Need help getting started with midi control and magic 260

You actually have an ideal situation to take great advantage of the M260 - assuming your keyboard guy isn't using all 16 midi channels in his sequences.

You can use the sequencer to trigger either Scenes or Shows to good advantage.

A Scene is created by using the M260 to set all of your lights in a condition that you will want to use sometime during the gig - and recording it to a particular button on a particular page of the M260. As long as that Scene is turned on, nothing about the lights will change (although if in the scene you have set a fixture to chase or strobe, it will "change" in the sense that it will keep chasing or keep strobing on and off).

So, for a particular song, you might have one Scene you want to run during the intro, another during the verse, another during the chorus, another one or two during the outro. You would set up and record each of those Scenes to its own button on a particular page of the M260.

For reasons described below, don't record you Scenes just anywhere on the M260. Record your Scenes in locations on the M260 that use midi channels not used by the keyboard to control the sound module(s).

Now repeat that process for all the songs you play (although you will most likely use the same Scene in multiple songs - meaning you only have to record enough scenes to give you the variety of lighting conditions you will want during the gig.

You can now use the sequencer to call up each of those Scenes at the appropriate moment during playback of the sequence.

Ideally you would use some midi channels for triggering notes in the sound module(s) and other midi channels to trigger the lights [If that is not possible let me know and I'll tell you how to deal with that.]

So, lets say the keyboard uses channels 1-12 for sound and 13-16 for lights. Go into the M260's menu and find the Midi page. [I haven't got an M260 in front of me and the manual isn't helpful - so I'm going from memory here.] Select Channel 13 and set "Extra Channels" to 3. Now the M260 will accept midi note signals on midi channels 13-16 - and will ignore what is going on on channels 1-12.

Here is where it gets tricky. There are 24 Scenes per page on the M260. Each midi channel controls three pages of scenes. The Midi Chart on Page 34 of the manual says Midi Channel 1, Value 0-72 (Scene 1-3), and something similar for the other midi channels. What this means is that if you send note 0 on midi channel 1 to the M260 it will turn on Scene 1 (on Button 1) on page 1. What is not clear is that it also means that if you send note 24 or 48 on midi channel 1, it will turn on Scene 1 on page 2 or Scene 1 on page 3, respectively. Of course, sending note 72 on channel 1 would turn on button 24 on page 3. [All of this assumes that you have set up the M260 to receive instructions on midi channel 1. If you have already done what I suggested in the previous paragraph, however, the M260 would ignore these midi note messages.]

So if you set the M260 to ignore all signals on channels below 13, then you will not be able to get the sequencer to call up any Scenes recorded below page 36. See the Midi Chart on Page 34. So record all the Scenes you will want to use on pages 36 or higher.

Now, if you want to trigger Scene 1 on page 13 when the song starts, send midi note 0 out on channel 13. [The M260 will change to page 36 and turn on button 1.] Then whenever during the song you want the lights to change to a different scene, have the sequencer send out the midi note on the midi channel that corresponds to where you saved the scene you want to use.

You can use Shows instead of Scenes to good advantage. A Show is a sequence of Scenes - and you can tell the M260 to loop 2 or more Scenes while a show is playing. So if you want the lights to change during a scene (e.g., you can have the intensity of different fixtures change/bounce around to the beat of the music by using multiple Scenes in a Show and turning on the M260s sound active button), you would have to use Shows instead of Scenes. And as with the Scenes you would have the sequencer call up one Show for the intro, another for the verse, etc.

Hope this helps. Have fun and enjoy the show!

BTW. You say you will use fixtures that aren't DMX controlled. Consider getting something like a DP-415. With one of those you can turn those fixtures on and off with the M260 - either in a Scene or with the AUX buttons.

Hey thank you for the information.

This week I will probably be trying this (Ive had a lot of other projects come along since I wrote the original post and a baby on the way ;-))

Ill give it a shot and let you know how it works!

I will probably just end up making shows for each song and having them start at the beginning of each show.
I think im going to end each show either with a black out and just blue lights, or maybe just the blue lights. Im not sure of that yet.

Do I need to make these control changes?

If I have a sequence that uses all the midi channels how do I program the lights then?
Can I put the signal to the lights on another channel?

Hey Jealousblues - I'm taking the same route as you - controlling the 260 from a Keyboard, I'm stuck at the moment, as my 260 is sick - hopefully I'll get a new one back soon, but what I am looking to do is partition the upper and lower extremes of the keyboard to send out notes on different channels - I'm using a Yamaha XS7, so this is pretty simple to do.

Looking at the midi implementation, it just looks like it needs careful planning, particularly if you want to use shows, as these only operate on the first 12 channels. The one thing I've learned about lighting is that its better to write down what you want to do first for each song, look at how many scenes you need, then combine these into shows.

The issue I have is how do you advance the 260 manually through a show without having to reach for the 'go' button - the most useful thing here would be if you could use a Key, but the only way I can think is to use the Sound to Light Mic input somehow to do this - set the show to music, but control the beat yourself, maybe by using a different output from the keyboard, or a small form keyboard with sound, to provide a single 'click' on key press? . . its something I will experiment with when I get the 260 back.

One thing I did find to help was a white paper on band lighting - full of good tips - located here:

http://www.metaphreaq.net/BasicLightingGuide.pdf

I'll keep watch on the post, and maybe we can help each other out with some tips!

OK - new 260 seems all good , and I've been experimenting before I program the bands repertoire.

In terms of Midi, you can set the controller to ignore channels before a certain value and only act on so many channels - this is covered elsewhere in these forums.

Are you using all 16 channels on sequencer? - if so does your Sequencer had a more than one MIDI out?, some do (the old Roland MRC500 for instance) allowing you to send to 32 channels.

The other thing you can do is set your receiving device to not receive the notes that you want to use for the magic . . kind of limit the range (which is what I will do on my Keyboard), effectively shaving a couple of notes off the top and bottom, and redirecting the output to channel 7-16, transposing as necessary to hit the right show/scene.

Hope this helps.

One thing I did note on MIDI, a scene will act the same as pressing the scene key on the M260 - so if you hit the note twice, you may effect a blackout (if you have your lights definitions with blackouts)!, A show simply gets to the end and stops, hitting the key again has no effect- shame, as sometimes it would be nice to restart a 2 scene show by hitting the same key again (for bursts of light and emphasis for example!)