Who would have thought it, in my role as a music technician, I do lighting as well now. The University received delivery of some new lights for St Pauls Hall and a sales consultant from Stage Electric to program them and find a place for them on our lighting desk. The fixtures in question were from the COLORado range from Chauvet, they were going to be put into the correct modes and addressed by the consultant from Stage Electric and then hung in place by ourselves. All of this was done quite quickly so we began to wedge them into the lighting desk, in doing so it was discovered that some of the profiles were no longer working. The consultant suggested because there were 6 fixtures broken that it was probably because a fuse had gone on the dimmer rack. To resolve this we spoke to the estates team who later replaced the faulty fuse.
The lighting desk used in St Paul’s Hall is a Frog 88, this ancient desk stores its shows on floppy disk and has 48 channels to play around with. Fortunately the desk does have an internal patch bay so you can take inputs from anywhere in the DMX universe to patch them across the 48 faders and move things around the desk without readdressing entire dimmer racks. The consultant moved some things around and that was that; the final job of the day was to reprogram the light switch that is used day to day to control the lights. It is digital and uses DMX to control all of the lights that the desk does, but in a more basic, user friendly mode. Having found the user manual online we opened it up, turned on the relevant dip switch and began, this didn’t take too long as we didn’t need to reprogram every setting, just ones that would benefit from the extra lights.
Following this day, I got some emails requesting that I take a look at the lights in the hall because the new ones were flashing, so I went over, tried with the light switch, and the lights were flashing; turned it onto the desk and the flashing stopped, I couldn’t make them flash while on the desk. There was a second problem with the two new fixtures, the lights were not the same colour, this was very strange because they were programmed with the same starting address, I knew that because I checked that personally when we put them up. To solve this I got the manual from the office and took a read through and found the page relating to the 9 channel personality that we have them in. Reading this I discovered that this has a channel dedicated to strobe that was not patched into the lighting desk, this explained the flashing; if the lightswitch was sending out information out on that channel for something else then it would cause the lights to strobe. It didn’t explain the differing colours; I suspected that they hadn’t both been set to the same personality so to confirm this I climbed up to the fixtures and found that one of them have been in “tour mode” with extra feature that we don’t need access too.
The fuse for the profiles had now been replaced as well but because of the way the new fixtures had been put in, they were no longer patched into the desk; neither was there any space to put them in together in one place. So begins the re-patch, the desk was a mess with a profile here and there, 2 lights next to each other could be at opposite ends of the desk. This gave me the excuse to reorganize it and put everything in a more logical order. I took pictures of the previous patch and then began, putting all of the house lights in first ordered from back to the stage, from left to right, followed by the fresnels then profiles and LED fixtures. This was a lesson learned for me, not only do you become much more familiar with a desk when you entirely re-patch it but I also became more familiar with lighting in general, and how to more effectively trouble shoot.
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