Uploaded May 2022 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
So, time to explain some inner workings of GH2! Expand the description for more...
AddyMills recently posted a few videos demonstrating the various lighting calls in Rock Band 2. A link to one of those if you're curious: youtube.com/watch?v=WM6PmL0vp4Y
I was motivated enough to make a chart that'd test the same in GH2, in all the venues, through the three marker events, [verse], [chorus], and [solo]. Here's all the footage of those tests.
If you've ever watched the pretty colors in the background of GH2, you might wonder what drives all that. GH2 can change the stage lighting in two ways, either through lighting calls, text events in the EVENTS track that tell the stage lights to go out, strobe, etc, or through lighting keyframes in the TRIGGERS track, which are MIDI notes that simply shift the spotlights a bit, good for a subtler effect.
Lighting is also controlled a little through marker events, which tell the game if the current section roughly counts as a verse (calmer), a chorus (more animated), or a solo (focused on the guitarist). Marker events are really more used in the vanilla game as a way to filter which camera angles to choose. [solo] goes for close-ups and [chorus] pulls back to balcony and far shots more.
Part of what makes lighting the stage in GH2 so abstract is that you have very little control over the fine details, only the gist of the lighting. You have two color calls. They are not red, or blue, or green--they are color1 and color2. These do universally make the lighting more static than the normal "blank" lighting call, [lighting ()], so can be good for that purpose, but you can't set the lights to specific colors, no.
Venues differ very frequently in how they respond to lighting events. A spotlight sweep in the Battle of the Bands is the lights fading to neutral. A spotlight sweep in the Harmonix Arena only happens once. Some venues have flares looping. Some do not.
If you've never been to my website, firstly, rude. Here's a link, it's got lots of Harmonix game goodies: mariteaux.somnolescent.net/modding
But if you've never been there, you might not know I've been sporadically trying to document GH2 modding in and out. Even with all my time spent with this stuff, I don't always get it right--case in point, my animation reference page. Even before these tests, I knew that page had some inaccuracies, and now, I really know some shit wrong with it.
Here's a summary of some of the things I learned doing this:
1) Keyframes do work during [solo] in most venues. I previously thought they didn't because they don't work in the Rat Cellar specifically, which is one of my most common testing venues.
2) Lighting calls between [verse] and [chorus] differ very little. There are differences, like the half note spotlight shifts during [lighting ()] during [chorus] in the RedOctane Club that don't happen during [verse], but they're very rare.
3) [solo] lighting does differ from [verse] and [chorus], but only during [lighting ()]. The color calls and the flash pot calls are virtually identical.
4) Venue effects, note 52 on TRIGGERS, are useless. They only work in the Warped Tour and in the Harmonix Arena. Stonehenge doesn't recognize them, nor do any smaller venues. I still like them as a neat optional effect, but they're not necessary at all.
5) Flares being used as a slow strobe are okay, so long as you're alright with them not repeating in about half the venues. For the ones that simply flick the flash pots on until another lighting cue is called, I'd consider that an acceptable substitute.
6) If you don't want flares to loop, switching to another lighting call about a quarter note afterwards at 120BPM looks good. 20-30BPM faster and you'll want to make that a half note, 20-30BPM slower and an eighth should do.
A lot of this is just geek rambling and useful only for people doing customs, but since no one ever made a video like this, I figured I would. Apologies for the occasional encoding glitch, ffmpeg as a lossless editing tool is weird.
Venue chapters, since they're hot:
00:00 Battle of the Bands
01:25 The Rat Cellar
02:42 The Blackout Bar
04:00 RedOctane Club
05:16 Rock City Theater
06:32 Vans Warped Tour
07:48 Harmonix Arena
09:04 Stonehenge
So, time to explain some inner workings of GH2! Expand the description for more...
AddyMills recently posted a few videos demonstrating the various lighting calls in Rock Band 2. A link to one of those if you're curious: youtube.com/watch?v=WM6PmL0vp4Y
I was motivated enough to make a chart that'd test the same in GH2, in all the venues, through the three marker events, [verse], [chorus], and [solo]. Here's all the footage of those tests.
If you've ever watched the pretty colors in the background of GH2, you might wonder what drives all that. GH2 can change the stage lighting in two ways, either through lighting calls, text events in the EVENTS track that tell the stage lights to go out, strobe, etc, or through lighting keyframes in the TRIGGERS track, which are MIDI notes that simply shift the spotlights a bit, good for a subtler effect.
Lighting is also controlled a little through marker events, which tell the game if the current section roughly counts as a verse (calmer), a chorus (more animated), or a solo (focused on the guitarist). Marker events are really more used in the vanilla game as a way to filter which camera angles to choose. [solo] goes for close-ups and [chorus] pulls back to balcony and far shots more.
Part of what makes lighting the stage in GH2 so abstract is that you have very little control over the fine details, only the gist of the lighting. You have two color calls. They are not red, or blue, or green--they are color1 and color2. These do universally make the lighting more static than the normal "blank" lighting call, [lighting ()], so can be good for that purpose, but you can't set the lights to specific colors, no.
Venues differ very frequently in how they respond to lighting events. A spotlight sweep in the Battle of the Bands is the lights fading to neutral. A spotlight sweep in the Harmonix Arena only happens once. Some venues have flares looping. Some do not.
If you've never been to my website, firstly, rude. Here's a link, it's got lots of Harmonix game goodies: mariteaux.somnolescent.net/modding
But if you've never been there, you might not know I've been sporadically trying to document GH2 modding in and out. Even with all my time spent with this stuff, I don't always get it right--case in point, my animation reference page. Even before these tests, I knew that page had some inaccuracies, and now, I really know some shit wrong with it.
Here's a summary of some of the things I learned doing this:
1) Keyframes do work during [solo] in most venues. I previously thought they didn't because they don't work in the Rat Cellar specifically, which is one of my most common testing venues.
2) Lighting calls between [verse] and [chorus] differ very little. There are differences, like the half note spotlight shifts during [lighting ()] during [chorus] in the RedOctane Club that don't happen during [verse], but they're very rare.
3) [solo] lighting does differ from [verse] and [chorus], but only during [lighting ()]. The color calls and the flash pot calls are virtually identical.
4) Venue effects, note 52 on TRIGGERS, are useless. They only work in the Warped Tour and in the Harmonix Arena. Stonehenge doesn't recognize them, nor do any smaller venues. I still like them as a neat optional effect, but they're not necessary at all.
5) Flares being used as a slow strobe are okay, so long as you're alright with them not repeating in about half the venues. For the ones that simply flick the flash pots on until another lighting cue is called, I'd consider that an acceptable substitute.
6) If you don't want flares to loop, switching to another lighting call about a quarter note afterwards at 120BPM looks good. 20-30BPM faster and you'll want to make that a half note, 20-30BPM slower and an eighth should do.
A lot of this is just geek rambling and useful only for people doing customs, but since no one ever made a video like this, I figured I would. Apologies for the occasional encoding glitch, ffmpeg as a lossless editing tool is weird.
Venue chapters, since they're hot:
00:00 Battle of the Bands
01:25 The Rat Cellar
02:42 The Blackout Bar
04:00 RedOctane Club
05:16 Rock City Theater
06:32 Vans Warped Tour
07:48 Harmonix Arena
09:04 Stonehenge
