Ableton DMXIS and a NEWBIE question

[amdavila]

Hi everyone,
I have an newbie question for you. I play bass and run lighting for my 4 piece blues/rock band. I would like to use Ableton Intro to sync my bands lighting using the vst drop-in DMXIS.

Ableton and DMXIS work great together-everything is as it should be. I'm using the Presonus Audiobox USB 2x2 as my soundcard. I'm not super familiar with Ableton's routing, however.

My question: What is the most effecient/easy way to set up the signal routing for Ableton on stage with this set up?

Does my drummer need to be monitoring a click? Or, do you pre-record a backing track that ableton is able to sync to automatically...or am I missing it altogether? I'd prefer to not have my drummer on a click, but no biggie if this is THE way to "do it".

I really appreciate any/all advice and guidance....thanks in advance!

[pimpleburger]

amdavila - I will try to make sense of your question as you are really hard to understand.

My suggestion to you is to run your DMXIS software as a stand alone application. You are playing blues so tempo synch'd dj style aproach isn't for you. I would simply use the footswitch port to trigger the lighting sequence for each song.

If you simply have to use ableton with DMXIS VST then your drummer can hit something that will send a midi signal to the tap tempo function in Ableton. Usually after the fourth hit ableton will start the song on the one at the tempo taped in by the drummer. But you guys will not stay in synch unless you have metronomic timing which doesn't sound like the blues to me!

So if you want a big flash off light on a particular snare hit then you will need to feed the drummer some kind of pulse. This doesn't have to be a click - it could be a groovin' percussion loop or a two bar phrase from an instrument.

I used a Roland SPDs percussion pad to hit and I use abletons midi learn to assign the different pads to different function. I've got a tap tempo a start and stop and a next and previous marker on 2 other pads. You could buy a cheap Alesis Pad control for the drummer to trigger the sequences the way I do with my SPDs.

Best of luck. I'm actually buying DMXIS tomorrow.

Peace,
Pimpleburger

[amdavila]

thanks Pimp.

I'm taking your advice and going the way of the footswitch for now. I have an FCB1010 that I'm playing around with, should be good to go.

Best of luck and thanks for the response.