New guy here, basic questions + photon vs other apps

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Hi all, new guy here. I’m a musician with a band, and looking up up our live show with some lighting improvements. Currenlty I’m typically running 8 ADJ par lights on 2 bars, one one each side of the stage, as a wash, controlled by this manual DMX controller from Tetra. It’s simple and I don’t have to worry about it too much.

I’m looking into synchronizing our lights with our click/backing track, and maybe using photon to take midi inputs and send out the ARCnet/etc info to the lights. Backing tracks/audio would normally be played by an ableton push, which can output midi messages that I’d program to synchronize lights.

My questions are this:

First, is Photon the best app for this? I’ve heard of blackout and Luminaire as well. I’d like to keep it simple-ish for myself, as I’d be running these from the stage and I don’t have a lot of mental bandwidth to worry about technical stuff in addition to performing.

If so, can photon accept midi CC messages and send scenes/cues/whatever we call them in lighting land based on those CC messages.

Thank you all for your thoughts on this!
Geoff

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This is eventually what I’d like to get set up. I’m starting by just getting photon running though.

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I went through several lighting tools and settled on Photon2. It is quite flexible, relatively easy to set up and design shows, and seems to work well in the background behind OnSong (which triggers different light show designs for each song). I use the audio from my iPad to “listen” to our live gigs and give Photon2 the tempo for the lights (since we don’t use clicks). My setup is below:

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Interesting. So you have both sound and Art-Net on the same wifi network, huh? I didn’t realize that was a possibility.

My mixing console (A&H CQ18T) isn’t shown in my diagram, but it does have a built-in wifi router, which we use occasionally, mainly for the band to adjust their own monitoring. I’ve not mixed from my iPad, since the mixer itself has a touchscreen and a handful of physical knobs too.

Wonder if the two wifi networks (CQ18T, and the Blizzard SoC-IT) will have any issues coexisting.

Thanks for the reply. Nice setup :smiley: Glad to hear photon works well in the background, that’s exactly what I want it to do! I may further refine my diagram above and end up with something more like yours; I’m currently looking into using the Stage Traxx app instead of the ableton push. It seems like it might do almost everything I need, and some things that the push won’t do.