Lighting designer PJ Carruth programmed almost the entire timecoded show with the fixture’s onboard DigiFX, using new canvas mapping to turn a single upstage row into one continuous surface
Most touring lighting designs are built from a palette of fixture types, each doing the job it is best at. The Spiritbox production that toured North America in 2026 was built from just one. Lighting designer and programmer PJ Carruth carried 20 GLP JDC2 IP fixtures and nothing else, running the new firmware 2.0 in what is believed to be the first touring deployment of the 2.0 release.
Carruth is a Los Angeles-based designer and programmer who came to lighting through mathematics and science, first learning moving lighting programming from his high school math teacher and continuing the trade through his applied physics degree. His work has since concentrated on timecoded, pre-sequenced shows. Clients tend to come to him for his engineering sensibility, as much as his eye for design.
“I’m typically hired for timecoded productions that seek a high level of syncopation,” says lighting designer and programmer PJ Carruth. “Most of my clients admire my engineering mindset and my applied physics background. It makes me a good fit for unique applications.”
Spiritbox presented a particularly unique design element to Carruth. The Canadian metalcore act moves between crushing rhythms and long atmospheric sections, often within the same track. The lighting had to articulate that structure rather than simply keeping pace with it. Carruth’s programming leans into the percussion, treating light as a form of annotation for the music.
“Spiritbox wants staccato in their visual production, so my programming leans heavily into the percussion elements of their songs,” says Carruth. “It’s important for the lighting to set each moment’s unique mood, acting as visual subtitles throughout the set.”
The touring package consisted of 20 GLP JDC2 IP fixtures supplied by Volt. They were arranged as a single row across the upstage floor. Committing to doing this entire show with a single fixture type placed considerable weight on the range of the JDC2 IP.
“We knew that for this tour, we needed a Swiss Army Knife for a fixture,” says Carruth. “The greater JDC family has always been the greatest engineered set of strobes on the planet, especially with how the control modes don’t belittle the intelligence of the programmer. We knew we were only going to bring one fixture type out, so we needed something versatile, and there’s nothing more versatile than the JDC2 IP. A full-length set can have a completely different look for each song.”
The Spiritbox set is fully timecoded, and for Carruth, a fixture’s suitability for that workflow comes down to how faithfully it responds to DMX rather than what its feature list claims. “The JDC2 is a responsive, reliable fixture that doesn’t seem to have any measurable input latency, making it ideal for timecoding to a grid,” says Carruth. “As someone with a background in digital communication theory, I don’t believe that LED fixtures should necessarily need a shutter channel. A lot of my programming relies on Nyquist effects rather than sync shutter looks and random generators rather than random shutter looks, so I very much judge a fixture’s response to DMX signals.”
The JDC2 IP pairs a 12-segment beam line of 84 high-output LEDs with a 1,728-LED colour plate offering individual pixel control. But it’s much more than what GLP established with the JDC1, the hybrid strobe. It generates digital content through GLP’s DigiFX, directly controllable from the lighting console. These are real-time algorithms running on the fixture’s onboard dual-core processor with no media server in the signal path. It can also display NDI video streams on its LED plates.
“We love the DigiFX system. It is truly brilliant how it all comes together to produce a constant pattern across all JDC2s with DMX-configured canvasing,” says Carruth. “I initially programmed the entire set with no external video and all DigiFX. Once we got to rehearsals, I added some NDI cues, but with how MA3 handles recipe tagging, I was able to keep all the DigiFX programming as emergency video-failure looks at the single click of a macro. I was never stressed if our media server failed.”
Firmware 2.0 introduced a canvas-based positioning workflow with relative, absolute and segmented modes, allowing fixtures to be placed within a defined coordinate space so that content maps accurately across a group rather than repeating identically on each unit. For a row of 20 fixtures acting as a single surface, this is the difference between 20 strobes and one continuous canvas.
“Canvasing was way more user-friendly than I could have imagined,” says Carruth. “It did not take me long to make DMX presets for the various canvases I wanted to use and then apply them to either the DigiFX or the video stream.”
The JDC2 IP accepts up to four external NDI streams directly over its two GigaBit EtherCon ports, without a dedicated interface or external video processing. Having built the show initially only on DigiFX, later on, Carruth additionally layered NDI content during rehearsals after the production’s VJ presented looks that suited particular cues. The performance of that path proved better than the rest of the video system around it.
“The initial programming was all DigiFX, but during rehearsals, our VJ demoed looks that we added to various cues,” says Carruth. “We found the latency to be near zero, even to the point where the video walls and the projector lagged behind the JDC2s.”
That capability produced the moment Carruth singles out from the set. During a spoken poem interlude, the same content ran simultaneously across the IMAG screens, the projector and the row of JDC2 IPs, with the strobes carrying legible text as part of the composition. At the tour’s outdoor shows, where projection and screens lose contrast to ambient light, the fixtures’ contribution became disproportionately important.
“During the interlude, the IMAG, projector and the JDC2s were all showing the content. For those outdoor shows, the feed on the JDC2s made a world of difference,” says Carruth.
The practical demands of the run were as significant as the creative ones. Changeover windows and console time were both short, leaving little margin for a rig that needed coaxing into position each day.
“Our changeover time and console time was very short on this run, but the setup and the programming of these lights were so streamlined that we weren’t stressed about getting everything working quickly,” says Carruth. “I’m very excited to incorporate these fixtures into future productions.”
