I am a musician who wanted to produce a really good theatrical light show to run in time with my live music but I found big problems along the way and I'm still not completely there yet. I'm no fool, having been an expert synth programmer for years, but I was treated as a fool on more than one occasion when I asked reasonable questions about lighting control linked to MIDI.

If you're a musician having problems with lighting, this page is for you. I've tried to keep it up-beat and helpful but with a little bit of a bite. Why? Because I am annoyed at the frustrating attidudes and lack of knowledge I found almost everywhere. Lighting people seem to not want to help musicians, I've been warned away from doing lighting and ignored by lighting forums every time I've mentioned MIDI and lighting together.

If you're a lighting person, please feel free to tell me if I am wrong about anything I've written. I'm willing to learn and will happily change the page. I'm pulling no punches on this page and you may find some of my comments annoying. Here's my email link - EMAIL HERE

Lighting people come in several flavours. At the top of the tree are the professionals who do shows for live rock events and huge TV productions. I haven't met many of them so I've narrowed down my page to "Theatre" and "Disco". These are the two types of lighting guys I've had most contact with, and there is a huge gulf between them. I've named them under these two banners because - well - read about them in the links if you want to. One attitude though, seems to apply to all lighting guys - the thought that musicians should "But out" of lighting and stick to playing on stage because that's where they belong.

If you don't want to bother with my story, please feel free to just click on the links and get the info you need. Before you can make any sensible descision, you must understand the difference between MIDI and DMX. It doesn't have to be technical, just the general idea of what each one does. MIDI and DMX a comparison.

A short while ago, I decided to buy some LED lighting to replace some of the 40 parcans I was using to colour the stage. These can be expensive so I researched carefully before settling on 6 "Stage Colour 24" floods - these each contain 24 X 3w LEDs which have a reasonable throw. They each offer a choice of 6, 9, 15 or 27 channel DMX control for, respectively 3, 6, 12 or 24 channels of LED dimming - Nice! The other three remaining channels in each case, offer a master fader, flash rate for strobe effects and an on-board program selector.

I quickly realised that these floods would do some great things for me if I could find a lighting desk to control them to maximum effect so I started to search - the little theatre type desk I bought with the floods was returned.

Theatre desks - those with 24 or 48 faders and a simple crossfade were too small and some did not offer a MIDI input so I turned to desks that were designed for modern inteligent lighting (my LED floods are "Inteligent" because they have dimmers, programs and things built into them). I soon found one, it offered 480 DMX channel control - divided up into 20 banks of 24 (the number of faders it had on the front panel).

I went online and read the manual which indicated that it could do all sorts of things. You could select different uses for each fader and save all of them as an optimised control set for virtually any modern lighting fixture. "Yipee" I thought, and promptly ordered one - Bad move!

I ordered the desk from a company on the internet (Solo Light and Sound) and that is where I had my first bad experience buying from a "Disco" retailer. I quickly became aware that I couldn't make the desk do a simple crossfade operation between scenes and, being new to DMX, contacted the shop to ask if I had missed something obvious but they had no idea what I was talking about. They kept me waiting for nearly two weeks before sending a reply which could have been made up by a drunken gerbil.

Just to show you how stupid it was, here is part of my email to them followed by their answer.

"I need to be able to reach a minimum of 90 DMX channels and create many scenes with a crossfade between them - -" "- - All of this is controlled by MIDI triggers from a computer which runs the background of the show."

Their complete reply (apart from returns details) -

"I have spoken to the supplier after sending them your email and they have confirmed it will do some midi but not all."

As you can see, even the mention of MIDI was enough to send them into a blind panic. Why? They sold equipment with MIDI sockets on it. The company has since gone into liquidation - not surprising really.

Following that email I then sent an email to the managing director of the shop's supplier (Prolight) who also supply the Stage Colour 24s. He passed it on to an employee who sent me roughly the same reply - unbelievable! They supply the lighting fixtures but not a desk capable of fully controlling them - and they didn't understand my question about their own product - bad marks for Prolight!

Since then I've noticed that many online companies offer a specification copied from their own suppliers website and they may not actually understand the units they sell. One company who are currently advertising the LED floods I purchased, actually claim that a "speed adjustment feature gives you command over fast-to-slow colour changes". This is extremely misleading because the speed control only changes the speed of the on-board preset chases. Beware of dealer specs.

The only person I've spoken to who understood my problem was from another lighting desk manufacturer who admitted that within the industry, there is a lot of concern about which direction they should take with new-fangled fixtures. He was a proper tech guy and I had a good conversation with him which helped clarify many of the matters you are reading about here. Even he though, did not quite understand why I wanted to use MIDI and he told me that his company was removing MIDI sockets from all their new models.

That is what I, and possibly you too, have been told by lighting people. The problem is the way they view MIDI control. Most of the lighting people I've mentioned MIDI to, seem to think that musicians actually want to directly control lighting with MIDI rather than DMX, maybe that's why they are so full of dire warnings about doing so. However, the key word in the above sentence is "Control".

If you read the comparison link above, you will already know why MIDI will not control a lighting rig directly and this is where the problem starts with the attitude of many lighting people. Most will tell you about the limited bandwidth and the slow speed of MIDI, which suggests to me that they don't understand that we (the musicians) want to "Control" it by MIDI.

Midi is good at control of DMX.

A lighting desk with a MIDI input still operates the lighting rig using DMX, most musicians know that but most lighting people don't seem to understand. The MIDI input is just to allow the selection of DMX functions within the desk - it's the same as having an operator press a scene or chase button and it works like this -

Midi "Presses the button" and DMX operates the lighting - as the meercat says in the advert "Simples!"

O.K. Back to my story... I have places in my show where I want the lights to move and change in time with my music and by "In time", I mean that each individual light acts at the very same moment as a beat happens. A chase is not good enough for this as it is only a simple repeating sequence of scenes which change or crossfade at the "Chase speed" setting on the lighting desk (not connected in any way to the music). Think of it this way - How would it have looked if Michael Jackson had danced at a different speed to the music? That is exactly what a chase does though.

Sound to light is no good because, although it flashes the lights, they will always flash slightly behind the beat instead of with it and once again, because the concept of sound to light is so basic.

What I need is to be able to trigger my choice of scenes via MIDI and have the lighting desk operate them by DMX. To do this I need a desk with a MIDI control input. The desk would ideally have the option to store crossfade times in a scene and this also means having the crossfade routine "Within the desk". If you are confused by this comment, read the following link, I was caught out and confused until I realised the situation with "lighting desk and fixture specs."

So far I haven't had much luck in finding an affordable desk which operates on enough DMX channels and offers MIDI control so, in the mean time I have investigated MIDI to DMX convertors. These boxes offer a way to directly access DMX functions from a MIDI keyboard or sequencer.

There are problems with this system.

1 - MIDI numbers have to be doubled so as to reach the DMX range resulting in half the resolution of DMX. This means more noticable level stepping.

2 - Sending lots of MIDI data from a sequencing program risks flickering and loss of that data because MIDI sends too much unused info and is too slow for lighting control. This means that a recorded fade down could lock up the whole system.

I have an old Peavey PC 1600 MIDI programmer which I've configured, with quite a bit of HEX programming, to send only the info I need to control lights and with a MIDI/DMX convertor (Cinetix - www.cinetix.de ). I can now control my lights on as many channels as I want and even carry out smooth crossfades from inside the convertor itself! The faders send only "Note on" and "Velocity" info to a channel (or several channels) of DMX at a time, giving me many options.

As soon as I find an affordable lighting desk which will do what I want I will buy it and get rid of the direct MIDI conversion, using MIDI only for control of the desk functions. Until that day I am stuck with a system which is not ideal.

I have made a movie to show what can be done with MIDI control using the above equipment, it's just a static camera in my studio but it shows clearly the kind of show that can be created without spending a fortune. The lighting will form part of our live show.See Movie