Hey all! I am wanting to be able to create a light show I can take with me as a Traktor user.
I recently made a thread concerning audio->DMX that gave me a few ideas, but didn’t totally answer my problem. It helped me better understand what my problem really is though, so here we go.
Basically I frequent two venues in my city that have either very little lighting or none at all and I LOVE lighting and I want it to be a recognizable part of my show so that when people hear I’m playing or see a flyer they think; “That was the fuck with the awesome light show.” or something like that. Not even so much awesome as memorable. So basically I’ve been looking a DMX softwares, especially DMXIS and Cuelux with DMXIS being my main focus and inside these programs you can make presets and such and it is really, really neat shit! So then I thought; “Hey! I could make a preset that I trigger at the start of the song in Traktor and it can just play along side off of another laptop!”, then I realized if I dropped any sort of loop they would go out of sync… bollocks. If I were an Ableton DJ it would be VERY easy to just make corresponding MIDI clips, but I don’t have that luxury in my workflow.
So. My question to you is, what is the best way to make a light show that syncs to each song to play alongside Traktor?
Some Info
I have a MacBook Pro currently. (i5, 16GB RAM, 480GB SSD, OSX 10.7 Lion)
I would be open to buying another laptop to run this, but that one would be a PC.
I am willing to make a custom light show for every song I play. (I fucking love lights.)
If you would like any other information feel free to ask! Thanks in advance!
to do what you want to do would requiere a lot of time if you going to make a scean in cuelux or any other software for each song. Lets say you add 10 lights to you setup, there is only few variations your going to get out of them and after a cuple of songs you’ll be repeating your self. for simplisety get some lights that have build in mic and can operat standalone in sound to light.
Only if all the lights are the same. The DMX commands that the light sends out will be whatever that specific light is doing, and probably won’t match with a different light (different channels, different commands etc).
There is no easy way to make Traktor to talk to a DMX program of any kind, as it doesn’t output DMX at all.
Honestly, I think your best bet at this moment in time might be just to run the lights in sound active mode.
What lights are you going to be using?? If you have multiples of some lights, get some DMX cables, connect them together and run them master/slave.
Perfectly syncing your lights with the music you are playing is going to be very hard, if not impossible to do with Traktor. Sound active will get you 90% of the way there.
I wouldn’t say I’m an expert in the area, but I’ve been mobile djing for over 8 years now and have used a wide variety of lights in that time, so I’d be happy to give you some pointers. First things we need to know are your overall budget, size of the room (I think I remember you saying it’s a club/2 clubs??). Also, how are you going to mount the lights??
Let us know what you come up with though. I’ve always thought that well sync’d visuals make a huge difference, but in most case that I’ve seen there is someone else running the lights that know the music well enough to be able to property tailor the lights.
!