DIY stage lighting?

[agent of change]

A black metal band came through and had some red conical lightbulbs on the floor. Simple but made them look evil. Anybody done anything relatively easy and cheap, for effect?

[spookstrickland]

Black lights work great.  I got a couple old blue and red police lights I'm going to try out soon.

[mortlock]

if you can get your hands on a liquid light projector and some good weed, you can take jams to the next level..

[eyeprod]

there's some things that you can do with LED's easy enough. I've researched it a little, thinking how hard can it be? People talk a lot about safety when it comes to lighting. I figure that a couple of  LED clusters could be enough for the situations I'm usually in,  but then controlling them becomes a question. Seems like it might be reasonable to just buy a couple of low cost stage lighting rigs and maybe a controller to change colors or whatever.

[liquidsmoke]

I use 2 red bulbs on my pedal board. I can see my fretboard and yeah, evil. I didn't know when I started doing this but red seems to be getting rather trendy.

[agent of change]

if you can get your hands on a liquid light projector and some good weed, you can take jams to the next level..

Back in the day, I saw Monster Magnet and White Zombie at the Vic Theater in Chicago. Monster Magnet's "lighting" guy was sitting up in a balcony near us, with an oldschool overhead projector like teachers used to use, sloshing some orange liquid around in a glass baking dish.

[liquidsmoke]

^ a local guy I know here is starting to do this for bands and he gets awesome tripped out '60s looking shapes with 2 big glass bowl type things.


This is an older picture of my pedalboard. I usually clamp on a second light also with a red bulb.

[agent of change]

Blacklights on the pedalboards would be pretty cool. I've wondered about wrapping my drums, tom by tom etc, with Xmas lights. Wonder if they're available in blacklight.

[khoomeizhi]

you're just dying to get to plug in your drums, huh?

[jibberish]

if you take eyeprod's buffer circuit and use a piezo tweeter or cheap shit computer mic or even a spare pc speaker as the input into the buffer amp, then fuck with the gain resistor ratio until you get a solid 3v+whatever gets burned in a current limiting resistor which would light an LED, or several if you do the math for series parallel diode combos (they all drop like 3v and consume x mA to maybe 1 amp for those beefy 3watt jobbers, so choose your amp IC carefully)

then put the "mic" in the drums to where it gets activated enough to light the LED how you want it when you hit the drum.
you could make one control board for several inputs since generally op amps come multi in cans or DIP's

there are also LED drivers at
www.rapidled.com

I love this place for my aquarium shit, but soon, planters that don't have to be near a window, my own lighting effects, and whatever else I come up with.
check out this 3 color manual dimmer.

http://www.rapidled.com/aquarium/

they also have voltage controlled dimmers for $20 that can run like 12 LED's. VC means from a small voltage pre amp or even a fucking synth module VC CV-out. the possibilities get crazy when thinking about using sound volume levels and even crap like fraquencies thru filters to control lights and animations....yeah, fun stuff..

[Danny G]

[eyeprod]

I've got a large blacklight mounted vertically against an otherwise unused mic stand, with an LED globe/disco ball thingy that's meant to float in a pool mounted on the end of the boom, or where a mic would go. All using duct tape of course. It works great. The globe thing looks like an eye. I aim that towards the crowd to give them something to look at and because it's not bright enough to be of any use to us on stage. It's got 5 different flashing patterns.

The front of a kick drum makes a nice spot to project some light, if it's a white head. It pulses with the beat. Lasers look especially cool, they get all squiggly. There are sound reactive circuits that you can build into things to make them pulse with a beat

[liquidsmoke]

[RacerX]

Torches are pretty metal. Check your local fire code...

[liquidsmoke]

Jex Thoth uses candles and it works very well for them.

[everdrone]

also consider incense for giving off the hippie and religious vibe

[RacerX]

Just don't use torches where British English is spoken—flashlights aren't very metal, not even the metal ones.

[fallen]

The Buthole Surfers used to have these strobe towers that were really cool looking.

I wouldn't know where to start but I'd love to get a pair of those high Sunn or Peavey PA cabinets and reload them with pie plates of LEDs instead of speakers. Driving them off the amp signal to create a set of lights that pulses with the guitar signal would look awesome, not that I have any idea how to do that.

[Jor el]

^^^ Like the old Radio Shack "speakers."


Briar hooks his laptop up to a projector and hits the whole stage with his animations.
Very cool.

REBREATHER !

[Lumpy]

I've seen clip-on lights and flood lights work well, on small and medium stages.

[agent of change]

Torches are pretty metal. Check your local fire code...

I played drums for a bit, as a favor to my keyboardist friend, in an industrial band. They used tiki torches all over the stage. The smell of the burning oil was intense. But nothing compared to the carburetor cleaner the frontman used, to flamethrow over the crowd. The fumes made people up on the balconies puke over the railings. Then he would cut himself with razor blades while screaming "I deserve to die for loving you!" And do shots of his own blood, lined up in shot glasses. He was special. Ah, memories.

This is what that black metal band was using. It's my first go-to. But I have been looking at "party lights" and video projectors on Ebay and Amazon. I almost won a video projector for $5 but someone outbid me while I was sleeping this morning.

[Lumpy]

There's probably 3rd party knockoffs of these (Apple marks everything up - somebody else must be making these too)

http://store.apple.com/us/product/HD231VC/A/philips-friends-of-hue-lightstrips

[mortlock]

I had one of these once. it was great for the jam room.

[eyeprod]

They make these long strips of led's with some chip that makes it programmable via a control box that you attach to the end. You can line up as many strips as you want and program the colors and patterns. Make a wall, or curtain of light.