Avolites D7 Gets Godsmacked

	Niller Bjerrgaard. Photo: Francesca Ludikar

Danish lighting designer Niller Bjerrgaard recently purchased two Avolites D7 consoles, taking them on US rock/metal band Godsmack's current world tour.

Bjerrgaard joined the crew for the band's lengthy 2025 European tour. Although he cut his teeth on Avolites' Pearl consoles in the early 2000s, he used another console brand while anticipating the launch of the Avolites D7 range.

"I loved those old Pearl Rolacues for busting and improvising shows," he says, adding that he "runs shows very differently now -- based around cue stacks and layering effects on top," yet maintaining that "the Avo modus operandi is still fantastic for those adopting a more improvised style of operation."

He purchased the two D7s -- a D7-330 for the main console and a D7-215 for backup -- a month before the tour started.

Setting himself the challenge of learning the D7 in a very short timeframe, he notes, "It wasn't as hard as I thought," adding that tutorials are available online, many created by Kade Behn, head of Avolites' training and technical support in North America.

Bjerrgaard was in fact so impressed with Behn's master classes that he flew to Phoenix, Arizona to catch one of his workshops in person.

Bjerrgaard likes that the D7-215 is the same desk in terms of features and hardware as the D7-330, just with one less screen and ultra-portable, fitting into a Pelican case, weighing 59.5lb, and can accompany him during breaks in the main tour where, for example, he might need to zoom off to Latin America for a special show or a TV appearance.

This enables him to have the same desk, which is more than enough when running cue stack- style, with "executor" buttons on top. While he loves the extra screens and space on the D7-330, he reckons that if he purchases more D7 consoles in the future, they will likely be D7-215s.

The Godsmack tour comprises four trucks of lights with approximately 400 fixtures being run through the desk.

Some fixtures are run in "sensible" mode and some in as "wide" a mode as possible, and this is still "more than enough capacity for most good-sized tours," he says.

Features he loves include palettes: "They make life very straightforward when tailored and they also make cloning and morphing easy." The fixture layout of the palettes can determine all the pixel and chase effects, "and it's truly astonishing what you can get out of your XYZ axes, just by changing the order of the lights."

Once the fixture layout is complete, effects can be run across the whole lighting rig that translates to all the XYZ axes "enabling extremely cool and more interesting effects based on color, intensity, gobos, etc."

Initially, he felt that the pixel mapper might be more geared to video control, but soon realized the benefits of running it across anything with pixels, and he enjoys using it to create arrays of crazy bouncing effects and advanced multiple layered looks that fit perfectly into his "high-impact" collection of effects and specials.

He thinks that key frame shapes are a great feature and a viable alternative to the chase function. With it, a user can build a stack of features, turning them into a chase and order it in any preferred manner.

Bjerrgaard finds working extensively in cue stack mode with different forms of tracking extremely time-saving when programming, saying he can now achieve in approximately 2.5 hours what previously took around four hours with smart use of the tracking section of the cue stack. This means that he doesn't have to touch everything again if he knows he is going to - for example -- use the gobos in X set of fixtures in the next cue; instead, he can just track them through.

He thinks the work light on the back of the desk is "the coolest idea," especially when, inevitably scrabbling in the dark plugging in DMX lines, one hits the button for the light, and the whole back panel illuminates.

The keyboard draw is well designed and thought out, he notes, and with two network cards in the back, users can potentially keep their floor package on its own exclusive network when their artist is playing festivals.

Bjerrgaard's D7s were delivered in February by Avolites' Danish distributor, Light Partner, from Herning. The company organized two days of training at its new HQ, which includes a large previz studio. He then took the consoles home and continued the process. He says that the support overall from Avolites had been "outstanding."

Roy Hunt, of Christie Lites, Godsmack's lighting vendor, is his main contact in Europe and the US. He arranged for Avolites programming expert and training partner Andre Huff from Limelight in Knoxville to support Bjerrgaard for the ten-day rehearsal period in Nashville & Tampa, Florida.

Bjerrgaard says the D7 networking capabilities helped reduce stress during rehearsals. Huff was on the network using the D7-215 with Bjerrgaard on the D7-330, both demonstrating features live to one another while still working on their own desks.

"Avolites absolutely went the extra kilometres in support," Bjerrgaard says.