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I play in a band and want to automate lighting using midi files that play alongside click tracks while we are performing.

I have an ENTTEC interface and a variety of fixtures including PAR cans, LED battens, moving heads, a hazer and lasers.

Adding and controlling the fixtures I am happy with its more how to approach the configuration to give as much flexibility as possible.

In essence what I would like to be able to do it to trigger via midi control, grouped parameters so for example

-Set a group of par cans colour to RED,
-Then set the colour of moving heads to blue.
-Then control the intensity so set the group of par cans to 50%
-Then the heads to 75%.
-Then move the heads to a set position.

This approach would allow me to effectively have a pallet of each fixture property for all the fixtures (colour, intensity, position, shutter ....) and the pick from them as appropriate for each song.

So under Colour I can have PAR CANS BLUE, PAR CANS RED, HEADS BLUE, HEADS RED and pick any of those options at any time. Also have the same for each of the fixture properties (colour, intensity, position, shutter ....)

The key is that I need to be able to action these things via MIDI. So for each song we perform I would create a MIDI file that has the events to set the lighting in time with the song.

I read somewhere that submasters will achieve this?

I hope that make sense. Your collective help would be VERY much appreaciated.

Brett

In essence what I would like to be able to do it to trigger via midi control, grouped parameters so for example

-Set a group of par cans colour to RED,
-Then set the colour of moving heads to blue.
-Then control the intensity so set the group of par cans to 50%
-Then the heads to 75%.
-Then move the heads to a set position.

Each of your examples would be performed by a Sequence. A different MIDI value would be assigned to cause the sequence to run. At least I think this is the way to do what you want.

But that would mean I would need to create a sequence specifically to achieve just that example. I want to know if I can avoid making those decisions up front in FreeStyler but just expose each of those steps as options which can be triggered from MIDI.

I'm sorry. I do not understand your request then.

I am sure you can do that. There are a lot of ways to do that, either with sequences or submasters. I think the best first step for you is to look at all the midi options, and depending on your midi controller you may want to try different things, I use an Akia apc mini, and it is even color coded. If you are not in "front" of freestyler like you mentioned you will just have to memorize what keys do what.