Hello, I’m in the middle of designing a laser, lights and visuals show to go with my music. I’m an electronic music artist, mainly house / bassline / dubstep / drum’n’bass. I can’t include links here but on soundcloud I am ‘Hungry_Man’, on youtube its ‘hungrymandj’ where you can get a taste for my visual aesthetic.
I got a digital art degree many years ago and used to be a vj and lighting designer in clubs.
For my live show I have 6 audio tracks within Ableton containing audio clips and loops of tracks I have produced. I want each of these channels to feed an audio-reactive lights and projection show. I have specific ideas of looks I want to achieve but the overall vibe is that the lighting and projections rig directly represents what is happening in the music so that it becomes like a visual instrument to entrance the audience. I also plan to create four or five moments within the show that showcase how the light/lasers/projection rig is audio reactive, by playing a solo instrument, solo voice and letting the entire rig reacts to just that. The music is bouncey, upbeat and dancey, so the visual and light show will also be, encouraging people to dance and get excited.
I’m looking into different ways to achieve this and have seen Touchdesigner and Madmapper used to create bespoke audio reactive lighting shows.
For my show the projection is secondary to the lighting. There will be 16 - 30 moving heads, these are the main players. There will be no large screen behind me when I perform (the typical format seen at performances). I will use smoke, haze and mesh as the projection surfaces and the main surface will be above the dancefloor. I will have RGB lasers in line with the video projectors
In the 1st place I’m really keen to see any audio reactive lighting shows for live/electronic music incorporating moving head lights and ideally lasers and projection too. Please share any links if you of specific projects. I have already come across Stanislav Glasov, Christopher Bauder and Tundra.
In the 2nd place I am looking for a Touchdesigner or Madmapper developer or crew to collaborate with me to bring this project to life. Please get in touch if this sounds interesting to you and ideally you have experience working with moving heads, lasers and projection. I can share more technical information.
Thanks!
I use a combination of Touch Designer sending NDI to Obsidian Onyx’s DyLOS. TouchDesigner does the generative, music reactive content and the DyLOS system maps the effects to the lighting rig. Sometimes I have Resolume Arena/Synesthesia sending stuff to DyLOS or to TD, too. I also use Obsidian Netron boxes to get from SACN to DMX. Can/could do it all with Touch but I found it much easier to integrate Touch and Onyx for faster results. DyLOS runs on 256x256 pixel sources. Doesn’t sound like much but that’s 65,536 points of data to work with. Resolution doesn’t really matter unless it hits a screen. If I need to match a screen I will bring the screen source into Touch and send it back out squished as a 256x256 NDI feed to DyLOS.
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You could stick midi cues in a channel in Ableton and use them to trigger stuff in Touch. And also monitor knob controls. Use Touch as the hub to send out cues to everything else.
Not wanting to teach granny how to suck eggs, but moving lights do run best from a lighting desk.
Mostly because they are good for doing the focusing. And swapping out fixtures. And because often you’ll want to integrate your show with some existing lighting. Or play a festival. Personally, unless you’re just changing RGB values, I’d run TD into a desk, so sending an artnet cue to fire a cue stack on the desk.
We’ve done a thing where on the desk does the pan/tilts and then feed pixel map data in for colour / intensity. Works well for RGB fixtures, but less so for mechanical CMY.
I work on a show that uses Ableton and Touchdesigner.
For various reasons, we run SMPTE timecode from Ableton to all departments, video, lighting and lasers. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty tight. But we program in advance and have a lot of programming time.
Either way works.
Doing lasers through Pangolin Beyond is not a bad idea., because you’re likely to find gigswhere there are existing Pangolin setups. Again, cue from TD or through midi / SMPTE.
Laser graphics out of TD into Pangolin works really well. The Beyond Essentials license will let you do 4 lasers from TD.
The big challenge with using lasers is termination points.
If you are projecting them towards the stage from FOH, they are not so bright, but terminate neatly on the upstage wall. If you point them out from the stage, they are bright but often it’s quite restricted where you can point them. You can’t just fire them off outdoors if there are people who might get in the line of sight.
If I was doing this, I would go
Ableton into TD.
Then TD cues
an MA Lighting desk for lights.
Pangolin Beyond for Lasers.
Direct output for video.
Have a look at what Max Cooper is doing. This is a fairly similar thing to what you want to do.
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I use Onyx cause I can’t afford MA 
The other thing to be aware of = lasers can destroy projectors and cameras.
If you have projectors or cameras in the venue you have to be sure the beams do not hit the lens directly.
Hi Marcus and Goblynn,
Thanks both of you for your input which is really helpful and insightful. Marcus I looked you up and found your website, you’ve been involved with some awesome projects!! Would love to keep up with what you do or collaborate in some way, if you ever need music or sound design for a project.
Goblynn - great point about lasers and projectors…my current stage plot has lasers and projectors pointing at each other with a mesh screen in the centre so this is something I need to modify!!
The direction I’m going in now is to use Showsync softwares Beam and Videosync which link to Ableton live and can control lights and video without requiring any custom programming. There are several ways to do audio-reactive controls, either directly by following a waveform or by using midi notes. Ableton has an ‘audio to midi’ feature which allows you to convert audio to either melody, harmony or drums, which I could use to convert my audio clips into midi clips (controlling luminography programming) that would fire at the same time as the audio clip firing.
Another nice thing with Beam is that all the lighting fixture ‘instruments’ are built in M4L and they can be opened and modified to add fixture specific controls or parameters.
Its early days for me on this project, I will share anything interesting I produce on this thread.
Thanks again for sharing your knowledge.
Side note: for any beam effects (lasers, sharpie, etc) you’re going to need hazers. If you’re in a venue that means fire watch. Just something to think about/cost to keep in the back of your head.
Sounds like you’ve got pretty good grasp on how to work this all for the tools you’ve got/you’re using. So many fun ways to pull this off!!
I’m technically a freelancer and I don’t maintain a website or show off anything I’ve done or self promote at all. These days I work mostly for the same company called Showtec out of San Diego. YouTube “CES most insane Keynote ever”. I did media playback on that. Look up “Epcot Death Star” and you can see why I can claim “I controlled the Death Star” (the laser on that was intense, but not real fancy). Epcot Mike Wizowsky (sp?), too. So many fun shows; those are just the ones I know are on YouTube.
I try to be mostly invisible and unknown.