I am on the look out for a controller that has at minimum 8 buttons, supports up to 15 banks of buttons, (or has 126 buttons), and has midi out compatability. I want to use it to connect to my Chauvet Obey 40 via MIDI, to control scenes. any ideas or help?
I’ve just seen your other thread showing your lighting, and I’m just gonna ask 1 question: How deep are you planning to go with your lighting?? If you’re planning on potentially hooking up a lot of lights to that Obey 40 board, I would look into software DMX control before going much further. I had one of those boards, and while they are great for controlling a few different lights, or a whole bunch of the same sort of lights, once you start hooking up par cans, effect lights, lasers etc. it can be a bit much. I switched from it to using a program called freestyler for my PC and I couldn’t be happier, plus you can connect a midi controller to it to control scenes etc. just like you can with the Obey 40.
Freestyler is the cheapest software based DMX program I know of, but there are other options as well.
I’ve definitely have looked at everything, I just feel tha for now, with a small setup, the Obey 40 is great for my needs Currently, most of the proper brand name DMX-to-USB interfaces are rather expensive (upwards of $299 USD), so, for now, I feel that i can make do with the lighting rig setup that I will have now. But, yes, I do have a few of the different DMX light control softwares, including Freestyler. Its very difficult to understand, so I’ll take my time with those.
No problem, I just thought I’d ask in case you we’re going to go all out and then discover that DMX software would have been better!!
I use an Enttec open DMX USB dongle with freestyler, cost me about £50 ($80 ish), have used this for well over a year now at over 40 gigs controlling about 12 lights in total and I’ve never had any problems with it, so if you ever did decide to go software then there is a cheap solution out there! Freestyler is a nightmare to get your head around at first, but once you’ve got it down it’s so easy to use and control. I use a Xone:K2 to control all of my programs using midi on it, which is a lot easier than doing things with a mouse and keyboard!
Im thinking i might actually use FL Studio to write a MIDI track, to make a ramshackle light show. Since the midi notes control different scenes, I can create something like 120(?) scenes, and essentially write a midi track that will run a light show. Thats kinda something i really would find interesting if i could do it (mainly cause i still need to acclimate to Freestyler)