Sound control for a few lights
John Taylor
A former venue that I worked at and now do some consulting with, is looking to add some lights for special evening events. Long story short, this will be in an outdoor amphitheatre. They are buying 8 weatherproof LED lights. Lights will be under some cover on portable trees.
So, we need to control the lights. They would like to use the Q-SYS system that controls the audio playback. They run the sound from an iPad on the venue’s private WiFi system. There is a suggested system called QCore. Anyone have experience with this unit?
Or do you have any other suggestions for running the lights from the Q-Sys sound system?
Thanks in advance.
JT
Mark Turpin
QSC DSPs are widely used in installed systems in the same way a BSS or Symetrix DSP might be used. The “core” is the DSP hardware itself; there are several flavors from the baby Nano up to enterprise devices. “Q-Sys” is the ecosystem, and also the common name of the programming software.
A core has enough brain power to serve its primary function as an audio processor and also work as a basic control system for a modest sized installed system, eliminating the need to layer a separate control system on top of the DSP. (We often leverage that control capability to handle things like controlling backstage and lobby systems for a theatre, where a separate control system is just another point of failure to worry about.)
The QSC core can generate MIDI or IP control strings to control outboard devices, such as sending a control string to call a PTZ camera preset or sending stop/pause/stop commands to a playback device, or any one of a hundred other things. It cannot run lighting directly, however; it can only send a command to lighting controller, often as a MIDI command.
So, yes, the QSC core can act as a basic control system for your application, but you will still need a lighting controller for the core to send commands to. For this application, it might be a small computer with a dmx output dongle running a freeware lighting program, but a small dedicated lighting controller that is already designed to receive MIDI commands will be easier to implement. (There are tons of inexpensive lighting consoles that are designed for the DJ market that will easily handle this.)
Keep in mind that this is basically a show control problem. The core can certainly do it, but programming the core is not trivial, so it can take some time to make changes. There may be more straightforward solutions.
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Mark Turpin
Sorry, Jeremy. I’m not sure. Supposedly Qsys supports direct MIDI commands as of 9.12, but I haven’t done it myself. I recently (within the last year) had a contractor implement MIDI from Qsys, but they may have used an IP-to-MIDI translator. (I didn’t have a reason to look under the hood on that implementation.)
If you query MIDI on QSC’s website, you get a suggested plug-in to control the Visual Productions CueCore 3, so if Qsys can do it directly, they are still keeping it in the background. (Supposedly there is (or was) direct MIDI capability, but it was hit or miss getting it to work.) Unfortunately, the CueCore 3 costs as much as a Core Nano, so that’s not a great solution.
I still suspect this particular application would be better served by a small dedicated show controller that can send IP to Qsys and MIDI to a lighting console (possibly a virtual console on a PC). OSC is used for stuff like this all the time.
Another option is a different DSP; a Symetrix Control I/O connected to a Symetrix DSP gets the same result for less money, and a generally easier programming experience.