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MIDI Drum Kit triggering LED light strips

How to add reactive LED strips to a MIDI drum kit

This setup will light up an LED strip to the correlating drum as you hit them, and will also allow you to add your own variations what the lights do when you’re not hitting them.

Here’s the signal flow:

Here’s a pic of what my kit looks like:

and a video of it in action:

Equipment you’ll need

Here’s a list of the equipment you’ll need, but before we get started, we’re assuming you already have:

  • An Electric Drum Kit
  • A DAW/Digital Audio Workstation (Reaper, Logic, Protools, Garageband, Ableton etc.)
  • Basic knowledge of navigating a DAW and using MIDI

Depending on what you’re going for, this list could vary. Here’s the list of equipment I used (I was avoiding any soldering):


More equipment you may need

Other tools you may need:

If the bottom and sides of your pad is completely sealed off, then you’ll need to drill a hole to route the cables through.

Assembling the signal chain mostly involves plugging everything into the correct inputs on the DMX Decoder which is this guy:

This shows the DMX Decoder with 12v power connected, DMX cable connected, and 1 LED strip fully connected (4 wires). 1 more LED strip is almost fully connected (R, G, and B cables are connected but not the power which is the Black cable)

Add Power to the DMX Decoder

First, we’ll add power to the DMX Decoder.

MAKE SURE YOU ARE NOT PLUGGED INTO THE WALL DURING ANY OF THE CONSTRUCTION.

If you need to test something. Plug in the Decoder, test what you need, then unplug it when you are done. It’s not smart to connect, disconnect, or move wires around while it’s plugged in.

  • Using a small flathead screwdriver, begin unscrewing one “-” and one “+” power input until the hole where you will insert the wires becomes wide enough to fit them in comfortably
  • Insert the Red cable into the Postive (+) slot
  • With one hand, hold the Red Cable in place, and with the other, begin to tighten the screw at the top so the slot becomes closed and locked into place.
  • Do the same with the Black Cable into the Negative (-) hole
  • Plug in your 12v power supply into the female receptacle of the red and black pigtailed
  • Plug the Power Supply into a wall outlet

Does the Red light come on? If so, we have power! If not, check your connections and try again.

Connect our first LED Strip

Unplug the power from the Decoder before starting

  • Grab an RGB Extension cable and separate the 4 wires apart so you can use your wire stripper to strip them individually (about 1 cm from the end of each wire)
  • Once they’re stripped, begin inserting the wires into the correlating slots on the DMX Decoder. (Red is R, Blue is B, Green is G, Black is V)
  • Determine how long your drum will be from the Decoder, and add some extra wiggle room, then use scissors to cut the RGB Extension cable

Let’s connect the LED Strip to the RGB wire connector

  • Grab a 4 Pin LED Strip connector, open up the end that’s for the LED Strip, insert your LED strip in, and close the connector to lock it in place.

Connect the RGB Extension cable to the other end of the RGB wire connector

  • Grab the newly cut end of your RGB Extension cable, and just like before, separate the 4 wires apart so you can use your wire stripper to strip each wire individually (again about 1 cm from the end of each wire).
  • Look on the LED Strip and it’ll have labels for “V, G, R, B”
  • Line up your stripped wires from extension cable with the respective labels on the LED Strip into the LED Strip connector.
  • Insert the wires in, and close the connector to lock it in place

Test the connection to see if it works!

  • Plug in power to your Decoder again
  • Does the LED strip light up on its own?
  • If it did, yay!
  • If it didn’t, check your connections and try again.

Light up the LED strip when you hit a drum

  • Connect the DMX Decoder’s IN to Entec DMXIS OUT using a DMX Cable
  • Connect the Entec DMXIS device via USB to your computer
  • Register and install the software
  • Add a new track to your DAW and select the Entec DMXIS as a VST
  • Connect the Entec DMXIS to the DMX Decoder with a DMX Cable
  • Open up the Entec DMXIS VST and right click the first channel/fader (which would be Red) and select “Learn”
  • Hit a drum that you’d like to initiate the LED strip
  • That’s it! When you hit that same drum, it should light that LED strip up Red.

Oscillators

  • Open up the Entec DMXIS VST and select Channel 2 (the 2nd fader which would be Green)
  • Check out the bottom portion of the window under Oscillators
  • Turn the Oscilattor from “Off” to Sine and the LED strip should be pulsing in Green, while you could still hit the pad and have it turn red.
  • I won’t get too far into the details here, but you can toy with these values and combine them to get a desired result

I’ll update a bit more with some screenshots, but I want to get this out because a few friendos have asked for links to the gear list and instructions on how to do this.

Feel free to reach out to me on twitter @andyTHPS if you have any questions.

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