desk control using midi or remote

[The Boogie Man]

Hi Troops,

 

I did ask a similer question awhile back about which desks were good a recieving midi in to control changes, and the likes of the zero 88 jester seemed to fit the bill.

 

What I'm wondering at the mo is, a well spec'd desk like the jester gives the variation and growth for a good light show, but a simple foot pedal gives ease of use in a one man show envioment. Is it possible to get a foot board for a desk ? Or can I use my midi mate to run a desk. I imagine that patch changes on the midi mate will change patterns on a jester etc, but starting and stopping scenes/chases/blackouts/full on.

I'm just trying to see if it would be possible to get the main functions of a good desk at my feet, as the footboards I've seen are very limited on channels.

 

Cheers

baz

[benweblight]

The Jester has a socket for one single foot pedal that can be set to control any function.

 

Here is a snippet from the manual about MIDI:

In Preset mode:

The first note of any octave will drive channel 1, the second note of any octave

will drive channel 2 and so on. The Receiving Channel is set to <--> by default.

This means that the desk will accept commands on any of the 16 channels. The

velocity information is used to determine the fade rate of a channel.

In Run mode:

The first note of any octave will drive submaster 1, the second note of any octave

will drive submaster 2 and so on. The velocity information is used to determine

the fade rate of the submaster.

 

It is probably possible to control via your midi pedal depending on how configurable the pedal is (if it let you send notes rather than CC).

[DavidLee]

The Zero88 Lightmaster XL (12channel) and XLS (24channel) desks have full MIDI control capability - and output channel level information via MIDI-out as well.

 

Control uses note on messages - but velocity is used to control output level rather than fade rate.

 

Whilst these desks are no longer in production they regularly appear on the 2nd hand market.

 

David

[dbuckley]

The MIDI Mate is a fine pedal, I use one myself, capable of outputting patch change and controller info, when you use it in controller mode. Most lighting control tools don't do MIDI very well, the low end products work like the Zero88 XL as mentioned above, they convert notes to faders. (I also have an XL, and I can confirm it's MIDI does work!) The expensive desks accept MIDI Show Control to trigger cues (which the MIDI Mate cant generate) or want MIDI TimeCode, to sync to something else, like video playback for example.

 

Some of the computer based lighting control packages, and in particular those that don't pretend to be hardware-less versions of proper lighting consoles, have far more flexible MIDI capabilities.

[Tomo]

The SmartFade series have full MIDI capability - the MIDI specs are available from ETCconnect.com - here

(Direct link to PDF)

[The Boogie Man]

Cheers guys,

 

So if the midi mate can send patch changes to the above zero 88's and the jester etc, then the only thing I would have to do by hand is just press go to start a scene, or I could have a delay at the start of the scene. I suppose black outs and full on would be ok as when the patch is changed the scene would be instant. Yes? No?

 

cheers

baz