Controlling Your Lights: The DMX thread

[Phil Starr]

I'm just starting to use a DMX controller to control our band's stage lighting. There's nothing wrong with using the built in programs but they tend to be disco orientated and literally a bit too flashy for band use. Good for the audience if they are up on the dance floor but nobody wants the lights to flash off in the middle of a tricky bass run

If anyone has any practical experience or tips to offer I'd be glad to hear them and I'll save the first post to try and pull together the best tips and build up a wiki/how to help people as new ideas are added.

[Phil Starr]

Saved for future development

[Steve Browning]

Personally, I never use chases or sound to light. I always look at how bigger bands use lighting and aim to replicate that, as far as possible. 

 

Trying to get too clever can backfire. 

 

I want to change from my current set up (two Kam partybars) to allow more flexibility from the 8 channel footswitch, which is useful for controlling the lights. 

[TimR]

I have a Chauvet Obey 40. It's only been used at home so far but I did use one in a band about 20 years ago and setting up 5 simple chases and using the 'rate' slider to vary the speed of the chases was all I needed. Select a different chase each song. 

 

About to buy some WiFi transmitter/receivers as the amount of long cables that have to be run and packed up. It'll pay for itself in cables and time. 

 

Currently only DMX control is 4 mini spotlights linked together with one as master (and sound to light) and everything else is just sound to light solo. It can look a bit manic. 

[Rosie C]

For years I worked on a mobile 'heavy rock' disco but we didn't want the disco flashing light thing, we wanted to created a mood. The lights were all DMX controlled and we had a PC in a flight case with a USB-DMX adapter. From memory the rig was

• 6 x PAR56 on dimmer packs with rainbow gel selection
• 4 x gobo scanner
• 2 x moonflower

Each PAR can was one colour of the rainbow and we worked out which gobos were which, I wrote simple programmes that were just red, or just orange. Some move complex ones that moved the scanners, flipping gobo as they changed direction. But it was all very low key.

 

We retired from that game a long time ago, but a couple of years later someone asked us to do one last gig. We didn't have the PC anymore and had to borrow back the lights from the local high school we'd donated them to.  I found that with only one scanner running a built-in pattern, the other three set to mirror it, we got 4 scanners all with the same colour, all moving in a sequence and it was fairly low key and not flashy. The dimmer packs let us put the PAR cans on a slow fade between channels - maybe a minute to move around them, and that worked OK. So looking back I probably wasted a lot of time programming fancy light shows - the built in stuff could be tweaked to be OK. Of course this is going back years to the days of single-colour halogen lamps.

Edited 47 minutes ago by Rosie C

[Phil Starr]

Hi Tim,

 

Using wi-fi links sounds really interesting, winding up DMX cables every gig is already getting very boring on top of the XLR's. I'd be really interested to know how that works out.