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Reply to "Newbee needs help - lights for house party"

For a house party, people honestly don't really give a crap about what's going on as long as the following is taken care of:

1: Booze
2: Snacks
3: Toilet works, is clean and there's a fresh roll on the spool, soap in a pump dispenser and lots of clean towels for drying their hands off(change it every hour)
4: Loud Music(quality often not a concern)
5: AC is working(Air conditioning)
6: Trash cans.

If you want to add stuff like lights and/or haze, then so be it, but honestly, nobody is really going to care.

Now, having said that, it's best to figure out your electrical situation, mostly from a control point of view. If you can turn your lights on and off from switches and available outlets, then that's nice and handy, but may not be an option. The drawback to this option is that if people are flopping around looking for light switches, they might kill your light show, but that's a risk you run.

No switches? Well, power strips can do wonders, so that's a decent option.

I'd say for now, a couple of lights either running stand alone(same or different, doesn't matter) or a matched pair running master/slave is sufficient. The only bad thing is that for longer parties, this gets boring fast. But, weighing your options, I think this is acceptable. Again, we're talking house party, not dance club with a cover charge.

You can always go stand-alone, then kick in master/slave, then out again. Buying a DMX cable to enable this is cheap so it should fall within budget.

I'm not familiar with the UC3, and UC3-support for fixtures I buy isn't something I look for. It's not something that would kill a sale either way, it's just not a feature I am interested in. But, ADJ makes a good deal of fixtures that support the UC3 AND DMX, so this might be a function you interest yourself in as it allows you to upgrade to cheap control early, while the DMX functionality lets the lights grow with you long-term. Win-Win all around.

Another option is, especially if you can mount your lights safely, is a product like MyDMX, where you can just have it run simple patterns and scenes and chases to help break things up. Chances are you have a laptop or a PC around the house anyways, so this would just be something else you do from time to time. It might cost more than an entry level controller, but it gives way more features.
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