Magic 260

That is a magic 260 NOT magic 360. Sorry and thanks again.

Getting the fixture profiles installed on the M260 is a good start. Hopefully you chose profiles that used less than 16 DMX channels. If you profiles with a higher number of channels you will need to redo the installation with profiles with 16 or less channels. If you want to keep things simple for now, I'd suggest that you use a low - maybe even the lowest - number of channels for each fixture.

You mentioned 20 fixtures and said you had others. The M260 can control up to 24 fixtures or 24 groups of fixtures. You'll need to decide whether you want to program each fixture separately or if you want all similar fixtures do the same thing whenever they are on. For example, you could set it up so that whenever one Dekker comes on, they both come on and do the same thing.

If you want to keep things simple so you can get up and running in a hurry, I'd suggest that you start out with all like-kind fixtures as a group (that is, they all do the same thing when they come on) and just use the built in programs. You can change this later when you get more up to speed on DMX and light programing.

To do this you have to go into MENU/CHOOSE FIXTURES on the M260. In there you assign a fixtures to any of the 24 buttons on the left. For example, you could make button 1 the button that controls your Dekkers, button 2 the button that controls your Galaxians, etc.

Then you will need to make sure that each of the fixtures is set up in the same number of channel mode as the channel mode of the profile you chose. Find out the number of channels used by your profiles your installed and set the light to use that number of channels [How to do that is in the manual for the fixture].

Then set each of the fixtures to the correct DMX channel. Go to MENU/PATCH FIXTURES on the M260. It will first show you that the channel of for button 1 is channel 1. If you've got button 1 set up to program your Dekkers, set them to channel 1. Turn the wheel and you will see the channel for button 2. If you are using an 8 Channel Mode profile for the Dekkers, then it will say that the channel number of button 2 is 9. Set the channel on the next group of fixtures (your Galaxians?) to channel 9. Keep doing this until all your lights are properly patched to the channel number for the button which controls that group of lights.

Assuming you've daisy chained all your fixtures with dmx cables from the M260 to all the lights, you are now ready to program the M260 to get the lights to do what you want them to do.

Let me know if this doesn't solve your problem.

I got all the channel buttons correctly patched. I have all the lights daisy chained with DMX Cables, I just can't figure out how to simply turn ON the light group, or turn OFF the light group. It seems that no matter what channel I put the group of lights on, EVERY channel turns on or off. instead of turning off all the dekkers, and leaving on the Glaxian Lasers, or turning the Quad Gems ON and the Lasers OFF. I want to be able to turn the GROUPS of lights ON and OFF separately. I did what you said and ALL my Dekkers are in one GROUP, All my lasers are in one GROUP, all my Quad Gems are in one group. That's only three sets of lights. Each group does the exact same thing, individually. All the Dekkers flash at the same time. All the Quad Gems flash at the same time. All the lasers pan and tilt all at the same time...but right now, they are ALL ON, or ALL OFF. I don't know i this matters or not, but NONE of my lights are in the "ADJ Library" so I am using the default 4,6,8,16 Channel presets that come pre-installed in the Magic 260

I was going on your statement: "I have downloaded the ADJ profiles and even installed that to the controller successfully." If you have done this, then use the profiles installed (not the x channel profiles). This is because the x channel profiles don't tell you what each of the knobs control. I'm a little surprised that you can get them all to turn on and turn off. How are you doing that? Are you just using the master fader?

Please note that each fixture has it's own set of channel designations. Take your Galaxian Move for example. It uses 8 channels. Ch1 controls pan, Ch2 Tilt, Ch3 Red [On, Off, Sound Activated, etc.], Ch4 Green, Ch5 Rotation, Ch6 Macros, Ch7 Movement, Ch8 Speed. Unless all your lasers use the same channel set up, you can't group all the lasers together. You can only group the ones that use the same channel set up. This is true of all your fixtures: Group only like controlled fixtures.

Although I'd strongly recommend you use dedicated profiles, you can use the x channel profiles if you study each fixture's manual to see what channel controls what on the fixture. Until you find the channel(s) that controls dimming or on/off and the channel(s) that sets the lights into sound activated mode, you will be spinning your wheels.

If you haven't installed dedicated profiles for your fixtures, then either build them yourself with the M260 software or email Sergio and he will send the profiles you need. [So a search for "Sergio" in this forum - you will find his email address.] Tell him that you want the profile that uses the fewest number of channels, but also allows you to switch to "sound activated" mode. With the dedicated profiles the M260 will tell you which channels control what.

Once you know which channel controls what on each group of fixtures, then you have to create "Scenes." To keep it simple you might only use two scenes, one for slow songs which might use fewer lights, dimmer settings, lots of blues and lavenders and slow laser rotation; and another for fast songs with lots of Reds, Whites, Yellows and Blues (heck, make up anything you want!).

Here's what you would do. Set the "Fade" and "Speed" to 0 and the "Master" to 100. Select the "Scene" button. Hit the "Fixture" button. Hit button "1." Now use the knobs under the screen to set the lights controlled by button one to what you want. Unselect button 1 and repeat the process with button 2. Repeat this process until all the lights are set as you want them. Press "Record" and assign that "Scene" to a button.

Repeat that process, but have the lights do something different from what you just recorded. Once you've got your second Scene the way you want it, hit "Record" and assign that Scene to a different button.

Now anytime you have "Scene" selected and hit button 1 the Scene you recorded there will come on. Same with the other buttons you've assigned scenes to. If you done it right, only the lights you've set to come on in a scene will be on when you select that scene.