Hi,
I have been patching in Chaveut ‘Gig Bar Move’ into beam. When I am writing a midi clip to test triggering I am getting nothing. I have double checked to make sure that the patching inside beam corresponds with the associated midi track, yet I am getting nothing.
do you have any solutions? I am not finding anything in the manual or online because it seems to be taken as a given that it will just work.
thanks,
Jarran
Hi Jarran,
Thanks for getting in touch. Could you please share the following:
Best,
Luka
As a new user I cannot upload attachments though I have attached a wetransfer link to the ableton session and fixture file.
Thanks,
Jarran
Thanks for sharing the files!
There are two main reasons why MIDI notes are not triggering intensity envelopes in your set:
You are using the Generic device, which allows you to select what modulation the MIDI-note-triggered envelopes will control. By default, None is selected, so if you want to control the intensity, you should select dim:
In this case you could also just use the Par device instead, where MIDI notes always trigger the envelope for the dim modulation.
You also need to ensure the pitches of the MIDI notes you send to the devices match the MIDI note pitches specified in the Beam patch.
E.g. the Par fixtures in your patch expect pitches between C3 and A3. In your Live set you place Generic devices for different components of your fixture on different Drum Rack pads between C1 and A1 (although this doesn’t play a role per-se, note that you also swapped the order of L and R pars, in comparison to the patch, which might add to confusion).
Regardless of that, Live’s Drum Rack by default always outputs a C3, no matter what pitch it receives. This post explains how to set pads to output a desired pitch.
This is the way you should set the Drum Rack on track “65 Beam-Par” to correspond the setting in your Beam patch:
With these two steps the “triggering” should already work. I was able to confirm this via the Beam Monitor and using the Capture visualiser with a Chauvet GigBar Move fixture.
If you see activity in the Beam Monitor and you have DMXIS selected as your output interface, but the fixture at this point still does not react to the MIDI notes, I would assume it also doesn’t respond to the Intensity dials.
In this case please check if your fixture is indeed set to the right DMX mode. The DMX mode refers primarily to the number of DMX channels that your fixture uses to receive control data on. Your fixture has 35, 17 and 3 channel modes (see manual page 16-20). Considering you went with 35 channels in your Beam patch, your fixture also needs to be set accordingly. Since this is the first mode of the fixture, I would expect it to be set to that by default, but you can see how to check and set that on manual page 15. While at it, please also confirm the fixture is set to the correct starting address (that should in the case of your patch be 1).
The steps in the previous post will hopefully be enough to make things work (please do let me know if you are still having issues). However, to make life a bit easier, I would like to propose some workflow improvements.
Instead of using an instance of Generic Dimmer fixture profile for every channel and then making a tag for that, I would recommend using fixture profiles for every part of your fixture, assigning a tag to that, then controlling different properties of the fixture via modulations.
Place these files in your “Fixture Profiles/User” folder (which you can access via the Beam’s menu bar, Beam → Fixture Profiles…):
Use one of these two Beam patches:
To test this you can use:
If some of these concepts are still confusing, I would suggest going through the Patch Editor and Fixture Editor sections of the manual.
Another thing that caught my eye was the way you are using Ranges in your patch:
Looks like you probably thought this is used to specify different ranges of each DMX channel, but that’s not exactly the case - this is an optional property that allows you to set a minimum and maximum DMX range for a specific modulation parameter. For example, in the patches I added to this post, I am using this to make sure that the 0. to 1. values of the stroberate parameter for Par fixtures are mapped to DMX values between 127 and 239:
This allows for only using the strobe speed, slow to fast part of that channel’s range (I set minimum to 127 instead of 128, to ensure that the fixture is still ON when at 0.):
See this manual article for some other uses of Ranges.
Hope this helps - please let me know if there is anything else that remains unclear.
Thank you so much for this help. I have most definitely been able to get it all going now. I have another question ( possibly you would like a new topic?)
I am getting an instability with my instruments. I will open a session and a single par will be greyed out (See picture).
I have tried making them stable across sessions but sometimes the only thing I can do is delete the rack and reinitiate it (which means it’s too unstable to be used live.)
I guess the question is: am I doing something wrong to cause this?
Hi Jarran, thanks for getting back - good to hear you managed to get it going!
As far as the problem you are experiencing goes, we will soon release an update that resolves a number of issues, including situations where devices are not correctly initialised. Before asking you any further questions it would be good to check if the new version also resolves your case, so please check your private messages later this week - we will send you a beta build when it is ready.
Update: this issue was fixed in Beam 1.5, so make sure to update to the latest version. Thanks again for reporting the bug!
