triggering lights with dm5 and pd7 pads

[buconine]

My son has an acoustic set with 2 roland pd7 pads. We are looking at adding an Alesis i/o to add more sounds to the kit as well as trigger some 110v lights for on stage. Will the alesis i/o work for this or is there a better option? What would you use to interface between the lights and the i/o?
Thanks for any help,
buc

[DamageDrummer]

very cool man i have seen this done before, but never done it myself. i would imagine you would need to hook up some kind of external light controller to the output and still be able to *Y* off of the output, or maybe use something like MIDI for the amp or mixer. now im not sure if you have special lights of your own already, or if your thinking of hooking up to the stage lights.

some things to keep in mind (hopefully this helps)

if your hooking to club lights- mostly all commercial buildings (including nightclubs) run 277/480VAC on their lights, rather than 120/240VAC that is most commonly used on residential. so some club lights may not work when controlled by a controller that plugs into a 120V wall outlet, because you cant draw 277 volts from 120 volts. maybe keep that in mind when buying a controller.

but if you have your own lights, you will need some kind of 120V power source that is separate from where you plug in the instruments, or it probably will cause interference if the equipment is not noise gated or filterd.

good luck with this man, let us know, maybe post pics

maybe research and find out if someone actually makes a light controller that takes care of all of this stuff.

[PerryGoRound]

One of my friends wired a second kick drum trigger to the negative side of a 9V battery connected to a small purple neon (like for ground effects on a motorcycle) that he put inside his kick drum. He used a clear reso head, tape-stenciled his bands name on it, spray painted the whole thing black, and then removed the tape. Result: every kick drum hit flashed his bands name in purple through his kick reso.

Probably had to change the battery before every show.

[buconine]

We were planning on using floodlights in a home made enclosure. Most venues won't let us tap into their light board, so we were just looking for some flash on stage. I'm thinking we may just end up making midi tracks to the music and triggering the lights thru a dmx via a laptop. Not quite sure how all this works yet but i'll keep digging. Still welcome any ideas from bands that have used this type setup. Just seems like there should be a simpler way to do this...

Thanks for the ideas!