I am in a rock cover band and we finally used Photon to run our live light show. The learning curve is kind of steep, but we were able to host pretty complex light shows for our songs with backing tracks. I was quite pleased and it really made an impact with the audience by my estimation.
Our current setup is 2 Chauvet 4Bars out front to light the stage, then a single tripod in the rear hosts 2 Rockville Stage Panels and 2 Mini Spider lights.
We control the lights in 1 of 3 ways.
- We use midi sent from StageTraxx when playing the handful of songs we have backing tracks for.
- We use my electronic drums to send Midi to trigger to a raspberry pi through the midi pedal to the lights. (Raspberry Pi runs a filter to prevent repeat notes so the lights don’t turn off and on with each hit of a drum)
- We run a random sequence of lights and a midi pedal to allow for strobe, speed increase and blackout.
While Photon has been generally great, these are the issues I ran into:
When running in midi mode from StageTraxx my light shows are somewhat complex. Most of them have upwards of 20 scenes and/or sequences in the live view which means at best I could fit 3-4 songs in a show if I combined them, so I would still have to switch anyway. I simply cannot combine all of the buttons from all of our midi controlled songs into a single show. Even if I could, it would be entirely too cumbersome to manage. Then again, managing them as I am now (each song gets its own show) is also entirely too cumbersome. Between every song I have to back out of StageTraxx, go into Photon, disable live mode, switch shows, re-enable live mode, then back to StageTraxx. If I am switching to drum or pedal controlled lights I have to also remember to change the midi source, because “all sources” actually means everything that is NOT inter-app. Then I have to switch back to inter-app only if I want to run a backing track light show.
Since all of our drum controlled lights and backing track controlled lights aren’t all directly in a row, that means I have to do this shuffle multiple times in a set. It gives great control over the lights, but it’s devastating to between song downtime.
This app really needs the ability to have pages on each show, or the ability to switch shows using a midi program change. Something. Doing it manually is just too much.
It also needs a way to actually monitor all midi sources, from both physical devices and apps so that the source doesn’t have to be constantly managed as well.
Once the light shows are programmed and setup, I feel like there should be nothing more than turning it on and letting it run from the start of the show until the finish.
Anyway, thanks for making this! Programming the lights was a lot of fun even if it was frustrating at times. I certainly hope the app is not dead. I see some posts here and there that seem to indicate it is alive, but based on the number of updates I’ve seen since I bought it, I’m not convinced there will ever be an update.
