DMX light show control

[SmokeAndMirrors]

I use a software lighting controller (Daslight v2) on a laptop to create my light shows for bands. However, this occasionally relies on being quite dexterous with the mouse and is mistake prone. This is because I set my light shows up so that I have separate on-screen buttons for my fixture directional scenes (pan and tilt) and colour scenes - this seriously reduces the number of different scenes I have to program and fit on a single screen at one time, but it also means if I want to do "Red fan1" I have to press "Red" and "Fan1" pretty much at the same time. Since the mouse can only be in one place at a time, I often hot-key "r" for red and so on, and click on the directionals, but there are only so many intuitive key bindings. So I was thinking an auxiliary hardware controller might be helpful. Possibilities:

 

1. Hardware MIDI controller. Drum pads have about 16 buttons that can be used to trigger scenes. Con: is 16 buttons enough?

 

2. Hardware DMX controller. Pro: can also real-time control fixtures so I can move a head manually. Cons: most boxes seem to have more than I need, eg scene memory; fewer buttons.

 

3. Touch-screen monitor. Pro: it'll work out of the box. Cons: no tactile control; still limited to what I can fit on-screen; expensive.

 

Has anyone got any advice - good kit to buy? Is splitting scenes into directional and colour sensible / common practice?

 

A second (related) question: in Daslight one can chase scenes by creating a sequence with hard-wired time values in. However, there's no guarantee of sync with the band, either due to me starting the chase a bit late or early, or the natural variation in band tempo. This means I tend to keep the scenes separate and manually chase them myself and so I end up with a lot more on-screen than I'd like. If I could crack that then it would influence my choice of hardware. How do you guys manage sync issues?

[MarkPAman]

I've only ever tried one of these with sound software, but......

 

Beringher do various Midi Control units which would give you much more than just 16 buttons. They have a foot switch input too which may be what you need to help with the tempo issues.

[HobitLight]

You could have your computer keyboard to trigger colours and a small MIDI keyboard for the fans of vise-versa.

 

This one's only £70 and really small.

 

EDIT: At first when you said drum pads I thought that you meant electric drums (I play drums, you see) but I think now that you may have meant something along the lines of this which you could use, or if you got another you could use two.

[SmokeAndMirrors]

You could have your computer keyboard to trigger colours and a small MIDI keyboard for the fans of vise-versa.

 

This one's only £70 and really small.

 

EDIT: At first when you said drum pads I thought that you meant electric drums (I play drums, you see) but I think now that you may have meant something along the lines of this which you could use, or if you got another you could use two.

 

That's exactly the thing I had in mind. My only quibble with this is there's no apparent way to label the pads (or keyboard keys). Sticky labels would gum up the pads. Hey, there's clearly a niche in the market for a dedicated MIDI trigger controller with LCD assignable text labels, if only I were a hardware engineer

 

PS: I play drums too :)

[Eros Key]

but it also means if I want to do "Red fan1" I have to press "Red" and "Fan1" pretty much at the same time. Since the mouse can only be in one place at a time, I often hot-key "r" for red and so on

You can assign one hot-key for two scenes so the two scenes will play Sync.

[SmokeAndMirrors]

but it also means if I want to do "Red fan1" I have to press "Red" and "Fan1" pretty much at the same time. Since the mouse can only be in one place at a time, I often hot-key "r" for red and so on

You can assign one hot-key for two scenes so the two scenes will play Sync.

 

If I bind "red" and "fan1" to 'r', then what do I do for "red" and "fan2", "red" and "all ahead" (etc)? The power of separating into directional and colour is that given N directionals and M coloured scenes, I only have N+M buttons on screen and not N*M.

 

What I'd like to be able to do with Daslight is swap key bindings on the fly. For each song in the set, I would have specific key bindings (say 1-0 and Q-P for easy access) that I could switch in at will (eg a "next song" option on the menu). I'm going to suggest this to them, though their technical support have proven to be less than helpful in the past.

[HobitLight]

My only quibble with this is there's no apparent way to label the pads (or keyboard keys). Sticky labels would gum up the pads.

Use electric tape and put the table above/below the pads.