The grand master is included in Lighting Desks to allow the output of the desk to be controlled by a single fader, usually as a fade to black at the end of a scene. This allowed all the presets or submasters to be left as they were if needed for another cue. Companies such as Strand were putting six presets in desks to allow for more manual programmimg so the single grand master was a logical evolution.

With the addition of Moving Lights, the action of a grand master affected the non dimmer functions of moving lights in an undesirable way, such as panning the fixture to one side or changing gobos while a cue was running, if the grand master was moved, so manufacturers either stopped putting grand masters on desks or provided split desk functions so the grand master controlled only conventional channels and moving lights dimmer functions, which allowed the other non dimmer functions such as pan, tilt etc to stay as they were programmed to be.

The Innovator was a good mixed desk design that had a grand master that did not affect the device traits if the device definition was set up correctly.

See Also

• Submaster
• Fader