have original recordings?

James.

The name of the band is Underground zero
website here www.undergroundzero.co.uk

in the first picture im second from right

the music is spacerock / psycadelic, sorta Hawkwind stylee

yep all orignal stuff .... bit of a back catalogue now
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Zero

next year we will have been together 30 years ... with the same line up

and hopefully for a few more years yet to come

all the best .... Karl

[aijii]

you old prick

[Things]

I then chanced upon a magazine article in Silicon Chip about a kit from Sydney mob "Oatley Electronics", basically a 3 motor spirographic projector. I threw in what was probably a 1mw 660nm laser diode, and had me my first projector....

PS - it would be cool to have an AUSLEM. or an APACLEM. Held in Melbourne of course. Sydney sucks. Need to find more down under dudes with lasers.

lol that was the first laser projector I ever had too. I also used a 1mw 660nm for it. I loved it at the time!

and I agree 23984% on the AUSLEM thing, though its a big flight for me to Melb. Tho I guess i' possibly be able to pull it off

[aijii]

I still have it all sitting in the garage somewhere. in pieces of course. and a bunch of 7mw henes. and one of those NEC argon heads. it does what looks to be about 5mw.

lol

might need a clean - filthy as...