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In a thread in the ADJ forum I suggested that a serious shortcoming of the Magic 260 is that it wasn't particulary compatiable with the FBC1010. The situation is not nearly as bad as I suspected. The shortcoming was either in the Midi Chart in the Magic 260 manual or my powers of comprehension.

In a conversation with Sergio, I learned that the Magic 260 is extremely capable when it comes to recieving midi instructions and any incompatility with an FCB1010 is due to its inability to send note information on more than one channel. [For all practical purposes, the FCB1010 can only send 127 notes and the Magic 260 has memory for 1152 scenes and 288 Shows.]

The trick is deciphering the cryptic Midi Chart in the Magic 260 manual. It says, for example, "Midi Channel 1 - Value 0-72 (Scene 1-3) & Value 73-95 (Show 1). To be clear, it should have pointed out that 24 times 3 is 72 and said something like this:

Each Midi channel will trigger up to 72 scenes or 24 Shows. For example, Midi channel 1 will trigger all 24 SCENES in the first three Pages of scenes in Magic 260 and all 24 SHOWS on Page 1 of SHOWS. So, for example, if you want to trigger scene 10 on Page 3 (of scenes), send note 58 on midi channel 1. If you want to turn on show 24 on Page 6 (of shows), send note 95 on midi channel 6.

While the FBC1010's note sending function is (for all practical purposes) stuck on one midi channel, with that capability you can trigger 72 scenes and 24 shows. That's a whole lot better than I thought the Magic 260 could do based on my reading of the Midi Chart.

I hope this post helps others decipher the Midi Chart in the Magic 260 Manual.

Hobson
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Wow! Thanks, Hobson. You saved my universe (well maybe my DMX universe, he he). What I am trying to do is control a light show while playing drums live. Although using the Behringer FCB0101 pedal is discussed in this forum is an option, it is not a good option for me because my feet are pretty busy. I wanted to control the lights via my Roland TD30K electronic drum head.

Based on the bonehead MIDI chart in the Magic 260 manual, I thought I could only control the first 48 of 1152 scenes and only the first 12 of 264 shows via MIDI using all sixteen MIDI channels. I was also wondering why Elation would waste all that programming capacity by assigning MIDI channel 1, notes 0 through 23 to control only one scene on the Magic 260. It seemed a study in repetitive redundancy over and over again.

My limitation is that Roland allows a drum trigger to be assigned to MIDI, but only one MIDI channel per trigger. We’ll never need more than 72 lighting scenes, although we will use many of the scenes over again throughout our set list.

With the info you’ve shared. I can write a MIDI song using all the lighting cues (scenes) we’ll ever need and arrange the notes in the correct order to call up the scenes from the Magic 260 throughout our set list. I can manually step through our show by just tapping the rim on my Tom 4.

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