Here's a few ways that I often use my executor buttons on MA, just a few ideas:
1) 2-color
cue lists. For instance, the red/white cuelist has spots/beams in white and washes in red for the first
cue, and then the second
cue swaps (washes white spots/beams red). It's a 2-cue cuelist, and the
button is a go
button. I've got 12 or so of these generally, and they're an easy way to set a color scheme for the whole rig. A couple of my usual combos are red/white, red/yellow, blue/yellow, cyan/mag, yellow/lav, blue/white, &c. &c. I also have 2 cues near these buttons: one is a bump-to-white
cue (set as a "Temp"), and the other is a go-to-white
cue (set as a
toggle).
2) I always put strobes on exec buttons. I have a row of 5 buttons if I'm doing a show with actual
strobe lights (A3K or similar) and movers:
Strobe Blind,
Strobe Random,
Strobe Sync; Mover Random
Strobe, Mover Sync
Strobe. Easy to add some pop & sizzle anywhere.
3)
Gobo rotate speeds are always a good thing to put on buttons. That way you can easily pop from fast to slow rotate, or rotate off or anything in between. I generally have a stop rotate and 4 rotate speeds, which works with the buttons being in groups of 5. Don't record the
gobo rotate speed in to your
gobo cue-list, or just have the rotate speed cues as higher precedence than the
gobo cuelist.
4) A congo blue look to go to between songs. This look kills everything else and goes to a congo blue
wash of the
stage. Very useful for festivals so you can have your finger ready on that
button at the end of a song to
knock out a pile of effects, colors, and flyouts
in one shot.
5) Speaking of flyouts, I have a flyout
cue for each kind of mover on a
button. So I'll have for instance Beams Fly, Spots Fly, Washes Fly. I set these as temps so I can take them in time or manually with the man time
fader.
6) Move effects are good things to put on buttons. I generally like to have a row or 2 of good move effects for different groups of fixtures. Sometimes these will end up in an on-screen
button pool vs. putting them on the physical buttons. If you want, you can make a double-wide executor and
add a tap tempo as well as having a
toggle to turn the
effect on/off. Tip for effects: To get an
effect on an executor
fader or
button, hit the [ASSIGN]
button, then tap the
effect in the
effect pool, then hit the exec
button you want to assign it to, or one of the buttons associated with the
fader you want to assign it to. I only learned about this method less than a year ago after years of going through the
fader/
button assignment menu list to put effects on buttons/faders...
Definitely to through all of the
button functions so you know what they mean. They're very useful.
I have learned so many of my
busking techniques from hearing ideas that others have, so definitely ask wherever you can! The MA is unbelievably flexible as far as
busking goes.
The faders also have way more functions than just being cuelist faders. You can have group masters, which are very useful for controlling the overall
intensity of each group of lights (beams/spots/washes/frontlight/&c), and you can also have Speed Masters which are ridiculously useful. I usually have a speed master for dim/color effects and a speed master for move effects. I've seen some people do a "fast movers" speed master and a "slow movers" speed master to allow them to set different speeds for faster movers (like MAC101s or Sharpys) and slower movers (bigger spots & washes that are too large to be that zippy).
If you have multiple pages of stuff, remember you can "Fix" certain faders to make them occur on each
page. For festival shows I'll do this with the group masters & speed masters.