Hello, I'm a madrix beginner with a decent understanding of DMX, MIDI and most professional audio software. I spent a while reading around, and this forum has been very helpful so far. I'm in a band that uses basic DMX in our concerts, we currently have a few RGB par-cans and pallets to wash the stage in color, plus we occasionally strobe or run a color-wheel effect. Nothing crazy or out of the ordinary in our setup, we usually have a friend pull up queues with a cheap DMX controller and call it a day.


I'm a big fan of intelligent lighting, so I decided to upgrade our lights. I recently acquired a few LED Walker Color Tubes. I do not own a madrix key yet, or a DMX interface (though Enttec's boxes are looking quite nice). I downloaded the madrix software, and it looks straight forward for the most part. I'm sure there will be a few hurdles; however I think I have the basics figured out. I'm writing this post because I have a few newbie questions that I'll try to explain clearly and hopefully not confuse any other newbies who might find this post helpful in the future. I'm interested in how you would recommend setting up a Madrix rig for a live band. The primary focus of the rig would be syncing up with the band. Our band does use a lot of midi-instruments (primarily keyboard) so it would be possible to do something with timecode via midi, but I'm not sure which way to go – since there are dozens of ways of doing this.


1. Ideally I would like to sync my light scenes with click-tracks (probably in mp3 format), that way we don't need a "lighting guy" to run Madrix for our lights. It would be great if I could make playlists on the fly, for example every click-track & lighting sequence could be re-ordered. How would you do this? what hardware would you recommend and what additional software do you think would work best?


I use a laptop on stage to provide sounds for my keyboard, so it wouldn't be a problem having a laptop with madrix near me.


(PS an awesome feature request would be a sequencer/timeline that can do this built in with madrix like Chauvet's ShowXpress which supports mp3, video, and dmx queues in their timeline)



2. If the click-track technique is too convoluted, and we had a friend learn how to run lights using madrix, and probably some additional software to control our RGB pars… What would you recommend using? External controllers? Perhaps there is a midi controller that you have had great results from?


In advance, thanks for the help. I look forward to what everyone has to say. I'm currently stuck because I don't want to dump a lot of money on one solution when someone might have a more elegant or cost effective way of running this.

Brian, you can always drive the Madrix storage places or Cuelists via dmx commands sent from your sequencer pc

go into Device manager and remote