How artists and DJs should review show cues before a tour

An artist or DJ should review show cues by watching them run against the actual track before anyone touches a desk, not by reading a spreadsheet that describes what the cues are supposed to do. Words on a page can't tell you if a moment feels right. Watching the timeline against the music can. The review should happen early enough that changes are cheap, and it should happen on something the artist can actually understand without knowing any console syntax.

Why does the artist need to review cues at all?

Because the artist is a department too. Lighting, lasers, and video all design around the artist's set, but the artist is the one whose name is on the poster and whose brand the whole show is supposed to represent. If the visuals don't match how the artist wants to be seen, it doesn't matter how technically clean the cues are. A cue that looks great on a programming monitor can still be wrong for the artist, and the only person who can catch that is the artist.

Skip this step and you find out during the show, or worse, during a livestream, that a moment reads completely differently than anyone expected.

What's wrong with reviewing a cue sheet instead of watching the cues?

A cue sheet tells you a cue exists. It doesn't tell you what it looks like, how it feels, or whether it lands on the right word in the vocal. "Lasers full during the drop" reads fine on paper. Whether it actually works depends on exactly which frame it fires, how it builds into that moment, and what happened in the eight bars before it. None of that survives translation into a spreadsheet row.

This is the same problem we've written about with spreadsheets breaking down across departments: a spreadsheet can hold a description, but a show isn't made of descriptions. It's made of moments against time, and the only honest way to review a moment is to watch it happen against the music.

When should this review happen?

Before programming day, not after. Once cues are stored on a lighting desk, in laser software, and in a media server, changing them costs real time, and that time usually gets eaten from tech rehearsal, which nobody has enough of anyway.

There's a useful parallel in how touring lighting works today. PLSN's rundown of what separates a lighting designer from a touring lighting director puts it plainly: an operator "can hit a go button or start the timecode when they have been told to," while a director "structures and programs a show, getting final approvals from the designer." The approval happens before the show runs, not during it. The same logic should extend one level up. The artist's approval belongs before the cues get locked into hardware, while a change is still just an edit on a timeline instead of a re-program on three different systems.

This matters even more at a festival, where load-in windows are short and there's no time to reconcile a surprise note from the artist between soundcheck and doors. If every department is already syncing against the same clock, the artist's review is just one more set of eyes on the same timeline, not a separate fire drill.

What should the artist actually be looking for?

Not console syntax. The artist should be watching for whether the show feels like them. Does the energy match the section of the track? Does the biggest moment in the song get the biggest visual moment, or did the drop pass by while the show was still building? Is there a quiet verse getting blasted with full-intensity lasers because nobody double-checked it against the mix? Is the overall vibe, warm or cold, aggressive or minimal, actually the artist's vibe, or does it look like a generic festival set that could belong to anyone?

Those are creative judgment calls, and only the artist can make them. Everything else, the exact fade time on a lighting cue or which fixture group carries a look, is production's job to solve once the creative direction is confirmed.

What if the artist isn't technical?

Most aren't, and that's fine. The review doesn't need console access or any production background at all. It just needs a way to watch the show against the music without opening any software the artist has never seen before. That's part of why previsualization has become standard practice well beyond just cueing. As Vectorworks puts it, previz "is used both for cueing shows and presenting design ideas and scenes to clients", which is really the same idea: a non-technical stakeholder can watch a visual pass and give real feedback without needing to understand how it's built.

I've worked with artists who can't tell blue from cyan by name, but they know exactly what they want: lasers start blue, and on the drop, green. Whether that shift happens right on the drop or builds into it is exactly the kind of decision EdiTour is built around: blocking out departments, coloring in the moments, and getting the small details right that make a show feel considered instead of accidental.

How do you make this review painless for everyone?

The easiest version of this is a link. Not a login to a lighting console, not a build folder full of render files, just a link the artist or their manager can open on a phone, scrub through, and leave a note on. If lighting, lasers, and video already agreed on where the cues live and what they're for, on the same shared timeline, then giving the artist a look at that timeline is one extra step, not a separate deliverable someone has to build.