I’m a musician and totally new to Beam (it’s awesome!) and everything regarding lights, and wanted to ask something:
I want to program a small light show for my band using two ADJ Sweeper Beam QUAD LEDs. I already found the profile of the ADJ Sweeper Beam LED in the forum and tried to make my own profile for the QUAD version (the difference, as I understand, is that in the QUAD version it’s possible to set RGBW colours to all 8 LEDs.)
So as I understand it, the best way to do this would be to make an aggregate with a self-made profile for tilt/masterdim/strobe, and then add 8 generic RGBW profiles, so that i can control them with different midi notes. Is this correct?
Can i create an aggregate myself in the software, or would you be able to provide an aggregate profile of this fixture for me?
An aggregate profile is indeed the best way to control this type of fixture. The Fixture Editor doesn’t yet support making aggregate profiles, so you’re always welcome to request them here:
Place these into the Fixture Profiles/User folder, which you can find by going to Beam > Fixture Profiles…
Restart Beam in order for the fixture to appear as an available option in the Patch Editor.
Add the fixture to your Beam patch and don’t assign any tags to it while in the Add Fixtures dialog.
Double-click on the added fixture to reveal the children of the aggregate fixture and assign a separate tag to the Total fixture component for controlling parameters that apply to all the fixture cells (tilt, dim, shutterstrobe), and another tag to all the Lens components.
In Live, add a Generic device for controlling the modulations of the Total tag and another device (can be Par or Generic) for controlling the Lens tag / LED cells. You can set the Intensity of the device controlling the Total tag to always be at 100% (this is also the default for this fixture if you don’t add a device to control this tag) and just control intensity using the device controlling the Lens tag.
You can now use MIDI notes (corresponding to the notes set in the Beam patch) to trigger envelopes for the chosen modulation parameters of individual LED cells. You can add any number of devices controlling the same tag if you want to simultaneously work with different colors and envelope settings for different cells. You can also use the LFO device with a Spread set to something else than 0% for simple chase effects with an LFO phase offset for every LED cell. Here is a short video demonstrating this workflow.
If you want to program automation for every cell individually, assign a separate tag to every LED cell in Beam and add a dedicated device for it.