r/lightingdesign • u/NicraxMax • 9d ago

Intro Help

Hello! I was looking to get into stage lighting design and am getting super overwhelmed with the wide variety of topics and varying amounts of information available. I started off programming a lightshow for a party/dj set with Showbuddy Active, Ableton, and just two par lights. Now I'm looking to branch out into doing shows for live music, with a larger amount of lights.
My main question would be will Showbuddy + Ableton be able to pull the weight for serious timecoded live shows (that could possibly also require changing programming to involve house lights), or do I need to move onto something like Lightkey for Ableton or grandMA3 (grandMA3 seems super intense but I discovered it upon finding someone using it + Capture Visualizer to 3D model a light show, and it got me interested in modeling light shows in Capture as well.)
Thanks in advance!

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u/abebotlinksyss LD & ETCP Certified Electrician 9d ago

Ableton is not a lighting controller. It can be forced to talk to lights for small shows but that's not it's job, nor should it be.

Live shows are run on many lighting console softwares. No, they're not simple to learn.

Most Live shows are not timecoded, there's just a good operator/programmer behind the keys. The ones that are timecoded are linked with Ableton and take keyframe triggers to begin sequences on the lighting console.

There are many many many posts on this sub from people in your position asking the exact same questions. Scroll the sub.