If your production flies anything — PA, lighting, LED walls, scenic — rigging is the single highest-stakes discipline on your show. A dropped monitor console ruins the gig. A dropped line array can kill someone. The margin for error is zero, and the consequences of getting it wrong are catastrophic.
This article is not a guide to becoming a rigger. It's a guide to understanding rigging well enough to plan your production, communicate with venue riggers, and make informed decisions during advance. Whether you're a touring production manager, a band leader stepping into bigger rooms, or an artist rep trying to understand why the venue just rejected your plot, this is what you need to know.
The golden rule: never rig anything yourself unless you are a certified rigger. Rigging requires formal training, certification (ETCP or equivalent), and hands-on experience. No amount of reading — including this article — qualifies you to attach loads to a building's structure. Always hire qualified riggers or use the venue's house rigging crew.
A "point" is a designated attachment location in a venue's ceiling or roof structure where loads can be suspended. In arenas and purpose-built concert venues, these are typically steel beams with rated attachment points mapped out on a grid. In theaters, they might be counterweight linesets or motorized battens. In convention centers, they could be structural steel with specific attachment guidelines.
Every venue has a finite number of usable points, and every point has a rated capacity — the maximum weight it can safely hold. These numbers are not suggestions. They are engineering limits based on the building's structural design, and exceeding them puts lives at risk.
During advance, you need to obtain the venue's rigging plot (also called a point map). This document shows the location and rated capacity of every available rigging point. Without it, you cannot plan your hang. Request it early — ideally during the initial venue hold, not the week before load-in.
The single most important piece of information in any rigging plan is weight. You need to know the total suspended weight at every point, and you need to know it accurately. Estimating is not acceptable. Weigh your gear, add hardware, and account for cabling.
Here are typical weight ranges for common touring rig components:
Rule of thumb: Your total suspended weight at any point — including the motor, rigging hardware, truss, fixtures, and cabling — must never exceed 50% of the point's rated capacity for a static load, or the capacity specified by the venue's rigging guidelines. Always confirm the venue's specific safety factor requirements.
A single-point hang suspends a load directly beneath one rigging point using one motor or chain. Simple, clean, and effective when your point is directly above where the load needs to be.
A bridle uses two or more legs of wire rope or chain to spread a load across multiple rigging points. Bridles are necessary when no single point exists directly above your desired load position, or when the load is too heavy for one point and needs to be distributed.
Here's the critical detail: bridle angle directly affects capacity. A bridle with legs at 45 degrees carries significantly less load than a straight vertical hang. As the angle gets wider (legs spread more horizontally), the tension in each leg increases dramatically. At 60 degrees from vertical, each leg carries twice the load it would in a straight vertical hang. This is basic trigonometry, but the consequences of ignoring it are severe.
Bridle calculations are the rigger's responsibility, not yours. But you need to understand that a bridle doesn't magically give you more capacity — it often gives you less effective capacity per point than a straight drop. If your rigger tells you a bridle configuration won't work for your planned load, don't push back. Redesign the hang.
Not every venue can fly your rig. Low ceilings, no structural steel, historic buildings with protected ceilings, outdoor festivals without roof structures — all of these situations require ground support.
Ground support towers are freestanding structures (typically aluminum truss with a crank or motor lift) that hold your PA, lighting, or LED walls without attaching to the building. They solve the "no points" problem, but they come with trade-offs:
Know before advance whether the venue can support flown production. If the answer is no, budget and plan for ground support early. Discovering this at load-in is a production disaster.
The rigging advance is one of the most important conversations in your entire show prep. It needs to happen at least two weeks before load-in — earlier for complex rigs or venues you haven't played before. Day-of rigging surprises end careers and, worse, endanger people.
What the house rigger needs from you:
What you need from the house rigger:
Document everything from this call in your technical advance. If the rigger flags a concern, address it before load-in — not during.
Trim height is the final elevation of a flown element, measured from the deck to the bottom of the object. Getting trim heights right is a balance between physics, coverage, and audience experience.
PA trim: Line arrays need to be high enough for the bottom box to clear the heads of the front rows, and low enough for the array's vertical coverage pattern to reach the back of the house. Too low and you blast the first ten rows while the back hears nothing. Too high and you lose impact up front. Your system tech will model this with prediction software, but you need to confirm the venue can actually achieve the requested trim.
Lighting trim: Lighting trusses need to clear the PA arrays (both physically and for sight lines) while remaining low enough for fixtures to effectively light the stage. A front truss at 30 feet is great for washes but too high for tight specials. Typical lighting trims range from 22 to 35 feet depending on the venue and the design.
LED wall trim: Video surfaces need to be visible from the back of house. If your LED wall is behind the PA hang, trim it high enough that the bottom edge clears the array. Check sight lines from the last row, the balcony, and the mix position. An LED wall that only half the audience can see is an expensive backdrop for the front section.
Important: Always confirm that the venue's available trim height (distance from the grid or steel to the deck) actually accommodates your desired trim plus the height of the element itself plus motor chain and hardware. A 25-foot trim for a 15-foot LED wall requires at least 42 feet of usable height after accounting for motors and rigging hardware.
Rigging safety is built on redundancy. Every element in a professional rig has a backup, and every piece of hardware is rated, inspected, and documented.
If you ever see rigging hardware that looks worn, corroded, or improvised — stop the hang and flag it. No schedule is worth a failure.
You don't need to calculate bridle angles or certify chain motors. That's the rigger's job, and they've trained for years to do it. What you need to do is plan your production with rigging realities in mind from day one — not as an afterthought after the scenic designer has already spec'd a 6,000-pound LED wall for a venue with 1,500-pound points.
Know your weights. Get the venue's rigging plot early. Have the advance call two weeks out. Confirm trim heights against venue capabilities. And never, under any circumstances, let anyone without proper certification attach a load to a building's structure.
Rigging done right is invisible. The audience never thinks about why the PA is floating above them or how the lighting truss got there. They just experience the show. That invisibility is the product of meticulous planning, skilled professionals, and an uncompromising commitment to safety.
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