I’m looking for a device that takes 5-pin midi and outputs DMX. I’d like to use the midi tracks on my octatrack to sequence stage lights, and I want the device to do the following:
-control each light on a different midi channel (ie each light on its own midi track)
-control the intensity of the R, G, and B components of the light with one midi CC each
-control the overall intensity of the light with another CC
I’ve found a few midi to DMX converters online but I’m not sure if they are capable of operating in this way.
Whether this is gonna work is dependent on several factors. One of them being the actual light. Is it your own (then specify) or does this need to work with whatever lights a venue has?
Which boxes did you find that you re unsure about?
I found DecaBox midi to DMX bridge, but that only listens to one midi channel and routes midi notes 1-128 to 128 DMX channels. Since each color on a single light takes its own DMX channel and octatrack CCs are per track instead of per note, I’d need to use 3 tracks per light if I want full control. I also found this one but it looks like I’d need to write some custom code to make it work the way I want and I’ve never done anything like that before.
I’m using my own lights, this is just for DIY shows or streams. If I’m ever at a venue with its own lighting rig I’ll trust them to work it. These are the lights I’m using
Honestly, you’re almost certainly better off sending midi clock and events that you’d like to trigger stuff from (kicks, say, and program changes between song sections) into an actual piece of lighting software and going from there. The lighting software will be set up to understand the DMX world and can let you navigate different cues and looks in a sensible way, apple effects, etc., all of which will be a complete pain to do from midi directly.
Chamsys MagicQ is a reasonable choice — it runs on a laptop and you use their DMX dongle to output to the lights. The software is free, and the hardware unlocks it out of demo mode. It is, however, a whole big world to learn — I’ve been poking at lighting design for shows we run at our place for a few years and I’m still very much just getting started.
I use a DecaBox MIDI to DMX Converter to control lights from the OT. Works really well.
I missed this post when I wrote my answer above, sry. I don’t understand exactly what you mean (especifically the part about CCs per track instead of per note), but I’m pretty sure you either missed something in the Decabox manual or misunderstood something.
A simple example with one track per light:
OT Midi track 1: CC# 1-4 -> DMX channel 1-4 (e.g. RGB + “master brightness” for light 1
OT Midi track 2: CC #5-8 -> DMX channel 5-8 (same for light 2)
…etc.
…and you could get more creative by using tempo sync’ed lfos modulating the CCs and stuff like that.
All tracks in the example above would of course be on the same midi channel. I’m not sure why you consider a single midi channel is a limitation. But again, it feels like I might be missing something…
3 Likes