MADRIX Forum

Hi,

as a total newbie to madrix and LEDs in general, apologies if that is a stupid question .

I´m running a setup of traktor, bitwig and qlc+ to control various synths, grooveboxes and traditional fixtures like scanners, moving heads etc. Lately I added a bunch of LED bars, ie 10 or 18 pixels, 3W each.

Now this is where I´m hitting limits with QLC (more UI issues, not necessarily performance). And then it doesn´t take long to find madrix.

I´ve downloaded the trial, did my first steps, but something didn´t click yet: As madrix often appears to be aimed at panel setups for video display / large LED matrices, is it a good choice if you don´t run that kind of setup, but have a dozen or so 18x1 "matrices" spread around the room?

Basically I´m looking for something that allows me to treat light in a modular/layered fashion: Have basic building blocks like colour schemes, movement patterns, selection of participating devices (LED bars). MIDI map everything to single Notes. Then, by playing "chords", create a full scene. Snapshot this, map it to some other MIDI note and call the various scenes from a sequencer. Or maybe play this live: Hold the note that selects a patterns, but swap some of the other notes that call different color patterns.

Does that setup and workflow make sense in the madrix world?

I know that next fall I will go madrix no matter what, as my project for that time is a LED ceiling (4x5m, WS2815 grid 50cm width). That of course is madrix land, the sweet spot. But first I need to find a solution for these bar thingies.

Ideas, comments, "I´ve done that, look here", let me know what you think.


Cheers,
Oliver

Hello Oliver,
Welcome to the MADRIX forum.

MADRIX is a very powerful yet easy to use LED control solution for all kind LED matrices.
MADRIX is not designed to control the movement of moving heads or scanners for instance.

It supports several ways to trigger the desired effects:

Option 1:
MADRIX provides the possibility to trigger for instance the opacity of up to 8 effect layers per Storage Place and Deck. So you can assign your desired MIDI commands to different layer opacities which will all ways be triggered when the assigned MIDI command will be pressed.

Option 2:
In MADRIX you will find the TRI Effects. TRI means trigger effects which can be also assigned to MIDI commands. If MADRIX receives a desired and assigned MIDI command, the effect will be triggered to interact.

Option 3:
With the help of MIDI commands you can activate the desired Storage Place. So the desired Storage Places can be activated via MIDI

Of course you can combine option 1, 2 and 3.
With this 3 options you will have a lot of possibilites to work with MADRIX live.

It is also possible to record the live output as so called "MADRIX record" file and assign this recorded file as a video at another Storage Place which also can be triggered.

I hope this will help you.

Hi Guertler,

yes, that´s what I was looking for, thank you! I will now dig a bit deeper to get a better feeling of how this matches my workflow.

"No moving heads" isn´t a big thing, I work with multiple programs on the audio side, so splitting tasks between specialists can be done for the visuals as well. As effects and variations will be triggered via Bitwig, I´ll just pick a separate track for the MHs.

Thank you!