This will give you a short tour through all the most basic things you need to know for creating a show, turn on channels, make groups, store cues and make your screens display the relevant data. 

I have chosen to use different symbols when I want you to do different things. If you need to press one of the buttons on the screens then it looks like this: Full Access. If I need you to press a hard button (a button that is physically on the desk) it looks like this: SETUP. If I’m just referring to the button I will put it in quotation marks and use capitalized letters e.g.: “SETUP”. If you are supposed to write text on the keyboard I will write it like this: Moving light. If you are doing this on an onPC or Offline Editor, you need to imagine all the physical buttons, and use the relevant buttons in the program. I will write this as if you where at a real desk (a FullSize). If there are specific differences I will mention it. When I write “left touch screen” it’s the same as “Screen 1” on the onPC, “middle touch screen” is “Screen 2” and “right touch screen” is “Screen 3”. If you are at a desk that only got one touch screen, just ignore everything with left, middle and right screens. You will learn to store and recall screen views. The same thing applies for the external screens. If you don’t have any, just use the one screen you do have.

On a grandMA there are many different ways to get from A to B. But to get the best result it’s important that you follow the steps fairly precise. You can always experiment on your own afterwards. Happy programming.

All right, let’s get going. I assume that if you are using a desk, it’s connected with all the necessary screens and peripherals (keyboard etc.). And if you are doing this on the onPC, it’s fully installed and functional. If you haven’t already, turn it on/start the program. If it starts loading a previous show, just ignore it and let it finish. When your grandMA is ready, you need to press BACKUP. Next pres the Internal Only button. Press LOAD Show. This will allow you load a show from the hard disk or create a new empty show. This Pop-up is called “Select Show File to Load”. It lists the current content of the hard drive. We need to create a new show, so delete the text with a blue background and a red curser next to it and write: TUTORIAL BASIC, then hit “Enter” (either on the keyboard or the desk). There’s no need to save the show that was just loaded, so press the NO button if you are asked if you what to save the current show. After this the desk reboots and loads your brand new show.

Do you want a show without lights? No, not really! I’ve made a simple design with some general stage wash.

This gives us 40 dimmer channels. Start by pressing SETUP. To access the patch, pres Full Access. When the patch is completely empty it automatically brings up a pop-up screen that prompts us for creating a “Device Layer”. So let’s do that. Delete the text “New Device Layer” and write Dimmers. Then we are presented with yet another pop-up. This allows you to define what devices you got, how many, name, etc. Click on the text “From Library”, next to the small cross (in a square) next to _GENERIC. Then you can see all the device types in this category. Basically it’s like opening a folder with all the generic devices. Click on “DIMMER 8BIT Original”. Then we return to the pop-up called “Create New Fixtures or Channels”. Under “Quantity” change the number to 40. If you have done everything right it should look like this:

And (kind of logically) to create your 40 channels press Create!. Then you return to the main window of the patch. To save you changes you need to close the window. Do this by pressing the large blue cross in the upper right corner of the touch screen. And we do want to save it, so press the Save button. Then we are back in the “Setup window”. And now you’ve created 40 new dimmer channels in your show!

Now it would be nice if we could see how many percents the channels are at (probably nothing yet – but that’s going to change soon). Close the setup by pressing the big blue cross in the upper right corner. Then we are back at a empty gray screen. Click on the upper left square on the right touch screen. This new pop-up is called “Create a Window”. Press the button Channel. The result should look something like this:

Soon we need more windows. But first we need to store our current view. Press STORE and then one of the hard buttons on the right side of the touch screen (just not the big round one – we call that an “encoder”). If you are working with the onPC – click on one of the squares with three dots on the right side of the screen. This presents us with yet another pop-up (you are going to see a lot of pop-up’s). This one is called “Select View”. On the keyboard write Channels and press OK. Now you have saved your channel window on this button. This means you can always recall this view by pressing the button. If you are at a desk with multiple screens, you can choose which screens you want to be sawed in the view button. In the “Select View” pop-up the screens are represented by numbers.

1 is the left touch screen, 2 is the middle one, 3 the right touch screen, 4 is the left external screen and 5 is the external screen on the right. “All Screens” are (of course) all of the screens.

Before we are going to do a lot of button-pushing we need a new window. It’s very convenient to see what buttons we are pressing and what the desk makes of it. We need the “Command Line”. Since we (almost) only use this to see what we are doing, I suggest you put it on one of the external screens (if you only got one screen you can “clear” it by pressing the top and the bottom view button next to the screen). With the mouse click on the number 3 cell from the bottom on the left side of the external screen. In the “Create a Window” pop-up click the “Command Line” button. Now your external screen should look something like this (you could save this as a new view):

Notice that the “Command Line” isn’t empty. To make it easy for you the desk assumes that you are going to do something with channels (it’s called “default keyword”). If you had other plans, don’t worry. If you start your command with a different keyword the desk just deletes the “Channel” keyword. Often the “Command Line” is used for checking what you are typing (especially if you do something wrong). If you need to repeat a command you can click on it, and it is right back (every command you use is moved up to the gray area). If you make a mistake and hit a wrong button (before you “execute” your command with e.g. “ENTER”), you can delete (backspace) with the “OOPS” button. If you use “OOPS” when not typing a command it works as an undo function. If you keep it pressed for 2 seconds you’ll se a list of your 20 last changes, from which you can choose one and undo. Another important button is the “ESCAPE” button. This clears the “Command Line”. If you find you self lost in a command or gets second thoughts you can always use “ESCAPE” and start over.

There are many ways to turn on your channels on a grandMA. Let’s begin with one of the simple ones:  1  AT  1   0   0  ENTER. You have now turned on channel 1 at 100% (instead of 100% the desk write “FF”). Let’s look at what else happened. The number (1) has changed to a yellow color and the background behind the value has changed to a red color. Also the value (in this case the intensity) is now in a white color. The yellow color means that the channel is selected and you can change the value. Press AT  5   0  ENTER. Since the channel is already selected you can just give it a new value and it is now at 50%. Now press CLEAR once. Channel 1 is no longer selected and you can’t just change the intensity again. The red background color indicates that the value will be saved if you press “STORE” (don’t do it now). Instead press once more on CLEAR. The only thing left is the value in white color. This means that it’s still in the temporary memory (called the programmer), but it will not be saved if you store. Press CLEAR once more. Now channel 1 is turned off and it’s not in the programmer anymore. Instead of pressing the ”CLEAR” button 3 times you can keep it pressed until the desk makes a small beep sound (after approx. 1 second). 

There are other ways to turn a channel at 100%. Here’s another example:  1  AT AT. This is a shortcut to give the channel a (predetermined) value. As default the value is 100%. Press  .  twice. This gives channel 1 a value of 0%. You can of course also use “AT 0 ENTER”. The value is in the programmer and will be stored (if you save a cue). Press CLEAR until the beep. If you have several channels in the programmer and just what to “release” one, you can use the “OFF” button in combination with the “CHANNEL” button. Turn on channel 1 at 100%. Now press OFF CHANNEL  1  ENTER. The final way (I will introduce to you) is the “LEVEL” wheel. With this you can change the value fast and simple. Turn it away from you and the value of the selected channels goes up. Turn it towards yourself and it goes down.

If you want to turn on several channels at the same time you need the buttons “+” and/or “THRU”. They are pretty self-explanatory. Guess what you need to press to turn on channel 1 to 10 plus 20 at 20%. This is the fast way:  1  THRU  1   0  +  2   0  AT  2   0  ENTER.
If you want to exclude channels you can use “-” (minus). So if you want to turn off channel 1 to 10 plus 20 but minus 5, this is the fastest way:  1  THRU  1   0  +  2   0  -  5   .   . .

Now you know how to assign values to channels. End this section by clearing your programmer.

Since we are going to make some groups it would be practical to be able to see them. Begin by clicking on the empty cell in the top left on the middle touch screen (or clear your one screen and then press the empty cell). Again we are presented with the “Create a Window” pop-up. This time you need to press the button GROUPS. It’s in the second column number 4 from the top. Now you got 89 empty group buttons right at your fingertips. You could store this as a new view.

All the odd numbers in our light plot have a warm color and all the even ones have a cold color. We are going to make some groups with those colors. The first one is all the cold colors from front of house. Press:  1  +  3  ENTER. Now you have selected channel 1 and 3. Then press STORE followed by the first available group button. Groups cannot contain any value so we don’t need to assign any. Before you do anything else, use your keyboard to write: SR Box Cold. Should you have touched anything else (buttons, screens, anything) before typing you can use a different method to name things (e.g. groups). The function is called “Label” and you access it by pressing “ASSIGN” twice. Do that and then press the first group button again. Now you have the option to change the name, delete it, or type it for the first time. When you are happy press the OK button or “Enter”. Look at your “Channel Window”. Here you can see that the numbers 1 and 3 have the yellow color, meaning that they are still selected. We are done with those two channels, so press the CLEAR button once. All right, now I have told you everything you need to know about making groups. In all we need 12 groups. I have gathered all the information you need for making the groups in this table:

You all have already made group 1, but the rest is a nice little exercise.

When you are done, your group window should look something like this: 

Did you notice how the group background color changes to a light gray when all of the channels in that group are selected? If you didn’t, try pressing one or several groups. This shows you that the groups (and their channels) are selected. Press CLEAR to empty the programmer.

If a group only contains one channel (or fixture) the group looks a little different. Try to make a group that only contains channel 1 and store it as group 13. Several things are happening. First of all the desk automatically assigns the name “Dim 1” to the group. This is the name of the channel (the other groups where automatically named “Group 1”, “Group 2”, etc.). Also the background color of the button is light blue (and dark blue when selected). On the buttons top left corner it reads “C1”. This indicates that the group contain channel 1 (if the had been fixture 1, it would have been “F1”). If you select the group a big yellow “1” appears. This has nothing to do with the channel number, but it indicates that you have now selected one channel or fixture. This number doesn’t change if you select more groups. It could be used to show you in what order you selected groups of only one channel/fixture. We don’t need group 13 (it was only for show-and-tell), let’s delete it. Press: DELETE followed by the group button. And clear your programmer.

A light cue is saved in a sequence. The grandMA can handle up to 999 sequences. We only need one for this tutorial. All cue numbers are in numeric order i.e. cue number 4 cannot be before cue number 3. But the cue can have any name (just not more that 18 strokes). 

First of all we need a window where we can see our sequence. Click on the top left cell on the right external screen. If you only have one screen you need to clear it first and then press the cell. The window we need is called “Sequence Executor”, so press the button by the same name. You could save this as a (new) view. Let’s make our first cue. Press:  2   0  AT  4   0  STORE ENTER. That was it! You have now saved channel 20 at 40% in cue 1 in sequence 1 at fader 1. That was a bit fast, let’s examine what happened. Fader 1 has gone to 100%. That’s because the desk, as a default, has selected this fader. That means if you don’t specify anything else the desk assumes you are referring to your selected fader and the sequence assigned to that fader. You can always locate your selected fader by its green background color where it says “Seq 1” and a small “1 T” in the top left corner. And to indicate that there is a sequence assigned to that fader the green LED is on. You also got a line in your “Sequence Executor” window. Most of the columns are self-explanatory - but I will mention some of them. “No.” is of course the cue numbers. “Name” is the name. “Trig” describes what triggers the cue. If we look at our first cue, the trigger is “GO”. This means that to execute the cue you need to press a GO button. “Fade”, “Outfade”, “Delay” and “Outdelay” shows you the respective times.

Before we make any more cues, let’s change the cue name. If you don’t specify anything the desk names it the cue number followed by “Cue”. Press ASSIGN ASSIGN CUE  1  ENTER. Use the keyboard to write Behind Curtain. Press OK or use the “Enter” key on the keyboard. A different way to change the cue name is to right click on the name with the mouse. No matter what way you choose - your first cue should now have the name “Behind Curtain”. If you can’t see the entire name you can expand the column width by placing the mouse curser on the line that divides “Name” and “MIB”. When you are at the right place, your curser changes so it now also has a little horizontal double ended arrow. Click and hold the left mouse button while you drag the mouse to your right. Then release the mouse button again. Now your “Sequence Executor” window should look something like this:

Let’s make some more cues. Press:  2   0  +  2   8  AT  8   0  STORE  2  TIME  1   5  ENTER. That created cue 2 with a fade time on 15 seconds. Let’s continue with cue 3. Now we’re going to use the groups. Press: FOH Warm LX 1 Warm AT  7   5  SR Box Warm SL Box Warm LX 2 Warm LX 3 Warm AT  6   0  STORE TIME  2   0  TIME  2   5  ENTER. Notice that after the second cue we don’t need to specify the cue number. The desk automatically uses the next available number. At the end of the command we typed “TIME 20 TIME 25”. The desk interprets this as 20 seconds infade and 25 seconds outfade. Pretty clever, huh? In cue 4 we need to take 30% of everything that is on. We do this in a fast and easy way: IF ENTER AT -  3   0  STORE TIME  1   0  ENTER. That was fast! By using “IF ENTER” you select everything that has output. Then using “AT – 30” you subtract 30% from whatever value the channels had before (of course nothing less than 0%). You may experience that the “Outfade” time tracks to this new cue. If this is the case you can remove it by right-clicking on it and choose “Infade” on the calculator. 

Now we’re going to make a lot of changes: GROUP  7  THRU  1   2  .  . SR Box Cold SL BOX Cold LX 2 Cold LX 3 Cold AT  6   0  FOH Cold LX 1 Cold AT  7   5  STORE TIME  1   5  TIME TIME  5  ENTER. What is “TIME 15 TIME TIME 5”? If you have a look at your “Command Line” it reads: “Fade 15 Delay 5”. This means that you told the desk to delay the execution of the cue with 5 seconds after you’ve pressed the “GO” button (and then fade at 15 seconds – but you probably guessed that). With this one “TIME” button we can (when storing) assign many different times. A command like: “TIME 20 TIME 15 TIME 10 TIME 5” the desk translates to: “Fade 20 OutFade 15 Delay 10 OutDelay 5”! The last cue we are going to make is a blackout. And we do that with 8 button presses: IF ENTER  .   .  STORE TIME  0  ENTER. Again you might experience that the “Delay” time is tracked to this cue. You can remove it by right-clicking on it and assign a value of 0 to it. That was our 6 cues. It was hopefully fast and painless.

We would like to change cue 3 to automatically activate when cue 2 is done. You’ll do this by right clicking with the mouse where it says “GO” in cue 3. Then comes “the calculator” plus 3 buttons with the options (GO, FOLLOW and SOUND). In future tutorials we will talk more about the calculator, let’s move on. You need to click on FOLLOW. Then when cue 2 is done the desk automatically activates the fade to cue 3.

Let’s change the names. You know how to do this so I just made a table:

If you need to, then expand the “name” column, so you can see the entire names.

Let’s pretend that we’ve got a lighting designer who changes his mind. He wants 5% more on the group called “LX 1 Warm” in cue 3. Let’s load cue 3: GOTO  3  TIME  0  ENTER. What happened? We loaded a cue and activated the fader. To indicate this, the yellow LED next to the green one lit up (just above fader 1). And we now have a yellow background on cue 3 in the “Sequence Executor” window. To load cue 3 you only need to write “GOTO 3 ENTER”. We added “TIME 0”. This overwrites the times stored in the cue and we didn’t have to wait for the cue to fade in. Let’s move on: GROUP  1   0  AT +  5  ENTER. Now the LED above the button “UPDATE” is on. This means you can update the activated cue. Press UPDATE and without worrying about anything press Tracking_Update so the button changes to “Update Cue Only” followed by Update Cue. To exit the cue and deactivate the sequence you need to press the button above fader 1 (the one with the green and yellow LED).

Let’s change some of the times in the cue list. Look at the “Sequence Executor” window. Right click on the cells and type in the new value ether on “the calculator” on the screen, the buttons on your desk or using the keyboard. The result should look like this:

Press: BACKUP BACKUP (as double-clicking a mouse button). This is a fast way to store your show.

That was it! Now you know the most elementary things. You have leaned to create a show, make a simple patch, create views, turn on channels, save and use groups and finally creating a sequence with cues with different times. Before you trough yourself into big programming jobs, I suggest you complete the rest of the basic tutorials.

In the next tutorial you will learn to add moving lights, using several sequences, worlds and much more.