Questions, Questions, and More Questions!

This week on the podcast we have our Q + A Tuesday! Life and the business have been a bit crazy so far during this new year so there are a lot of questions to tackle. Be sure to tune in as we cover a wide variety in this episode.

As most of you know, I really enjoy helping those get started in lighting and this is why I began Q + A Tuesdays on the podcast. As the business grows and we begin to take on more projects it’s been more of a challenge to be able to answer the questions that come through our contact form.

Personally, I don’t like letting questions get backed up for too long, so over these next few episodes, I am going to be answering questions that have already come in. After getting these caught back up I don’t plan to do the Q + A Tuesday episodes any longer and will instead be shifting the podcast to focusing on our Patreon’s questions instead.

Learn Stage Lighting Patreon is super easy to join and very inexpensive to contribute to. With this approach, if you decide to become a Patreon, even if it’s only for a month, you can share your question and I will happily answer this within a month or less. That’s going to be my promise going forward.

Main Segment (7:57)

James (7:59): Hello, I beg to send me some solutions and ideas of how to deal with church and stage lights and how to repair them and even stadium lights thanks so much.

Unfortunately, this is a very vague question and I am not sure what situation you are working in. The best that I can offer is contacting someone locally that will be able to give you advice on what you are working on.

Lane (8:42): I have a LightShark Ls-1 and would like to know how to assign fader1-5 to control the dimming of the groups of lights? I have seen you do it in your videos but I am struggling to figure this out.

When you have the program loaded and the lights patched in, all you have to do is first clear out everything. Then, take the set of lights that you want to be on fader 1, bring up the intensity, and then add the strobe, shudder, or any feature that needs to happen. Do not use the Find key when doing this. Press record and press the fader. That should record it to fader 1.

To to do the rest you would just repeat those steps to record them to your faders.

Alex (10:37) Hi. I have watched a number of videos on your channel about DMX stage design and have recently started doing installations in nightclubs in Manchester UK! We have just completed a project but have been having a bit of trouble in the final stage. We are using a Starville DMX dongle to run 4 moving heads, a strobe and a 32 channel DMX controller that powers the roof spotlights that we repurposed to be individually addressable!! Everything works fine for a while and then the strobe went on full power and everything past it in the loop does not receive DMX signal properly. I think the signal is flickering so they cannot be controlled properly. After turning everything off and replugging everything the same thing occurred where it worked for a while and then some of the fixtures stop and the roof lights come on. I was wondering if you could offer any help or advice!

My top suggestion would be to check your USB Sleep settings. Just Google search your operating system and version, then search power save or USB sleep setting. Over a certain amount of time, your USB will reduce power or go into a sleep mode.

If that’s not the case then try removing fixtures from the chain that you believe may be causing this. You can try it with every light by just unplugging the light from the chain and connecting the cords so that the DMX will go to the next fixture. See if there is one or more fixtures that may be causing the issue.

Brent (13:20): I live in India where I use Ableton Live to run backing tracks while also playing keyboards typically with a 4-piece band (drums, bass, electric guitar, keys) setup. I’ve been interested in adding another lane of automation that can be sent out to lighting rigs of shows that we play at. The problem I’m facing is that every show is a different venue with different lighting rigs. How do I go about re-assigning a lighting rig so that I can have the same effect irrespective of the number of lights? I basically want a similar result to be perfectly in time with the music, wherever we play. Thanks for all the helpful tips and tricks! Cheers. Your browser does not support the audio element.