Basic DMX and Stage Lighting Training

Basic DMX and Stage Lighting Training

This course takes you from knowing nothing about DMX to designing and running a real stage lighting show. It’s built for beginners such as venue staff, church tech teams, aspiring lighting operators, AV crew and anyone who has been handed a lighting desk and told to “make it work”.

You’ll start with the fundamentals: what stage lighting is for, and how DMX works under the hood, tackling subjects like channels, values from 0 to 255, addressing and what a universe really means. From there, you’ll move into the practical side: cabling (and why mic cables don’t cut it), daisy chains, cable-length limits, splitters and Art-Net, terminators and the flickering they prevent, and the difference between 8-bit and 16-bit control.

The middle of the course covers colour theory for the stage, going into additive RGB versus subtractive CMY, colour temperature, the emotional weight different colours carry, and how to build monochromatic, complementary, triadic and analogous colour schemes that support the music instead of fighting it. You’ll then work through more than 25 fixture types, from dimmers and PAR cans to moving heads, scanners, hazers, CO2 cannons and pixel-mapping fixtures, so you know what to reach for and why.

The final chapters are about running actual shows. You’ll learn stage busking — controlling lighting live, by feel and by ear — and how it compares to cuelist and timecode-driven shows. You’ll learn to build a flexible toolbox of groups, palettes, playbacks and effects, read a performance in real time, and work with musicians and MDs. Finally, you’ll be taught a full troubleshooting method for isolating faults fast and a walkthrough of the instructor’s own workflow, including a site visit, sketching, designing in Capture and programming the show.

Taught by Andre Hanekom, drawing on years of real production experience — including the mistakes, so you don’t have to make them too!