It has been an intense year for renowned Mexican lighting designer Tony Perez, who has been working with two of the country’s most prominent bands of the moment: iconic rockers Zoé and genre-blending R’n’B trio Latin Mafia.
Tony has also invested in a new Avolites D7-215 lighting console, further expanding his growing collection of Avolites products. At the time, it was also the first D7 in Mexico.
Tony’s career in the industry began as a DJ when he was still a music-loving teenager in high school, and he has worked as a lighting designer and industry professional since 1989. Since around 1993, Avolites has been his preferred lighting control platform thanks to its power, flexibility and ease of use.
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Tony was very proud to be the first person in Mexico to own a D7, a console he has used extensively ever since, helping the product become one of the most popular and in-demand consoles, largely thanks to Tony’s influence.
The D7 is an evolution of previous Avo consoles; it has all the features and functionality, and I especially appreciate its compact size and portability, he comments.
He enjoys the multiple features and the speed at which he can program. If he had to highlight one feature, he says it would be the Avolites Timeline, natively integrated into Titan software, allowing the creation of complex, synchronised and timecoded shows directly from the console, although he also values and uses many other features. He also mentions how useful it is to be able to import older showfiles.
He recently used his D7 as the main lighting console for the six sold-out Zoé concerts at Estadio GNP Seguros in Mexico City, controlling 820 lighting fixtures, a combination of moving lights and LED sources, including 120 Robe FORTE fixtures.
Speaking more generally about Avolites as a brand, Tony considers it to be: THE easiest platform to use, the fastest to set up and program, and the company has developed the ‘next generation’ of consoles with the D7 and D3 ranges without losing its roots or any of the qualities for which Avolites is known and appreciated.
He believes the D7 and D3 ranges are the result of Avolites’ R&D team listening closely to user feedback and requests.
In Mexico, Avolites has been distributed for several years by SHOWCO, a leading sales and distribution company that has successfully brought the brand back to the forefront of lighting control for concerts and live shows.
High-profile designers like Tony have been instrumental in this success, although Tony has also achieved several other Avolites milestones over the years: he was the first person in Mexico to own a Tiger Touch console and also the first to acquire an Arena console at the time.
Tony recalls first encountering an Avolites console, a Diamond 3, in the early 1990s. “It was physically enormous, but very logical to program and operate”, he remembers. From there, he began learning how the consoles and their operating architecture worked. He moved to the Pearl range when it launched in the mid-1990s, after discovering that these consoles appeared in the riders and technical specifications of almost everywhere he worked around the world. “The Pearl was a revolutionary console range in its day. Compact and incredibly user-friendly, you could always work fast with a Pearl to get a show up and running!”
In 2002-03, he transitioned to the Avolites Titan platform, which he has used ever since version 2.5, and the first Titan console he purchased was a Tiger Touch in 2009, which also marked his first personal investment in a console.
As his career has progressed and expanded, so have his console acquisitions, all of them smart and strategic moves. The first Tiger Touch was purchased to operate a major event at the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City during the Mexican Bicentenary celebrations in 2010. At the time, he needed a console capable of handling 12 DMX universes, making it the perfect solution.
Since that first purchase, he has never looked back, and today he uses his D7, Quartz, Tiger Touch II or Arena consoles depending on the size and nature of the show. He cannot imagine completing a project without using Avolites as his first and primary control option.
