Hi, all
As some of you may have noticed from my posts over the last few months that I have been working hard to create a visual show for my next gig.
Here is the first demo of the demonstration videos I will be doing to promote my forthcoming Spectral Streams gig.
The main screen shows the video being created live using the Imaginando Visual Synthesiser and the the lights are DMX controlled and triggered.
I have created DMX synced lighting and video shows in my old Pink Floyd tribute act, but that was all “linear” from start of song to end of song. This gig I am doing is much more improvisational, so I needed to find a way of doing something visually that matched that. As I hate doing shows with no visual element!
It is still very much a work in progress, but I have been using the Imaginando Visual Synthesiser to create visuals that fade and for different layers in the video to trigger from what I am playing. Likewise the DMX lights can be cued from the sequence loops or react to what I am playing (e.g. GOBO frequency increased the higher up the keyboard I play).
The video is made up of the Imaginando video, a studio picture in video (my iPhone on a tripod) showing me playing and the lights going. These and the music are all recorded on different devices, so synchronisation is not perfect (I do not think the frame rates quite match), but hopefully good enough for you to get the idea.
At the gig, the video will be shown on a 100 inch projector screen using a HD projector and the lights, which are crammed into my studio whilst creating the show, but of course will be more spaced out at the gig. To the left you can see my two Varilights. These are usually on the stage floor and will be spaced either side of my rig The main PAR bars are behind the studio camera, so you only really see the general lighting they throw on me. They will be either side of the stage. And you can see a GOBO triggering as well, which is low on the floor behind the studio camera, but which is usually mounted high up and rear of stage looking back to the audience. So a bit of imagination is needed on the lights!
The demo song is called Proxima Centauri, our nearest stellar neighbour, and a red dwarf star, so I want visuals that were like a flaming ball of red, and then the lighting colours go to match. When I press a spare controller on my Novation Summit that triggers my imagining of a stellar flare in the visual layers (and Varilights and GOBO)
You can also see when I play my Hydrasynth (in this song triggering the Cherry Audio GX80) that you get a star sequence in the visuals and you get colour and speed changes based on velocity and key played.
That is the general idea anyway.
Cantabile makes a lot of this possible with its very flexible MIDI routing and processing to control not only the keyboards and sounds but triggering the visual synth and my DMXIS lighting controller.
When time permits I will write a guide on how all of this is done.
