Sweeping Delight: Hey, Mobile DJs, You Want Lighting Tricks? We've Got Lighting Tricks That Will Leave Your Party Guests Begging For More

Every mobile DJ has a lighting trick or two up their sleeve, something that’s sure to either put guests into a trance, entice them onto the dancefloor or keep them talking for days about the party – hopefully to their friends who will hire your company.

We surveyed some mobile jocks who are very serious about putting on a fun lighting show for clients. They offered up a step-by-step walk-through. What’s your trick?

DJ Toad, Toad Productions, Oxford, Ohio
“I use a handheld spotlight for things, the kind you get for $50 at Wal-Mart. It’s a super high-powered, rechargeable spotlight. We’ll use it for club things. We’ll spotlight people making out on the floor and make it pretty obvious, which is funny for us. Some people use it to lead the train dance around. If it’s a really hot song we’ll just shine it around the room like a searchlight. For high schools we’ll use it to spotlight couples coming in, like the homecoming court or something, instead of spending $800 on a spotlight. A $50 model at least looks decent.”

Doug Sandler, Fast Forward Entertainment, Owing Mills, Md.
“I do a lot of bar and bat mitzvahs in my market. The best thing for me to do is when I’m doing my game show, I take four American DJ Pocket Scans with a controller and use the controller with the white spotlights to do my version of ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire,’ which I call ‘Rapid Fire.’ So like on the TV show, where they have the sweeping spotlights and the fog machine and it looks really cool when they focus down on the contestant, we do the same thing with the intelligent lights and the pocket scanners. I play the same music as the ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire’ show to this. The kids love it.”

Chris Mills, CJ’s DJs, Las Cruces, N.M.
“What I like to do, and this is with any songs that start with a slow tempo and move to a fast tempo, is to use the American DJ Charisma. If you take the lights and turn the control all of the way down to where the light doesn’t move but it’s still got eight beams and it’s usually swirling stars and swirls, while it’s still in the slow beginning of the song, with the fog on you see the beams shooting through the fog and they’re swirling. You can really see them swirling through the fog and, as soon as the song kicks in with the beat, I turn the sound control all of the way up on it and as soon as the music starts bouncing, the lights start bouncing back and forth with it. It’s a fun effect to play with. I use it for so many songs but I really like it for ‘Back That Thing Up’ by Juvenile – that’s my main one. If I was doing a wedding and I was playing ‘I’ve Had the Time Of My Life,’ I’d use it for that. I’ve used it in reverse for the “Grease” megamix, where it slows down at the end, so I start off fast and then slow it down.”

Terry Moran, Crown Entertainment, Manchester, N.H.
“We use a lot of the American DJ Laser Widows that chain together to project outside of the dancefloor, because usually the events are pretty big and it draws a lot of attention to the floor. We have patterns going on both walls. If we have a white ceiling we’ll put them above and beyond the dancefloor. If the ceiling isn’t white, we just project them on the walls up high. I don’t like to throw a lot of effects into the middle of the dancefloor because they seem to get really convoluted that way. I make sure the lighting goes with the mood of the song. At every event we use American DJ effects like the Vertigo, strobe light and the lava lamps. We also use those torch lights. With bigger events, we use Martin.”

Russ Brown, Great Neck, N.Y.
“My favorite effect is to mount a Lytequest Sno-100 and a Mega-Strobe directly above a snow machine. I black out all of my other lights and stroke with the snow. It creates a unique effect.”

Joe Rosenberg, DJ MoJoe, Energy Entertainment, Baltimore, Md.
“I like to play the Bee Gees’ ‘You Should Be Dancing’ from their live album, One Night Only. I use a 10-foot Road Ready trussing system, with a DJ Scan RG, (for the fog effect), American DJ Laser Widows, a Vertigo, and a Double Derby, and two par-36 cans to light my booth. For fog, I use the Elation Rocket. I like to put Big Shot strobes, focused on the fog machine, so that it looks like the fog comes out in little bits. I typically will do this at the beginning of a show, with all of the other lights, and one high-powered strobe to get everyone’s heart rates going. It’s really cool, and sometimes during dinner, or at the beginning of the party, I will turn all of the lights on, except the strobes, and put a little fog out, and put the lights on ‘static.’ I do this to showcase the lights, and give the guests a little taste of what they are in for.”

Dan Leithem Makin’ Music Dance Productions, Hanover Park, Ill.
“With the American DJ Charisma, I carefully push the circular glass plates outward, bending them so the patterns go all over, instead of in a circle. With the American DJ Mini Saucers (the more you use, the better this works, I recommend at least four), I splice into the main cords, separate the ‘motor’ cords from the ‘light’ cords (attach plugs to each cord), then take the light cords and plug it into an American DJ CC2016 chase unit (plug motors in separately, but constantly on). With the Lytequest/Gemini Brainscans (using at least two linked to each other), I shut the ‘master’ unit down after the green circular gobo, this makes the ‘slave’ either slowly scan across the room continuously or strobe in all colors/gobos. Warning: probably not too good on the motor, but hey, you only paid $280 each for them.

“With the American DJ Barrel Ray, I take protective covering off the top, remove the barrel and aim at the mirror ball. It’s very similar to a color changer, but no programming.With the American DJ H2O and Roto-Gobo, I design a ‘swimming man’ gobo and place it in your Roto Gobo, then position it in the center of your H2O floor pattern. It will look ridiculous, but very funny (looks like a swimming man spinning in a pool of water).

“And finally, the American DJ CW-Spot is great if you’ve broken your color wheel (like I did). Don’t throw your fixture out! It is an excellent oscillator. Remove the lamp, mount upside down from trussing or tripod and hang your mirror ball. This is far better than messing around with those ridiculous mirror ball motors that don’t mount. Unless you buy a special clamp, use a wire hanger or attach to a block of wood and hang with a C clamp.”

Jason Moser, Intense Mobile Music, Lake Forest, Calif.
“Before the gig starts, we normally have the ‘regular’ lights on that are mounted in the building (the lights used when the party is over) and we have the light trussing covered in a large car cover, with the Martin MX-1’s on as spots and the fog machine goes on the floor. Then we kill the regular lights making the MX-1s look like a heaven effect...great for religious stuff! During ‘Great Balls Of Fire’ or songs with ‘hot’ or ‘fire,’ we use the ADJ Flame Machine around our DJ (who is normally elevated above the audience)...it’s totally sick!”

DJ Len, Party Central, Chicago, Ill.
“Get your speakers in front of the curtain and everything else behind it. Play music and keep the curtain closed. Start fogging the stage and get it so thick you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Kill the lights on the dancefloor. Then stop the background music and make your ‘opening announcement’ all with the curtains closed. Start your first dance song (should be something uptempo), start the lights, then slowly open the curtain. The fog will start escaping, the lights will gradually be revealed and the crowd will go crazy from the beginning of the night.”

Mike Anderson, Exquisite Entertainment, Sacramento, Calif.
“We like to use the Sunray II. It’s a mirror-ball effect and the reason why our company uses it so much is that you don’t have to worry about setting up a glass mirror ball and aiming lights on it. Everything’s internal. We use it during a couple’s first dance at a wedding. It creates a really nice effect in the room as far as a disco effect inside the room for a mirror ball, but it’s very low maintenance. As far as the other lighting, the Chauvet bubble machines are great for effects for a short period of time. We do a couple of different things with that. Fog isn’t extremely popular at events around here so what we do is put a fog machine behind the bubble machine, so when they come out for their first dance, little bubbles filled with fog surround them, leaving little bits of fog when they burst. The fog itself generally enhances any lighting you use. It encourages people to come to the dancefloor.”

Tom Walsh, Club T Entertainment, Avon, Mass.
“We reprogram our lighting routines about four times a year using an MLC 16 lighting console. It’s an automated lighting controller. We run the whole show off of that. One of my favorite tricks for lighting is done to a track from The Blue Man Group. We started, at the big video dance parties, to play The KLF’s ‘Last Train to Trancentral,’ which they play as one of the last songs in Blue Man Group. It’s a really high-energy dancey-type song. We have a real interesting wedding cue set up for it. At the larger shows, we’ll go out at the second-to-last song and throw out T-shirts and favors and light up the stage that we’re on and the audience with different lights. We set up the lighting cues during that KLF song. We like to get the kids going nuts and we’ll take the lighting and program it so that it sweeps the floor and us, too, so it’s like a live concert. There are a couple parts of the song where we’ll light up the whole audience. I like to program with some sort of house music and program the lights to it. The board has a tap sequence on it so you can take any cue and just by tapping on the Tap Sequence button to bring the BPM down. You can pretty much just run the cues through by hitting the button and the cues will react. It’ll go through the steps of the sequence, just slower, matching the beat.”

Griffin Behm, Los Angeles, Calif.
“One of my favorite effects is to have all my Intellbeams running, creating a stunning image, and then at a climactic point in the music, I abruptly shut them off and turn on my Mobolazer G-Beam with G-Scan on a Liquid Sky/Beam Chase to really impress the crowd.”