Cherry Audio Forums

I'm scoping out various project ideas and am wondering if it's worth developing a module that would enable Voltage Modular to control lighting rigs.

A bank of fairly compact but high-tech motorized LED fixtures is now within the budget of semi-pro artists so I think it would be really cool to integrate lighting in a modular synthesizer using the DMX 512 protocol but I'm wondering if there would be sufficient demand.

I have plenty of other ideas and don't want to waste time developing something that only one or two people would be interested in buying. But I can see massive creative potential.

Your thoughts?

Hello,

Could be of interest ...

Anyway, there are solutions already to do it from major DAWs (using ENTTEC DMXIS VST) or in FL Studio (ZGE).

Regards,
Eric.

Cheers Eric,

I've only just started looking into this but my initial impression was that existing plug-ins only allow very basic control - like sending MIDI notes to select pre-programmed DMX Scenes.

What I'm thinking about is direct voltage control of base parameters. So for instance each motorised fixture would have it's own VM module with six input sockets so that you can use individual CVs to control horizontal rotation, vertical rotation, red intensity, green intensity, blue intensity and strobing modes.

So if you had say a bank of four motorised fixtures then you'd have 24 sockets that you could drive directly from Sequencers, LFO's, EG's or whatever with far deeper integration than merely selecting preset Scenes.

Is this level of control already possible in a VST?

I just scanned through the ENTEC DMXIS user manual and can confirm it is possible to use MIDI learn within it to control fixtures via CC but 7 bit angle control would I suspect make moving heads look a bit jerky. NRPN can be used instead but that's not easy to do.

Another option appears to be using DAW automation to control parameters. But again this looks like you would have to do all the assignments by hand.

It's all really clunky and not exactly plug and play.

It looks primarily intended for people creating prearranged light shows and stepping through them with a foot switch or MIDI scene selection.

The asking price is a bit silly too.

i can only find very cursory info about using ZGE in FL for DMX.

I also looked at Lightjams but am struggling to get my head around it.