ON Services Deploys Robe WTF! Units on George Strait Tour

	"Playing stadiums, you need intensity, and the WTF! is really impressive, especially when in colors and as a strobe that also pans, tilts, and zooms!" says Skylar LaBarbera. Photo: courtesy On Services

The event services company ON Services, headquartered in Atlanta, has purchased 100 Robe WTF! (for "wash twist flash") IP-rated LED strobe-wash-blinder fixtures, 88 of which are featured on country George Strait's 2026 run of shows, with lighting designed by Stacey & Skylar LaBarbera.

The LaBarberas -- Stacey and his oldest son Skylar, who has his own production design company and is the tour's co-designer and lighting/media programmer on the road -- specifically spec'd 88 of WTF! fixtures as they wanted a new IP-rated luminaire that literally washed, twisted, and flashed. Donny LoDicco, ON Services senior account executive for touring and national lighting adds that the WTF!s are well suited for general rental stock and for lighting the many festivals, tours, exhibitions, and corporate events that ON Services supplies. Some have already been used on other gigs, including hard rock band Def Leppard.

"For me, the WTF! is a proper multifunctional product and a luminaire that ticked numerous boxes for us and our clients," he adds, citing the unit's 360 ability to spin degrees on both horizontal and vertical axes, "together with the zoom and the ability to zone it into different sections of light, and of course the sheer firepower in terms of lumens and output. We needed a fixture that was most importantly IP-rated for our outdoor venues and needed to be very bright to cover the audience with the ability for some eye candy effects."

On Services already has 1,500 Robe moving lights in stock, including iFORTES, iFORTE LTXs, Spiiders, ESPRITES, Spikies, Tetra2s, and LEDBeam 350s.

Over many years of working with Robe, Stacey says the company makes "innovative, quality and reliable fixtures," and he is on a constant quest to discover something different for each design they create to help make it a standout creation.

Skylar adds, "Playing stadiums, you need intensity, and the WTF! is really impressive, especially when in colors and as a strobe that also pans, tilts, and zooms! It allows us to perfectly focus the fixtures based on the size of the venue we are at that week, and the zoom sections are super convenient and allow for some cool looks...it really does it all for an audience color strobe! And you STILL have the 'CTO Mole' strip in the middle for additional functionality, which we use almost every song to light up the crowd for George."

On the George Strait tour, the designers are using 40 WTF!s on eight trusses positioned above and below the four onstage video walls for audience wash. (The show is staged in-the-round.) The four corners of the rig each have 12 WTF!s rigged in a grid-like pod configuration, used for eye candy effects and to also wash the audience.

These are run in full pixel mode so they can create twinkling, sparkling, kinetic eye candy, and other effects. "I took a lot of time to program these and get them just right, and in full channel mode, the versatility was endless," Skylar says.

Stacey likes the fact that WTF! is a fundamentally simple luminaire in concept of being a wash, a square, and a pixel surface, but with the added scope of continuous pan and tilt, focus, and in/out zoom; then there's the quality range of whites and other colors, plus the warm tungsten "mole" temperature and tungsten emulation of the center pixels.

Skylar says that the IP rating offers a plethora of possibilities for lighting outdoor events, festivals, and large stadiums where you need to control the environment more than a conventional molefay or standard color blinder. "You can focus these from the console and effortlessly fill every dark hole in the venue with light."

Stacey, who has worked with George Strait for over 37 years, says he has "seen many different aspects of lighting and lighting products evolve, and I am always looking for something that is different that stands out from the rest. Josef (Valchar, Robe CEO) and the team are consistently developing cutting-edge ideas and tech that help all of us in the industry push the creativity and originality of our art."