Control/Dimming Attempting to design a light show! Help!

[benecg]

Alright,
My Name is Ben and I'm a senior at my high school. Through out high school I have been the go to guy for anything to do with lighting or sound in our school. This past February we moved into our brand new school with a brand new theater. I have adjusted well and am pretty proficient in running the new consoles, etc. We have a new Zero88 Leap-Frog 96 and a Yamaha LS-9 sound board. The sound board has MIDI in and out on it, but the light board has an SMPTE input on it and DMX inputs/outputs. I have been able to connect an audio cable and have a submaster on random flash the lights by following the bass beat from the song, but I want a rehearsed show with exact cues. My question is how can I connect the two boards together to run a light show synced up to music? This is my first time so I am open to any suggestions you may have!! I plan on programming the light cues into the memories on the lighting console, any help is greatly appreciated!!

 

[derekleffew]

Forget MIDI. Record a SMPTE stripe on one track of your playback device routed directly to your lightboard, with audio on the other. Follow the Leapfrog manual.pdf as to how to assign cues to SMPTE times.

Be sure to include a video (like here) of the result here for critique.

 

[benecg]

So, do I need to make the audio track mono, then put the SMPTE on the other channel? Then only the one channel will go to the sound and the other to the light board?