So you have your PA, and you have the crowds but now you want your own lighting. The world of lighting can be a pretty confusing one and hopefully over the next article all will become clear.

The first thing you have to decide when lighting a band is your budget, it is best to choose a budget and stick to it rather than spend as much as you need to. This can get out of hand and usually results in either too much kit being bought, or some of it staying in the van permanently. Once you have an idea of what you are going to spend you can then go on to the next stage.

The Very Basics

I am going to start this article as if you did not know a thing about lighting and hence if you feel you know a bit about lighting then I would advise you skip straight on to the next section. I will first of all define some terms :-

Analogue – Is a fairly old form of lighting control, it works by sending a variable voltage from 0 to 10v to the dimmer packs. An analogue connector has 8 pins of which 6 lines control the 6 channels of a dimmer pack. The other 2 we shall ignore for now. We can make this even more simple. If on a lighting desk you were to put up fader 1 to 50% then to put it simply we could say that the voltage would be 5v and the light would be at 50% of its brightness.

DMX – Is another newer form of lighting control that sends a digital signal to each light or dimmer pack. To put it simply its like a postal service, each light / dimmer pack has an address. The right signal goes to the right address and the rest ignored. Usually the dimmer pack will have 6 addresses one for each channel so it knows what to do with each light.

Dimmer Pack – If you are using simple lighting, parcans, Fresnel's etc then you will require a dimmer pack. A dimmer pack takes the digital or analogue data from the control desk and converts it into something that the lights understand. A dimmer pack can use either analogue or DMX. A dimmer pack usually takes either a 32A supply or a 3phase supply. Many smaller dimmer packs can be plug into 13a ( the mains supply). These however will have less channels than a 32a equivalent. Simple lights get plugged into the sockets on a dimmer pack and the dimmer pack distributes power to the lights according to the signal it gets from the control desk. Usually a dimmer pack will power up to a maximum of 1000watts on one channel. This however does vary among dimmer packs.

Control Desk– Control desks come in many forms, one of the most basic is a sequencer that just turns each channel on in a sequence defined by the user. Some of the more advanced boards have faders and also programmable states.

Faders– Faders allow you to set how bright the light plugged into the dimmer is, they are usually labeled from 0% to 100% so you can accurately set how bright each light is.

States / Scenes– Some control boards allow you to set up scenes or states that can then be recalled after being programmed. Each scene will contain all the levels of dimming that have been set. For instance scene 1 could be all blue lights on 50% and scene 2 could be red lights to 70%. You can then recall these on demand. This can be useful for bands as you can pre-program a scene before a gig and play it back whilst you are playing.

Moving Lights / Heads / Fixtures– These lights use the DMX protocol and usually plug straight into the mains rather than a dimmer pack. The DMX signal coming from the lighting desk then tells the moving head what to do. These can also be programmed in scenes and you could have one scene with all the movers to Red and in the next you could have all the movers change to blue.

 Choosing DMX or Analogue.

This can be a tricky choice for many and usually the end result is governed by the budget, if you have a lot to spend and want a stunning light show then DMX is your best bet. This isn't to say that if you choose analogue then your lighting will look rubbish. It is just the analogue control system does not work with moving heads and most if not all of the moving effects on the market. For most bands however moving heads will be way out of budget as will scanning mirror effects.

In order to help you with your choice I will first explain a little about lighting control and then the benefits of each system.

Below is a graphical representation of how the system works:

In the above picture the blue lines represent power cables and the black represent signal cables.As you can see from the above picture, DMX moving heads just take power from the mains and do not plug into a dimmer pack. The analogue lights namely parcans have to plug into a dimmer pack if you want to dim them on a switch pack if you want to just flick them on and off. I would advise against switch packs as they become useless as your setup grows as they can not dim lights. This means that your lighting states will be on full or off. With a dimmer pack you can get everything in between.

Dimmer packs also come in two flavors, DMX and analogue. Let’s now look at the reasons for choosing one or the other.

DMX Positives

+ Daisy chain meaning you will only need 1 cable from dimmers to control board

+  Works with moving fixtures

+ Runs along XLR cable

DMX Negatives

- Can sometimes not work for no understandable reason

- One misbehaving fixture can sometimes cause problems with the whole lighting show

- Each moving fixture / dimmer pack has to have its own “address”

Analogue Positives

+ Easy to set up and configure, almost plug and play

+ Simple and effective

Analogue Negatives

- Each dimmer pack needs to have its own cable running to control board

- Does not work with moving heads nor moving mirror effects

I would advise to choose one or the other and stick with it, if you decide to change midway it can be costly and also hard to configure. If you do plan to use moving effects in the future then the extra expense for DMX at the start will really be worth it as it will save you having to upgrade all of your dimmer packs in the future.

Choosing Lighting

I will work on the premise that you will at first just want some general lighting in the form of parcans. This is the usual type of light that bands prefer as they are relatively cheap and give out 1000watts of light. They can be easily coloured (gelled), they also give out pretty large pools of light and hence you can be sure that it will look good and work well. They are relatively cheap and can survive life on the road.

Unless you want very definable areas of light then par cans will do perfectly. If you want to look at another type of light that does the same have a look for Parnels, these usually use less power 750watts but have different optics and hence will perform as well as a parcan.

I am not going to cover moving fixtures in this article as moving fixtures themselves will take up an article just by themselves. If you are interested in these sorts of fixtures then I suggest you ask questions on the forum as each case is different.

Choosing a Control Desk

Depending on whether you choose either analogue or DMX then the choice of control desks that you have available will differ. There are quite a few more budget DMX desks available and hence if you have decided to go DMX then you may reap the benefits at this stage.

Depending on how many lights you want to control you should take the amount of lights you have as the minimum number of channels that you will need on the desk. With analogue desks the amount of channels is usually governed by the amount of faders you have on the board. In most spec sheets it will tell you the amount of channels it will control and as long as this is bigger than the amount of lights you want to control individually then you should be fine.

DMX is slightly different due to the way it works and again it would take up too much space to explain it in this article and hence I would advise you to ask on the forums if you want to know more about DMX desks. With DMX desks you can also control the lights from a computer package, if you look in the reviews section you will see a selection of packages, ranging from cheap to expensive. This can save time and money if you already have a laptop or spare computer, it will also save you money as desks that are as good as the software are seldom cheap.

Connecting It All Together

So once you have all of your equipment you will be wondering what goes where. If you lay out your equipment as in the picture above then you will make it much easier for your self. First you connect all of the lights to the dimmers. You will want to connect each light to its own channel otherwise you will not have full control over your lighting. You can double on most packs and each channel will then control 2 lights.

After you have plugged in your lights to the dimmer packs then it would be best to run the test function on each channel. This is usually accessible on most packs either via a menu or via a dial. Please read the instructions that come with the packs as they do vary quite considerably. If all your lights come on then you are ready for the next stage. If not check lamps are securely in their holders and try again. If you are still having problems then please ask on the forums stating your problem and if possible the equipment you are using.

So once you have your pack/s up and running you are now ready to plug the packs into the control desk. If you are using DMX then take a feed out of the board, (either 5 or 3pin XLR) to the first pack, then out of the first and into the next and so on until you reach the last. At the last pack be sure to terminate the line using a DMX terminator. Details of which can be found in the getting started with DMX article. You will then need to address each pack and general instructions can be found at Ukslc.org DMX Intro.

If you have analogue then you will need a din cable from each pack to the desk. With analogue it is as simple as plug and play. So just take as many outs from the board as you need and put them into the inputs on the desk. Analogue is foolproof and nothing should go wrong. The only thing that may happen is due to a difference in standards by some manufacturers you may need to change the wiring in the din cables. If you ask at the time of purchasing the desk and dimmers then the store should be able to advise and provide you with converters.