Venue Venuelink wireless systems are designed to produce professional, vivid and dramatic panoramas that may look like a Hollywood lighting designer is at the helm. However, an entire show can be created by a musician with limited experience producing lighting extravaganzas. Venuelink is also perfect for multitasking musicians and DJs who must negotiate various cartage and assembly duties, as well as deal with live sound and their own performance.

Anyone who attends big concerts or theatrical productions knows lighting is critical for setting moods, amplifying musical cues and revving up emotions. But the expense, set up and operation of even a basic DJ lighting rig often makes it more attractive to forego lights entirely. Not so fast. Guitar Center Director of Private Brands Jim Norman and Production Manager Kyle Okazaki explain how Venuelink’s hassle-free, wireless approach can make it easy to wash artists, bands and fans in ambient circuses of color.

Tell us how Venuelink came together.

Jim Norman: Well, the idea started during two separate conversations. We were first talking about our Tetra Control, and in parallel, we were also talking about trends in lighting. We had been observing that a lot of customers wanted to have wireless connectivity between lights. It’s not easy showing up to a gig and having to run all of your cables and set up your lights. What if a cable is bad? Maybe it worked last time, but now it doesn’t. You’re trying to troubleshoot the system and make it work, and you’re five minutes from doors opening. That’s a big problem.

So, we were talking about situations like that, and thinking, “How great would it be if users had the ability to show up to the gig, place the lights and get the room lit up without having to run DMX cables?” We saw that as a natural step for making our lights better. And don’t forget, with DMX cabling, you must make sure everything is set up with a termination point at the end. If you don’t do it right, things can get a little finicky. We wanted to remove that “chaos factor” from gigs.

Pictured: Venuelink Wireless DMX Dongle Plugged into the Tetra Control 2 Wireless DMX Controller

Speaking to that, one of the things that struck me is Venuelink’s backward compatibility with existing Venue fixtures.

Kyle Okazaki: Yes. One of the biggest features is that it's backward compatible, because upgrading each fixture costs money, and that can be a big constraint for some people. Venuelink is a very good entry point for those who want to start using wireless, but don't necessarily need to have every single light in their setup be wireless. For example, if you already have lights set up with DMX cables, you can simply start the chain with a wireless Venuelink light and transmit the signal through DMX cables to subsequent lights. Venuelink is a friendly and cost-conscious way of removing that one long DMX cable from the controller to the first light.

In other words, people don’t have to replace a setup they’ve already invested in.

Norman: Exactly. If you have a truss with a bunch of lights that are already wired, Venuelink lets you swap out the first light—or add a new light—with the wireless feature at the front of the rig. The rest of the lights are effectively wireless from the Venue Tetra Control.

Can you tell us a bit more about the Venuelink wireless technology?

Okazaki: For fixtures that have Venue tech built in, the wireless dongle you connect to Tetra Control can reach up to 100 feet away and transmit up to 32 independent dongles or antennas. That’s not a definitive limit, however, because the signal can travel through DMX cables to additional lights.

Pictured: Venue Tetra Control 2 Wireless DMX Controller

For those who may be new to the Venue lighting ecosystem, can you tell us a bit more about Tetra Control and what it offers users?

Norman: I’ll speak to my own experience of taking on a larger product development role in the Venue line about six years ago. Anyone who has dealt with lighting at a gig knows there’s a learning curve to really get deep into DMX. So, I tried to approach it with the customer journey in mind. What is it like for the keyboardist—who is maybe the most “technically” oriented member of the band—who gets put on lighting duty? Or maybe you see a show at a club in Silver Lake, and the FOH audio engineer is also running the lighting board. You see what happens when you’re putting lighting on someone who has got split responsibilities, and maybe doesn’t have a deep understanding of what they’re doing. That’s often how it goes with lighting at smaller shows.

So, I put my musical hat on. I wanted to identify a way to make it more interactive for music and musicians. I started thinking about our lighting controller kind of like the sequencer or arpeggiator in a keyboard. You work out this pattern, and instead of sending musical notes like an arpeggiator, the controller sends information to the lights for colors, as well as all of the other things that come with a truly dynamic light show. What if there were multiple patterns you could change from one to the next?Another way to look at it is as a “lighting groove box” that makes the lighting aspect of a show more interactive. It flows. You’re not just playing patterns, but you are also setting “moods.” That opened up a workflow where you could have templates, such as “Star Spangled Banner,” “Halloween” or “Mardi Gras” as your larger theme.

Pictured: Venue Tetra Control Wireless DMX Foot Controller

That should feel like a pretty natural workflow for folks that might use something like a Phillips Hue system in their homes.

Norman: Exactly. First things first, we wanted to make it easy to interact with. If you're a non-lighting person, you don’t have to worry about figuring out lighting channels or anything like that. No one wants to do that. It's like step programming an old drum machine, but worse.

As we were developing Tetra Control, we thought it would be great to have real-time interaction for obvious lighting functions, such as strobing. If you want to stop and have a big strobe, black out or “all on,” you can do those functions quickly while the show is playing. That was the genesis of what Tetra Control became, but the system was initially designed just for our wash lights, because that's all we were doing at the time. Over the years, we started coming out with effects lights, but we didn’t have the ability to control them, because the DMX channel protocol wasn't going to be compatible. Either the moving headlights didn’t understand the messages, or they just didn’t line up. So, Kyle and the development team worked hard to add moving head functionality. They brought in our little revolver lights, ensuring they would start moving around and showing the same colors as the other lights. We added capability to the Venue Mothership, and we took it one step further by developing Venuelink wireless functionality to make things more convenient.

Are there any particular preset moods that really jump out to you?

Okazaki: Everyone seems to like rainbow and colorful—those are pretty standard. But my favorite is “Mardi Gras.” Nice, contrasted colors with the purples, oranges and everything.Norman: A lot of those preset ideas came from a member of our team at the time—a working musician who loves lights. He was thinking about it like, “Hey, I'm playing a Fourth of July party. I need a Fourth of July mood.” Then, he thought about Christmas, Halloween and so on—all with classic color schemes attached to them. It’s a great feature for performers. For example, many DJs put their lighting rig on sound active mode, cross their fingers and hope it looks good. But if you’re playing a thematic party, you’ve got some light choices you can count on.

Pictured: Venue Revolver Moving Head

Speaking of sound active, there’s a built-in microphone—as well as a 1/4" input—for picking up the music from your performance. Can you tell us how that works?

Okazaki: The audio input will pick up the tempo and overall dynamic qualities of your music, and by adjusting the sensitivity knob, you can easily tailor it to whatever scenario you're in.

Norman: If you set the sensitivity really high, it can pick up the nuances of an intricate funk beat. If just want the boom, boom, boom of a four-on-the-floor groove, you just dial back the sensitivity.

Venuelink offers two options—more affordable fixtures that work with the optional wireless transmitter/receiver dongle, and fixtures that have wireless capability built in.

Norman: That’s right. Part of the reason for that is one of the successes for Venue had been its price. It's a great entry-level product that easily has the same features as something more expensive. So, we didn’t want to only offer onboard wireless, as that would raise the cost significantly from what customers expect from the Venue lineup. We decided to offer both avenues to give the customer a choice. They can get wireless functionality via an optional dongle and stay close to the price point of the original lights, or they can pick the more expensive version, get wireless right out of the box and not have to deal with a dongle at all.

Pictured: Venue Tetra 6 Washlight with Venuelink

For a small band or DJ who may be setting up their first lighting rig, what fixtures do you recommend for a symmetrical setup?

Norman: Obviously, it depends on their budget and footprint. You can choose the Tetra 6 or Tetra 12 wash lights, which are good for overheads and around the stage. You’d probably want to go with four of those. If you want uplighting or back lighting, the Tetra bars are a good deal. They’re exciting, and they offer four zones in one. You could put those on the floor, or back behind the stage—they add a lot of drama. I think that would get you up and running. Finally, I would buy a Tetra Control because they are so affordable, and they will make the whole thing work much better than just having static lights or using sound active mode. Four Tetra wash lights, a couple of Tetra bars and a Tetra Control gives you a very impressive lighting rig.

Okazaki: That setup is also the best way to show the patterns and chases native to the Tetra Control.

Norman: Speaking of people setting up their first lighting rig, I want to call out one small thing. The first time you pull everything out of the boxes can be a little overwhelming, so we stuck QR codes on the back of each unit. You can grab your phone, scan the codes and pull up the manuals right there. No Google search required. No paper wasted.

Okazaki: Another thing we did that I like was to make the dongles powerable by the fixtures themselves. There’s no need to charge them up, and you can leave the dongles in your Venuelink fixtures—which is a huge thing if you have a static setup.

Norman: We’re really trying to make lighting easy for musicians and DJs. We’ve all been on those stages ourselves, and we know you’ve got enough to worry about to get ready for your show. Who wants to be stressed out about lights?