How to create a Good Morning lighting scene in Control4

One of the first things we set up for nearly every customer who gets Control4 is a Good Morning scene. It’s a proper crowd-pleaser, and it’s the moment most people go “oh, that’s why we did this.” Instead of stumbling around flicking switches in the dark, you press one button (or it happens on a timer) and the house gently comes to life — kitchen and hallway lights up, bathroom on a soft level, blinds maybe creeping open if you’ve got them.

The good news is that once your system’s installed, you can build and tweak a scene like this yourself from your Halo remote, a T3/T4 touchscreen or the Control4 app. Here’s how we explain it to our Melbourne customers.

What actually is a “scene”?

A scene is just a saved snapshot of lighting (and sometimes more) across multiple rooms, recalled with a single command. Rather than telling the kitchen lights to go to 60%, the island pendants to 40% and the hallway downlights to 30% one at a time, a scene fires all of those at once, exactly the way you set them.

A few things worth knowing before you start:

• A scene can include lights from any number of rooms — it’s not tied to one space.
• Each light in the scene can have its own level (off, full, or anything in between if it’s a dimmable circuit).
• You can give the scene a fade time, so everything ramps up gently rather than snapping on.
• Scenes can be triggered manually, on a schedule, or by another event (like the alarm being disarmed).

Building the scene and setting levels per room

You can create a lighting scene right from a T3 or T4 touchscreen, the Halo remote, or the Control4 app on your phone. The steps are almost identical across all three. Here’s the touchscreen/app version:

1. Open the Lighting area (it might be on your home screen, or under the room you’re in).
2. Look for Scenes, then choose Add Scene or the +. Give it a clear name — “Good Morning” — so it’s easy to find later.
3. Now add the lights you want. Tap to add a load from each room: bedroom, ensuite, hallway, kitchen, living, whatever you’d like waking up with you.
4. For each light, set the level you want it at for this scene. Slide a dimmable light to, say, 35% for the bedroom and 70% for the kitchen. For anything you want left off, set it to 0% (or simply don’t add it).
5. Set a fade time if the option’s there — we usually programme Good Morning to ramp over 10–30 seconds so it’s not a shock to the eyes.
6. Save the scene.

That’s the core of it. The beauty is you can walk around the house, see exactly how it looks, then come back and nudge any level until it feels right. We tell customers to live with it for a few mornings and adjust — your ideal kitchen brightness at 6am in winter is different to a summer sunrise.

Scheduling it to run automatically

A button is great, but the real magic is when Good Morning just happens at the right time. Control4 lets you schedule scenes, and you can tie them to the actual sunrise rather than a fixed clock time — handy in Melbourne where sunrise shifts by hours across the year.

1. From the touchscreen or app, go to Settings, then Schedules (sometimes shown as the agenda/calendar icon).
2. Choose Add and select your Good Morning scene as the action.
3. Pick the time. You can set a fixed time like 6:30am, or choose relative to sunrise — for example, 20 minutes before sunrise — so it tracks the seasons automatically.
4. Choose which days it runs. Most of our customers set weekdays only, then build a separate, later “Weekend Morning” scene. Easy.
5. Save it. Done — the house now wakes itself.

If you want it to be a bit smarter again — say, only run on workdays, skip public holidays, or hold off if someone’s already up and the bedroom lights are on — that’s where a bit of custom programming in Composer comes in. Our team can set those conditions up for you; have a read of our lighting automation guide for more on what’s possible.

Triggering it from a keypad button

The other way most people fire a Good Morning scene is from a keypad — typically the one by the bed or just outside the bedroom door. If your Control4 keypad has a spare engraved button (lots of customers get one engraved “Morning” or with a sun icon), you can map the scene to it.

From the app or touchscreen, the simplest path is:

1. Go to Settings, then Lighting (or Keypads, depending on your menu).
2. Find the keypad you want to use and select the button you’d like to programme.
3. Assign the Good Morning scene to a single tap on that button.
4. Test it — press the button and watch the scene fire. Adjust the levels back in the scene editor if anything’s too bright or too dim.

Some advanced keypad behaviours — like a double-tap doing something different, or a button toggling between Good Morning and All Off — are set up in Composer by an integrator. If your keypad buttons aren’t doing what you’d expect, or you want fancier behaviour, that’s a quick job for us. We cover button mapping in more detail in our keypad programming article.

A few things that catch people out

• Non-dimmable lights can only be on or off in a scene — you can’t part-dim an LED downlight that’s on a relay rather than a dimmer. If you want smooth dimming somewhere it’s not working, that’s usually a hardware question for us.
• Renaming rooms or loads after you’ve built a scene won’t break it, but it can get confusing. Keep names obvious.
• Remote access: to tweak schedules while you’re away you’ll need 4Sight/Control4 Connect active on your account. Worth having anyway.

If you’d like to see the official run-down of scenes and schedules straight from the source, Control4’s own support site at control4.com is a solid reference.

We’re happy to set it up with you

Honestly, the best Good Morning scenes come from a bit of back-and-forth — you tell us how the household actually moves through the morning, and we dial in the levels and timing so it just feels right. If you’d rather we handled the lot, or you want extra lights brought into the system, get in touch via our contact page and we’ll sort it.

Have a play, set those levels, and enjoy your house waking up with you. If you get stuck, you know where we are.

— Adam and the team at DUKE Electrical Group