Can someone bring me up to speed with lights?

iheartreverb

Hi all,

i play in an instrumental band and we aren’t he most “physical” of performers and I don’t like something on stage to give people something to look at.

we use a lot of arpeggiated synths and play to a backing track so that there’s a click in there that’s muted, I assumed this makes it easier to control the lights against the song?

in the past I’ve seen people play behind a bed of vertical tube lights Andy have thought it to be quite good. The venues we play always have their own lighting and stuff but I’m just looking to add something onto the stage to compliment.

It will seem fairly obvious from this that I’m not the most technical, the laptop setup and soundcard on stage is manned by someone else.

Any and all help appreciated!

Fez

We like the American DJ LED par cans. You can use them in loads of different ways in terms of positioning as they lay flat pointing up, hang on a gantry or sit on the handles angled to how you need them. They have on board programs like sound to light or fade between colours. They have DMX (sort of midi for lights) so they can be controlled from a DMX mixer, you can have a master and slave arrangement where the program the master is set to is transmitted to the slave(s) by a DMX lead.
There are several other manufacturers with comparable products and you can mix them as most conform to the DMX protocol.
Here is a link https://www.americandj.eu/en/mega-tripar-profile-plus.html to one we use. They do have some tutorial type videos which might be worth a look.

Roland

iheartreverb said:

we use a lot of arpeggiated synths and play to a backing track so that there’s a click in there that’s muted, I assumed this makes it easier to control the lights against the song?

Is it a sequencer, or just a click with all the clever sequencing being done in the synths? Either way, if it can output midi messages then these can trigger DMX programs.

We use DMXIS, driven by midi messages from my foot-pedals. That limits us to colour and intensity to  provide the mood, and pulsing to provide energy and movement. With a sequencer we could have a full lighting programme for each song.