It's About Time!
Welcome to your May 2007 edition of the
PlanetChristmas newsletter! It is published regularly and covers
relative topics for the Christmas decorating enthusiast.
Here's what you can read about in this month's newsletter:
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Watched a great video on the Animated Lighting website... a product
they call
Animated USA and it's a large flag done in lights and sequenced to
patriotic music. My parents always have a big 4th of July party
for family and friends and I could just imagine this thing on the side
of the barn flashing to the beat of Stars and Stripes Forever. Way
too cool. Then it got me to thinking about Christmas 2007 (my mind
works in mysterious ways...)
Have you ever considered using major celebrations during the year as
a way to experiment with new lighting effects for your Christmas
display? This is actually part of the "crawl, walk, run" mantra
where you start small, grasp the basics and build upon your experiences.
The 4th of July is a great time to try something new in lighting and if
it works, migrate the idea to your Christmas display.
Start with some basics by getting out your patriotic colored
Christmas lights. Here in the states, it's red, white and blue.
Pick some bushes in front of your house and add the lights. If you
think about it, decorating for the holiday this way is a whole lot
cheaper than buying fireworks.
If this is the year where you jump into computerized lighting, what a
perfect time to synchronize your first tune to the lights.
Patriotic songs are the ones all the bands march to in parades.
The music has a steady beat and thus easy to match the lights to the
action. Go to your favorite music site and search for "Sousa,
Stars and Stripes Forever." If you have a problem with marching
bands, try Lee Greenwoods "God Bless the U.S.A." Either song will
make Americans swell with pride. If you live in another country,
choose a tune that will do the same for you.
Synchronizing lights to music requires practice, practice, practice.
Depending on how many channels of lights you have, each music minute can
take one to eight hours to coordinate the lights to music. How do
you start? Remember crawl, walk run. Let's tackle the
basics.
Pick a tune you really like. The shorter the better.
Never forget your viewers have a limited attention span. If the
song is much longer than three minutes, find another one or use music
editing software to cut the overall length. The tunes mentioned
above are each a tad over three minutes in duration.
Now listen to tune in a quiet place. Listen to it again, and
again and again so you know the major transition points in the song.
You'll hear stuff you've never heard before. Every artist will add
some nuances to make it their own. Bottom line: get to really know
the song.
The most critical part of synchronizing lights to music is recording
the beat or click track. Have no idea what the beat is?
There are programs out there that will attempt to find the beat for you.
If you don't have a musical bone in your body and/or never taken a music
class, now is the time to find someone that has rhythm. It really
is important to have this base beat track in place.
Depending on your sequencing vendor, use the appropriate tool to
create the beat track. You typically play the song and click your
computer mouse for each beat. One trick is to click the major
beats and later go back and have your sequencing software divide the
time between major beats into minor ones... usually 2, 4 or 8 (again,
that musical training comes in handy about now.) Once the beat
track is made, you can start blinking the lights.
Your sequencing software will create a grid based on the beat track
you created. You can think of the grid as a big computer
spreadsheet. Across the top are points in time with the beginning
of the song at the far left. Down the side of the grid are lines
for each light channel you can control. Let me suggest beginning
with 16 or fewer channels to keep things easy. As you look at the
grid you can visualized any point in time for the music and what each
light channel will do.
A typical song will have several hundred beats and if you have 16
channels of lights, you could easily have well over 1,000 cells in your
grid. Don't worry, once you get the hang of things, you'll
sometimes wish you had a bigger grid.
Depending on your vendor, pick the first channel and click the grid
at different points in time to command the lights to blink on and off
(or whatever effect you desire). Play back the music, watch your
grid scroll by and see the lights blink corresponding to the cells you
toggled. Slick, huh?
Let me highly suggest you refrain from blinking a lot of lights
constantly. It takes a huge amount of time to program your musical
grid and don't forget the short attention span of your viewers. On
your first tune, start with slow fades at key transitional points of
your tune. Go in and add some fast flashing at key areas but
quickly get back to the slow transitions. Your viewers will be
amazed the lights are changing with the music, no matter how slow it
appears.
I guarantee after you finish sequencing the first tune you'll
immediately say "I can do better!" You're right and you will do
better with practice and lots of trial and error. Do something for
the next holiday and use it to learn how to do Christmas tunes better.
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LED (Light Emitting Diode) strings for Christmas are "environmentally
green." They use 80% less power than typical incandescent lights,
last 50 times longer and are nearly indestructible. If you think
about it, you can also use cheaper and less powerful light controllers
if you have a computerized display. The bad news is last year LED
strings cost about five times more than those standard light strings.
Every year I think there will be a major price drop the next year and
I'm proven wrong. Looks like LED pricing will stay about the same
for 2007 as years past. Rumors include some nasty patent
litigation going on among the manufactures keeping the price high.
So where's the PlanetChristmas tip of the month in all this? If
you see a good deal on LED lights for Christmas, buy them. You're
not going to see a major price decrease in October when the major stores
start rolling out their decorations.
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This is a new addition to the PlanetChristmas newsletter. Got
any juicy bits of gossip you want to share with the PlanetChristmas
community? Send a tip to
newsletter@PlanetChristmas.com
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Rumors
are rampant about some of the stuff PLUS2007 attendees will be
receiving... not to mention all the knowledge they'll be taking away
thanks to the expert instructors. (I'm betting the picture to the
right will end up on a t-shirt.) It's not too late to sign up...
though you better hurry because the current discount coupon is about to
expire. See the info at
http://www.plus2007.com.
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Something
different at PLUS this year is the option of participating in hands-on
labs. Although these classes require a small fee on top of your
registration, you'll get real experience and guidance from the pros.
We have a build-your-own mini-tree class where you get to take your
lighted tree home with you; the wireframe lighting class where you light
a custom frame and take it home; a soldering class where you learn how
to solder, build a small kit and take the finished product as well as
your soldering station home with you and finally a blowmold restoration
class where you get to take some of the special tools home with you.
Want to learn more? Go to:
http://www.plus2007.com/Education.htm and scroll down the page to
get more class information. If you are already registered for
PLUS2007, log into your account and sign up for the classes by going to
http://www.plus2007.com/Registration.htm
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PLUS2007.
This in no Mini!
(Our bi-annual gathering August 2-4, 2007)
Our bi-annual gathering (called PlanetChristmas Lights Up Symposium
or PLUS) is a little over two months away. This PLUS will be
different than 2005 because it appears about 70% of the attendees are
new to our world and have never even heard of PlanetChristmas. I
can't be more thrilled about the potential for tapping into so many
people with new ideas to share for our Christmas displays.
With this event, we're also providing a family vacation destination.
While you're fully immersed in Christmas decorating, the rest of the
family can be having a great time in tourist-friendly Gatlinburg,
Tennessee.
If you've been to PLUS before, prepare for different classes with new
instructors. If you're a newbie to this hobby, then PLUS is
definitely the place to be. We're spending the first day talking
about the basics and getting everyone up to a common knowledge level so
you can easily grasp the more advanced topics on Friday and Saturday.
We're very lucky to have our very own Marty Slack teaching some
classes. You probably saw him on national TV during this last
Christmas. Marty brings a wealth of knowledge and is eager to
share it with the newbies as well as the old-timers.
Most of the vendors attending will be announcing new products as well
as offering special deals to PLUS attendees.
Award-winning
entertainer Judy Pancoast will be singing "The House on Christmas
Street" at PLUS2007. She is an acclaimed children’s musical
artist, hailed by parents as “filling the void between Barney and
Britney.” Judy, who has twice performed for a President of the
United States, has taken her high-octane performances on the road,
giving concerts at festivals, performing arts centers and wherever
children and families gather in 47 U.S. states to date. Judy will
also be entertaining the children during our Family Fun activities.
Mary
Edsey, the author of "The Best Christmas Decorations in Chicagoland"
will be the keynote speaker at our gala banquet on Saturday night.
With the help of local newspapers, librarians, city clerks, postal
workers, police and neighbors, and weeks of dizzying drives up and down
neighborhood streets she accumulated a list of almost 400 Christmas
displays. Over the course of several years she interviewed the
decorators and narrowed the field to nearly 250 locations and wrote a
delightful book everyone should have. Oh the stories she can tell and
she will!
PLUS2007 is in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, August 2-4,
2007. The
www.PLUS2007.com website is online and accepting registrations for
the event. Here's a hint: there's a special discount coupon on the
front page of the website. Use it now before it expires.
Here's another hint: book your hotel room
reservations now. Keep an eye on
www.PLUS2007.com
for hotel alternatives.
What about the price of gasoline and driving to
PLUS2007? The good news is once you get to Gatlinburg, the car is
parked and you can walk everywhere you need to go. The city also
provides a trolley service to nearby Pigeon Forge for the super-hardcore
shopper. Bottom line: you won't be using any gasoline while you
and your family are attending PLUS.
Want to see some inside pictures of the Gatlinburg
Convention Center? My wife and I were on site in early April.
If you want to view how the place looks before we invade in August, goto:
http://www.plus2007.com/GCCPix.htm
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Blink Off (comparing
some of the computerized lighting products at PLUS)
You've read all the info from the vendors about how you can
synchronize your Christmas lights to music. At PLUS2007 we're
going to pit them against each other to see who can make the best 16
channel, synchronized-to-music light show in 60 minutes. This is
going to be fun and VERY educational! What are we going to call
this little challenge? If the food industry can have a bake off,
we can have a Blink Off! See ya at PLUS!
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Our Blog service has been reborn. Check it out at
http://blog.planetchristmas.com
The PlanetChristmas community has experienced tremendous growth.
Our three fundamental rules of family friendly, positive and Christmas
centric guide what we say and do. The real key to our community is
a willingness to exchange information so others can have better
displays. Come join us!
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Talking about a gold mine of information, this is the place! If
you haven't found it yet, go to
http://www.planetchristmas.com/talk.htm. We've recently added
more forums and made it a little easier to get around. Once you're
a member, feel free to change the look and feel of the chatroom by going
to "My Account/Preferences/Board Theme." Don't forget to update
your profile so others can learn about your display. Also remember
the part of the chatroom you can see when not logged in is indexed by
the Internet search engines, but once you're a registered member, many
new forums open up but are invisible to the search engines.
PlanetChristmas believes strongly in protecting your privacy.
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The PlanetChristmas radio station is still on-line and available to
anyone with a fast Internet connection to tap into. Christmas
music 24x7... even in the middle of Spring. How can you go wrong?
Find the details at
http://www.planetchristmas.com/PCRadio2007.htm
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Have a suggestion for a main topic or want to write
an article for a future PlanetChristmas newsletter? Send me an
email: csmith@planetchristmas.com
If you know someone that really should subscribe to your newsletter,
send them to
http://planetchristmas.com/lists/?p=subscribe
Next time: look forward to more Christmas
decorating tips.
Chuck Smith of
PlanetChristmas
