How to create cues for a GrandMA lighting desk the easy way

The easy way to build cues on a grandMA desk is to stop treating the desk as the place where the show's design gets conceived. Store your programmer values into a cue, name it, set your fade and delay, and move on. That part is simple once you know the syntax. The part that actually eats a production day is everything that's supposed to happen before you sit down at the console: knowing what moment each cue belongs to, in what order, against what point in the track. Get that sorted first and the desk work goes fast.

What do you need to know before you touch the console?

Before you store a single cue, you should already know three things: how many cues the song needs, roughly where each one falls, and what look or moment each one is for. If you're figuring that out while you're also trying to remember command syntax, you're doing two jobs at once (and neither one goes well).

This is the part a lot of designers skip, especially under deadline: they open the console, start storing whatever comes to mind, and end up with forty cues that don't map to anything specific in the song. Then tech week becomes a renumbering exercise instead of a polish pass.

What about actually storing the cues?

If you're a working lighting designer, you already know this part: build the look in the programmer, Store, Please, add fade and delay time on the cues that actually need it, and let everything else inherit the sequence defaults. And if you're still learning the desk, a blog post isn't the place to do it. MA Lighting's own quick start guide on storing cues and using executors will teach you the mechanics better than we can here. The conceptual piece we actually want to talk about is what happens before any of that. The desk is where the show gets executed, not where it gets designed. EdiTour is built for that before-the-desk stage: a collaborative timeline that's the first thing you and your crew build against the track, deciding together what every cue is for and where it lands, so the desk session is just typing in decisions that were already made.

How do you keep cue numbers sane across a big show?

Leave gaps. If your first pass through a song lands cues at 1, 2, 3, 4, you have nowhere to put the cue you inevitably need to add during tech. Number by tens, or by the bar or timecode number if your show runs that way, so there's always room between 40 and 50 for whatever gets added later.

The bigger problem shows up when lighting, lasers, and video are all numbering cues independently against the same track. Cue 12 on the lighting desk and cue 12 on the laser system might have nothing to do with each other, which is fine until someone in a run-through says "go back to twelve" and two departments jump to different points in the song. I built EdiTour to be the single source of truth for a show's timeline, because from experience I was tired of artists asking to go back to the chorus. That could mean the start of the chorus, the first cue of the chorus, the build before it, or the second chorus, depending on who you asked. EdiTour makes it easy: Beat 64. Everyone has the same beat 64, on the same collaborative timeline.

What's the fastest path from a shared timeline to the desk?

The programming day goes fastest when the desk work is just execution, not design. If lighting, lasers, and video already agreed on where the cues live, what they're for, and what order they fire in, before anyone opens a console, then storing cues on a grandMA becomes mechanical work you can move through quickly. That's the same failure mode we've written about with spreadsheets: when each department is working from its own version of the cue list, the console session turns into a reconciliation meeting instead of a build.

TPi's writeup on the Dolly Dots 40th anniversary tour is a good real-world example of this working well. Programmer Thomas de Vries ran lighting and video off two grandMA3 consoles during rehearsal, then folded down to one console running both showfiles once the tour started, with video cues integrated directly into the main lighting sequences. That only works cleanly if lighting and video already agree on where those cues sit before programming day starts.

This doesn't mean the desk work goes away, and grandMA3 is still where the actual show gets executed. What changes is what you're doing when you sit down. You're not deciding what the show is anymore. You're translating a plan you already agreed on into cues, fast, because the hard decisions already happened somewhere else.