Any lighting technician will tell you there is a lot more to properly lighting a concert than just setting up a couple of lights and turning them on and off with the music. Lighting sets the mood, allows for changes between songs and spotlights the performers. In order to have a successful performance, there needs to be effective lighting.
Stage Lighting
When you see a play, there is a great emphasis on lighting the front of the stage and keeping the back of the stage darker to allow scene changes and actors to get to their places. Lighting the front of the stage is known as front lighting, and lighting the back of the stage is known as back lighting. For a concert, there is much more emphasis put on back lighting than front lighting, and the back lighting is used for emphasis and effect to follow the mood of the music. Bathing the stage in light is called washing the stage in light, and this is done using back lighting and side stage lighting.
To follow the performers on stage, usually multicolored spotlights are used, with the colors changing based on the song being performed. By keeping the front of the stage darker than the back of the stage, the lighting technician is able to show off the effect lighting more as too much front lighting will overpower the effect lighting.
Intelligent Lighting
Today, one of the newer types of lighting is referred to as intelligent lighting. Intelligent lighting is equipment that can be programmed to respond to a bank of controllers on a lighting control board, and then the technician can control what the light does and what color light it gives off. The more popular type of intelligent light is an LED light because an LED light can change color without having to change the gel in the front of the light. The small LED bulbs that make up the LED lighting effect are able to change to different colors, and this allows the technician to create different scenes and color the stage in different colors without having to use multiple lights. Intelligent lighting equipment also includes fixtures known as intelligent moving lights or scanners. A scanner is an intelligent light that is placed on a movable head and can spin in a circle and move up and down. Because the light is completely controllable by the technician, just a few powerful scanners can create an entire light show on their own.
