Control/Dimming Please help my band select a DMX controller

Hello, my band currently has a lighting setup that consists of 4 Chauvet COLORstrips, fluorescent lights, and work lights. Consistency and timing of changes and effects is important to us (we don't want to trust the show to sound-activated programs and have specific changes for different songs) and are currently using a combination of a Chauvet FS-1 foot controller for the strips and regular on/off footswitches for the fluorescents and work lights.

We want to get more intricate, add some lights, and remove the need for the bandmembers to control the lights while playing. To this end, we've been considering software-based DMX controllers such as Elation Compu Live, Venue Magic, myDMX, etc.

The only issue is that we play all of our songs to a metronome (which I, the drummer, get in my ears). The light show needs to be synchronized, and it somehow needs to be triggered to begin at the same time as the metronome.
What options exist for us? My current thinking is that we get a laptop with Compu Live (or comparable program) on it, record the metronome for each song as an audio track, and have Compu Live trigger to them. Will this work? Are there other options? We need to move quickly as we have a show late January we would like to debut the new setup at.

Our requirements, after being able to program scenes via DMX and somehow sync them to my click, are:
• stable (low likelihood of "conking out on us" in the middle of a show")
• as easy to learn and use as possible
• and if it meets all the requirements, cheaper is better.

I really appreciate your responses. In fact, if you help us out with a thoughtful suggestion, I'll send you a free digital copy of our EP :grin::grin::grin:

Chris
 
I suggest you send your click track to a DMX controller (or PC) with an audio input for chase/sequence advance and set your lighting based on the click track. You could use a 2-track system with lighting cues on one track and IEM cues on the other if you wanted; or you can setup the DMX system to respond to the single track as desired. If it were me, I would go with 2-track audio cues.
 

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