What Is Patching Lighting

What is patching? Patching describes the act of connecting different parts of the lighting or sound system together. For example, some stage lighting installations have dimmers which are wall-mounted above a row of plugs, which can be used to connect any plug into any dimmer.

What is soft patching in lighting?

Soft patch allows more flexibility; a patch panel limits the number of circuits in a dimmer to the capacity of the dimmer, while a soft patch allows everything from one channel-per-dimmer to every dimmer in the system to be assigned to a single channel.

What is patching the console?

Before you begin creating cues for a show you should first create your patch. The patch assigns individual dimmers to control channel numbers. The console’s Patch display allows you to assign any of the dimmers available to any of the control channels your console can address.