Well, let me be 100% honest – I have whats known as “G.A.S.”, or Gear Acquisition Syndrome. I just cannot get enough of owning cool things. Lighting gear, DJ gear, even truss and cables. Owning this equipment brings me great joy.
Now this comes with a cost. Literally. I don’t have enough time to be using it all for myself, and would much rather help someone carry out their vision than have it sitting around collecting dust. I personally don’t have the experience or desire to throw my own events just for the sake of making them work. Luckily, what I do have is an aptitude and passion for designing & controlling stages. I have experience working in multiple night clubs, at multiple music festivals, and even a few one-off tour stops that I’ve been flown or bused out to.
More about who I am…
While I wish I could play with gear all day, like most of us I have a day job to support myself. I am currently employed at Unisys, working as an IT Technician for Microsoft employees on campus. I support both hardware and software for any Microsoft-owned laptop, and troubleshoot with clients face-to-face.
Additionally, I work at Looptid Visuals as a VJ. My primary gig was as a house VJ for Foundation Nightclub for about 2.5 years. I’ve also been given the opportunity to work at festivals such as Paradiso, Resolution, and Bumbershoot, not to mention a few tour stops out of state with artists like Troyboi and DJ Mustard. All in all, I have clocked over 1000 hours in Resolume doing active VJing in many different environments.
Right now I am busy learning the GrandMA2 software, and eagerly awaiting the OnPC release of GrandMA3. It is my go-to software for lighting programming and stage design, and I now use it on every gig with my OnPC setup. I plan to move to Capture 2018 for all stage design, pre-viz, plotting, and reporting once I purchase a license. I use Resolume Arena 6 to VJ.
How did I get into all this, anyways?
It all started in 2010, at a concert for Rusko at the Showbox S**o. Rusko was the first electronic music I remember hearing and falling in love with, so it was a big night for me. From there, I slowly drifted into my local rave scene in Seattle, attending more and more shows every month. At the time I was a “glover”, meaning I attached microlights to my hands and waved them in people’s faces. When I got bored of that about 3 years later, I began spinning poi. This led me many places, including on stage at Paradiso 2016 as a fire performer. But what really grabbed my attention was VJing, or controlling the visuals displayed on stage.
Through my time spent at many raves, I met Jeremy Jones, who invited me to join his company Looptid – a small but very passionate group of VJs who ran most of USC Event’s shows as well as Foundation Nightclub. I spent many nights at Foundation downloading artist visuals, converting them, and mixing them on screen in accordance with their technical rider. This gave me a ton of experience in the inner workings of not only nightclubs, but night life events in general.
Never being content to settle, I set my sights on all the lights on stage that I still didn’t know how to control. Luckily for me, Seattle is home to a few great LDs and programmers such as Christian Jackson. After hours watching tutorials, vlogs, and livestreams, I finally learned enough to start controlling my own shows with GrandMA2. I even bought his MA NSP to let me output the signal!
What I have planned for the future.
So what’s next? Well, hard to say. I plan to purchase GrandMA’s new OnPC wing for MA3 once it is released to the public. This will solidify my control setup for all future lighting gigs and should be relatively popular as a rental item. I hope to someday get to the same level of lighting knowledge and experience as I have with VJing right now – that is, to be able to control a giant arena’s worth of lights. My ultimate personal goal is to run lighting and visuals together simultaneously in one big flurry of button mashing and fader throwing.
But who’s to say what will really come next, that’s part of the fun!
– Jayson Esguerra
