God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen - ScottEffx music lightshow created with MIDI - LED string lights

Learn how to create fantastic music light shows with LED string lights. Make wonderful holiday or event displays with tasteful animation and infinite light effects with the flickerSong by ScottEffx. See how MIDI is used, created on your DAW along side the audio tracks, for you to sequence the light show and bounce the composition to a stand-alone music and lightshow conforming to mp3 file standards.
This music light show set to the music "God Rest ye Merry Gentlemen" by the Mannheim Steamroller is displayed on the Burkhart's 2024 holiday light display. The display uses five ScottEffx (scotteffx.com) flickerSong modulators running 37 total outputs and about 100 LED Holiday string lights. The flickerSongs are controlled with Macintosh and iPhone apps which play the music and light show together.
Each flickerSong is a small egg-shaped electronic module with 8 unpolarized 110V outputs compatible with holiday LED string lights. Each output can drive up to 5 standard 20' string lights with the light brightness updated 210 times per second for rapid transitions (when you want them). They are controlled over WiFi, connected to the same WiFi router as your ScottEffx App - available for free in the App Store. The App finds all the flickerSongs on the local network, automatically connecting to them. Each flickerSong is a standalone timer-dimmer when not playing a light show, with on/off/sequence events and adjustable dimming for each individual output. When playing a music light show, data is buffered and timed to eliminate any potential of real-time local network issues.
The ScottEffx Macintosh App has powerful editing features working with popular digital audio workshops (DAWS) such as Pro Logic, Ableton Live, Apple's Logic Pro and others. All the lightshow editing is done on the DAW, where you create MIDI events (note/channel/velocity), events which are sent to MIDI-out and then received by the ScottEffx App for processing into light show effects. Simulation of your light show setup is built into the App. A photo of your venue can be 'painted' with 'lights' as you plan, using editors like Photoshop or GIMP, and you edit your light show while watching the ScottEffx simulation on your monitor in real time.
ScottEffx 'light effects' are simply a time-series of light brightness with a resolution of 210 brightness 'settings' per second, up to 5 seconds long. Our Mac App has tools for standard effects like impulse, square, Gaussian (bell shaped), but you also can create any effect you want by simply typing a series of numbers into a text file and importing them.
Some exciting Beta support Apps are arriving, including AI percussion detection using our neural network. Thousands of percussion clips like Snare, Tom, Bass etc have used for training, and the trained network has achieved 95+% accuracy in identifying percussion sounds from percussion stem files. This gives light show creators a head-start with a percussion MIDI file (MIDI channel 10), using the standard MIDI notes like 45 (low tom), 49 (crash cymbal), 38 (acoustic snare) and so forth.
Another Beta App streamlines ScottEffx Midi-Map creation. Each flickerSong output 'subscribes' to a single Midi-Map: a 88 by 16 table of effect-type and delay which defines what the flickerSong output does in response to each MIDI message, whether it comes from the DAW or from the finished and mp3-packaged light show sequence. For larger displays like the one in this video which uses 37 of the 40 available flickerSong outputs, it can be near impossible for a person to manage 37 of the 88x16 Midi-Map tables. Our helper App imaginatively named 'MidiMapCreator', shows you how to define exactly what happens in your display for every combination of MIDI Note and MIDI Channel in your MIDI messages from your DAW.
One upcoming enhancement aims to separate the geometry of a light-show display setup from the music light show itself. We expect this will make light-show sequences more portable and marketable to a broader (non-DAW) audience.
Learn more about ScottEffx flickerSongs on the website scotteffx.com.