Patrick Matte Creative Coder
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DMX light rig with Ableton and MyDMX

I recently built a DMX light rig for Alice and the Serial Numbers’ live show. It consists of 10 Chauvet Colortubes 2.0 and one American DJ Megapixel bar. I mounted them on 2 metal bars i bought at a local hardware store.
The setup is controlled with the American DJ myDMX USB interface and software on which light scenes are MIDI-triggered from Alice’s laptop running Ableton Live. Here’s a video of the show in the lounge room at Avalon in Hollywood, CA.

10 comments on “DMX light rig with Ableton and MyDMX”

  3. Hi Patrick!

    Great video! I have to say that is one of the most effective uses of the Colortubes that I’ve seen! Could you explain a bit more about the way you choose to set up your rig?

    Did you wind up using the American DJ myDMX software with your myDMX USB interface? Also, I have several of the Colortube 2.0 lights, but I’m a novice at DMX. It looks like in order to use DMX you have to use a ‘brain’ like the COLORcontroller 2.0 to translate DMX is this what you did?

    Thanks in advance for you guidance!

    b33son

  4. Yes i used the myDMX software, it works great, although it doesn’t work at all on windows 64 bit. I had to create a partition on my drive and install windows vista 32 bit.

    As far as i know the Colortube controller 2.0 is the only way to control the colortubes, but it’s a little bit disappointing, because the only thing it really does is trigger the colortube presets… You can’t create your own patterns and animations.

    They should make LED bars with 3 channels for each LED so that you could create any color that you’d want. I don’t know if that already exists but that would really rock!

    Chauvet has newer colotubes, i think they’re called Colortube EQ, and there’s also a controller for those, but i don’t know how they work.

  5. Hi Patrick:

    I love the video. I am trying to figure out how to get the MyDMX to leverage my audio source. It looks like you have this setup here. I know you mentioned you used MIDI-triggered scenes from Ableton Live. I have Serato that I use for DJing, but wasn’t sure if that would work.

    thanks,
    Anthony

  7. Wow, So is she triggering certain patterns for the lights to perform or is her computer simply sending the lights software/controller her bpm? Is there any functions in ableton for this?

  9. Hey, that looks really awesome!

    I was wondering if you’d be able to talk me through the signal path from Ableton right to the lights?
    I want to get this kind of setup going for my own DJ set… I’ve been doing research but the whole thing seems kinda foggy.

    If you could detail what kit you have going into what, that would be awesome!

    Thanks for reading, and the inspiration.
    Oli

    http://www.facebook.com/jackaljackaljackal

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