Ableton Forum

I think some people mentioned they do that on here. After music that kind of thing would be my next interest but have no clue what kind of background goes into that and it's not exactly the type of thing there are a lot of local gigs for. The consoles and gear behind the visuals for concerts looks even more drool worthy than the gear behind the sound.

shows? theater? concerts? what ya doin?

Hi, I work in a small structure as a technician,concerts,theater,expositions and live events of any kind.So that brings me to do some lighting as well beside many other things..very interesting job,I meet different kind of people,artists,coworkers,etc..We are quite well equiped,mostly traditional,no robots and automats(Martin's..)

I used to run lighting and sound for a theatre and another music venue about 25 years ago if that counts

Technology has obviously changed alot since then and there are loads of reallyy cool fixture these days, but the way you tend to apply basic par-can spot and wash fixtures to light and band and stage hasnt changed much really.

These days most DJ and bands who want lighting have it. basic DMX controllers are quite cheap and there is some excellent software around for doing the stand band-lighting thing.

Where it gets alot more interesting is the ligt shows the likes of masny us here want to do - cross betwen normal band lighting and club lighting - thats where I find regular software and hardware controller have serious limitations and why some of us have do own own thing with software for our own use.

As for the consoles - TBH - no more interesting than sound consoles - actually basically the same - lots of faders and buttons - think of if like a digital sound console and you probably get the idea.

Just as with live you can do some really cool real time shit with audio, the same can be said of what you can do with software control of lighting. Most venues barely scratch the surface of the what can be done with their lighting being cripplled by the controllers they use.

I've only been to a couple venues that took advantage of computers with their lighting that I am aware of. The hardware controllers completely blow and I'm not surprised people don't take andvantage of them beyond the chaser function and turning lights on and off. Most built in patterns on lights are good enough compared to trying to control them on the fly, especially moving heads.

But beyond just lighting I would be interested in stage design in general. What did you guys do to get into the field?

I make a living running lights.... I design, program, operate, head electrician, truck loader and driver, you name it...... whats you aplication? I am highly interested in ableton controlled light shows, I got the light part down, its ableton thats new to me.

I'm still amazed at everything that can be done with lighting control and performance directly from Live, especially when it's choreographed to integrate tightly with Live audio and Live-controlled video.

I've got 21 DMX fixtures under Live control, and I don't use the built-in patterns or sound activation on any of them. Follow actions, MIDI effects, Live clips, virtual MIDI buses, dummy clips... they all make lighting and video control super-powerful, and as manual or automatic, fixed or random as you like.

Which fixtures are you using hambone?

Scanners, lasers, washes, strobes, blinders, LED PARs. All controlled directly from Live via a MIDI>DMX converter,

I'm a big fan of rich, strong colors, hence the use of 8 washes. They also greatly improve the quality of the live video feed.

As cool as I think that is, I don't think Ableton is capable of doing the things that the modern lighting control software is capable of, do you run any lighting software at all? At the same time, the average high end USB to DMX dongle costs around 2 grand per universe, so maybe if you CAN replicate the ways of a lighting console, you are on to something big!!

this is what I run
http://www.malighting.com/43.0.html?id=43&&L=0

this one is very popular
http://www.jandsvista.com/products_app.html

this is too
http://www.highend.com/products/control ... onsole.asp

these all run on PC versions as well and can be controlled via midi

We're building a modest LED-based rig using Enttecs.
http://www.enttec.com/
- and maxMSP/Jitter.

The only thing really missing is a fixture library, but that stuff is so easily handled there anyway.

We can take any video input, video file, midi data, volume input, fft audio analysis and connect it directly to any and all parameters on the fixtures.

First off, let me tell you I think what you guys are doing is fucking great, and will make Live electronic shows really pop, however, when setting up larger light rigs , you need the software to group and store things like color, position, and beam shapes among other things... while using small fixture might work, I think as you progress to fixtures with 40 dmx channels plus, it will become very time consuming, I will be working on slaving light software to Ableton using a second laptop connected via MIDI, however, I still have a ways to go on the Ableton side of things....

Go to http://www.lightnetwork.com/ this is thee worldwide lighting forum, smart people on here, industry best.... although, no one using Ableton

This is one of the hottest products out, you control it with a lighting console, but it has its own video server, so its a computer controlled by a computer
http://www.highend.com/products/digital ... g/dl_3.asp

I agree, I would never even ATTEMPT to run a show from Live, unless I had a real craving for envelope-drawing. We use generative media, and there is no generative lighting console.

We ONLY use maxMSP to handle this, and storing data in matrices in there lets us bypass libraries and workarounds. Besides, I have yet to see a freely configurable dvi->dmx solution in those systems that both works for us and isn't a million zillion dollars.

Its hard to talk lighting in a place like this without sounding like a pompous ass, but at the same time, music people are generally, well, musical, when it comes to lighting (like me ), Im really interested in what you are doing and hope I can learn more than I can share... I hope I can share though and get some good Ableton tips as well. I DO want to run my console triggering off of live though, but right now, I'm still working on the tunes.

I'm on a Mac and there is little to no sotware available from my brief research about 6 months ago. I'm currently beta testing DMXIS which is a stand alone application as well as a plugin you can use in Live.

What gets me, even with my limited knowledge, is that the DMX protocol is quite simplistic when you compare it to what a DAW or video editing software can do so why is there so little out there? Or it's extremely expensive.

Jands Vista runs on Mac http://www.jandsvista.com/ there is a Laptop version of every console, vista seems to very popular for being easy to use, Machinate might be able to help you with the DMX output as the jands piece is pricey....

You are right, DMX is VERY simple and expensive... simple because its all you really need (for now), there are 512 DMX channels in a line or "universe" as it is known, then most consoles start at 4 universes and go up to 64 and more.... thats a lot of lights... The stuff is pricey for sure, partly because of supply and demand, and party because the stuff gets outdated very quickly and many hours of development go into the stuff.