Hi,
I'm new to lighting control and my wedding band has decided to invest in a lightshow rigged to our backing tracks on Ableton Live.
I'm running the demo of Show Buddy Active and considering purchase, but there is practically no information about setting this up with Show Buddy Active, only a few videos of DMXIS (and I have read the manual). It does translate though so, although it's taken me 2 days, I've managed to get the VST plugin working in Ableton and have a couple of lights changing colours. I still have many questions about putting all this into the show as well as saving settings. On top of this I don't think I'm very efficient because I'm clicking buttons all over trying to figure things out rather than knowing what to do. In the absence of any guides, is there anyone I can have a little time with online to show me the basics?
Thanks,
Oli
New User
Re: New User
Hey there, I'm new into SBA as well trying to get automated lighting working with Apple MainStage (different app than Ableton but similar idea as yourself I believe).
I started with Show Buddy Active as a standalone light controller app in MacOS, created fixtures, make them blink, created a bank and a preset in the Perform tab and can manually turn on Autoplay to turn a red channel on and off . Works fine.
I then started up MainStage, and in one of my Projects that has a couple of backing tracks I added Show Buddy VST. As I'm a keyboard player I powered on a synth, told SBA to listen to some keypresses on my keyboard and that turns lights on and off by keystroke. Communicating with the outside world. Cool!
Mainstage uses MIDI Beat Clock with the backing tracks. I start the tracks/beat clock but Show Buddy doesn't seem to be listening as the Perform doesn't start up. I looked through the preferences in Show Buddy (only available when you launch SBA as standalone app) and turned on Time Sync, no dice. My light blink present doesn't want to start up and I have to manually start it. What's interesting is that SBA IS getting the time information from my MainStage project (which is set to 112BPM) as it reset to the new time from 120 BPM. It's just not clear how SBA should get the Start or Sync information.
Any ideas? Any tutorials for setting up DAW/SBA VST and MIDI Sync out there?
I'm still running in DEMO mode but more than happy to pay for a license once I know this works!
I started with Show Buddy Active as a standalone light controller app in MacOS, created fixtures, make them blink, created a bank and a preset in the Perform tab and can manually turn on Autoplay to turn a red channel on and off . Works fine.
I then started up MainStage, and in one of my Projects that has a couple of backing tracks I added Show Buddy VST. As I'm a keyboard player I powered on a synth, told SBA to listen to some keypresses on my keyboard and that turns lights on and off by keystroke. Communicating with the outside world. Cool!
Mainstage uses MIDI Beat Clock with the backing tracks. I start the tracks/beat clock but Show Buddy doesn't seem to be listening as the Perform doesn't start up. I looked through the preferences in Show Buddy (only available when you launch SBA as standalone app) and turned on Time Sync, no dice. My light blink present doesn't want to start up and I have to manually start it. What's interesting is that SBA IS getting the time information from my MainStage project (which is set to 112BPM) as it reset to the new time from 120 BPM. It's just not clear how SBA should get the Start or Sync information.
Any ideas? Any tutorials for setting up DAW/SBA VST and MIDI Sync out there?
I'm still running in DEMO mode but more than happy to pay for a license once I know this works!