Hello,
let me start by saying that I'm an amateur, so my question might easily be down to me not using the console right. Also, there might be a better way to organize things and I would be more then happy to hear advice on this.
I often volunteer in a community/amateur theatre which uses an ETC Element 40. We are mostly doing theatre, so most of my experience with the console comes from shows which are best run as a sequence of cues. What I'm not so comfortable with is the one show that works a little bit different:
We're doing a show where several local artists are invited to perform on stage and will go through a small interview about their work. This can be everything from bands, solo musicians, dance numbers, acrobatics, magicians, spoken word... you get it. The host will usually roughly follow a fixed plan, so we know in which order artists will perform and so on, but we still need to be flexible and don't want to use a fixed cue list.
What we do is that we have several lighting situations on submasters, so there is a certain look for each artist and for the interview situations, for people entering the stage etc. which we can quickly access using the faders if we need it.
We then add effects and extras based on the base look we are currently in.
In particular, all the base looks contain lights on the back wall and we prepared a bunch of effects which can run on these while bands perform.
Currently, these effects are also on effect subs and we can activate the effect using the push button and control the speed with the fader.
As it is almost impossible to get the effect in sync with the music using the fader (and it often looks really terrible if it doesn't match) I also included a button in our magic sheet which activates the "tap to bpm"-macro and allows me to match the effects to the music.
Only problem: The effect must not only be activated/selected via the push button but must also be running (aka, the fader isn't allowed to be at zero) for this do work. So every time I start an effect, it comes on running at the "wrong" speed for a moment until I get the bpm right. Is there any way to make sure that I can select an effect, tap the bpm in and then start the effect?
Or is doing everything with the sub the wrong way to handle things?
It would be very convenient to be able to set the bpm first and to then choose if the effect should be running at a speed of 50% or 100% of this rate by using the fader.
And one additional question:
Say I have my effect running with the fader at 50% and then set the bpm to 100bpm. Does this mean that the effect now runs at 100bpm and goes to 200bpm if I push the fader to full or does it mean that the effect runs at 50bpm and goes to 100 if the fader goes up? Or putting it differently: Does the tap to bpm macro set the maximal bpm for the effect or the current bpm?
Sorry for the long post containing so many information which is unimportant for the actual question, but I also hope to get some infos from you which might make our workflow better... thanks in advance!
