Scene Numbers and Insertions

[Jos]

Hi folks! A bit new to the A&H world, but absolutely *loving* using my SQ5 for our theatre productions. In so many ways it blows the X32/M32 boards they’d been using in the past out of the water.

Having banged through this production, I thought I’d bring up a couple features that would make life easier (and make this even more of a theatre powerhouse for regional/community-level houses!). If there’s ways to accomplish these that I haven’t found yet, let me know, but I’m pretty sure they’re not implemented yet. To keep things trackable, I separated these into two posts (one on Scenes, one on MixPad).

Scene management on the SQ-series is good, but could use some tweaks. As an example, take a problem I had with this show: after a tech run, I realized I needed an additional scene between scene 16 and 17 to cover a fast change I needed.

There are two problems with this:

1. There is no way to insert a scene between two scenes. Looks like you basically have to work your way up from the bottom of the cue sheet, copy-pasting each scene down a slot until you’ve created a slot for the scene you need. In this show (44 scenes) that’s painful; in a longer show with 100+, it’s downright RSI-inducing [0].
2. There is no concept of a “sub-scene” (i.e., “16.1” or “16-A”) that could sit between 16 and 17. This means that once I’ve done the above procedure to make 17 my new empty scene slot, I now have to go back and re-number my whole mic cue book to match the insertion. Having the ability to make even simple sub-scenes (e.g., “16.1” but not “16.1.1.1” or whatever) would be really helpful here.
3. While I’m on the topic of scenes and numbering, having a few more characters for the scene names would be great. Alternately, the option to turn on displaying the scene number next to the name would help — right now I have to burn a character or three to put the scene number into the name because it’s not shown on-screen at the top. This becomes important when working with board operators that don’t know the show as well, because they need to be able to make sure the scene they’re currently on is the correct one that matches the cue in the script.

Having said all that, I’m absolutely over the moon about how well this board is working for us. The AMM feature (and the ability to switch it on and off per-scene) is killer: it works really well and is saving a ton of fader pushing in dialogue scenes while getting gracefully out of the way for songs. (And yes, I realize pro-theatre people may regard using the AMM as sacrilegious! 🙂 ) The foot-switch feature is the other one that’s absolutely awesome — the ability to flip between scenes with a button-push means I can easily manage hitting buttons for sound effects & board cues with one hand while managing the mix levels with the other. The board is wonderfully portable, the channel support is awesome, and the ability to toss audio back and forth over USB for things like vocal effects is great!

[0] I did find a kludgy workaround for re-numbering, in case anyone finds it useful: I created a scene at the end of the cue sheet (nr. 50 or so), and set a soft button to recall that scene. Since recalling a scene doesn’t change the next-scene value, I just had to remember to hit the soft button after scene 16 and I could hop down to scene 50 and then hop back up to scene 17 by hitting next. That’s pretty limited though — I’ve only got so many soft buttons! 🙂

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