Lighting Control For Newbie...Any Advice?

[davidvignola]

Hello Group. I am a newer user to Ableton Live and I love it. I am basically only using session mode to launch scenes /songs as my backing tracks. I did write the backing tracks as I had a friend do it and he loaded the clips into the session mode so when I switch to "arrange" mode? I don't see the multi-tracks with audio everything is blank.

I just picked up a few Chavuet PAR lights so I can learn about adding lights to my live shows. These will run and follow the music in sound activation mode but I am hoping to learn how to manually program lighting changes within Ableton. I don't want to have a 2nd lighting controller as I am the performer and engineer (1 man band). I have look at several YT video but most are 5+ years old and I see there are several ways to go about this. I am hoping someone can give me the easiest way to start having Ableton run lights during my performance. The lighting fixtures are DMX controllable and I assume I would need some sort of interface which is DMX to USB or something similar to get the lights into the computer?

anyway, any help or resources would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance

[woodwolf]

Look into a midi to dmx converter like this one.

https://www.amazon.com/DecaBox-MIDI-to- ... B00N36JQG2

Search on you tube for " use abelton to control dmx."

This is assuming your lights have dmx dimmer packs which most modern lights do. You will see an xlr input on your dimmer pack.

[davidvignola]

Thanks for the info. I will check it out. Yes, there are 2 XLR jacks on the light fixture.

[jestermgee]

You can also look at picking up a DMX controller which has MIDI input that you can create scenes on and then trigger those using MIDI. That offers the added benefit of having some easy manual control over the lights too. I use a nice little controller "DMX240a" which also has audio input to operate scenes from audio signal and works pretty good for both tasks.

[davidvignola]

Thanks, Justermgee.....that sounds interesting. I was hoping not to have an additional piece of equipment but I do see the benefit of being able to reach down and manually control the lights if necessary. Although I probably will never need to do this as I am the musician as well and won't have the extra free hand to adjust the lighting. However, you mentioned something that sounded interesting. You said to get a DMX controller that has an audio input so it can control the lights via an audio signal coming in from Ableton. I need to look into that as I have no clue how to do that.