Whether busking lighting for a live rock band where the drummer naturally ebbs and flows, triggering cues to a club DJ mixing tracks at fluctuating tempos, or executing precision theater cues against a fixed backing track, rhythmic cohesion is what separates amateur blinking lights from a professional light show. Unilighter features a unified, project-wide master clock architecture that keeps keyframe curves, step chases, procedural oscillators, and audio triggers tightly locked in musical sync.
🎛️ Master Tempo Controls in the Header
Positioned persistently in the top navigation bar, the tempo block provides instant, zero-latency access to the show timebase:
1. Numeric BPM Display
Displays the current project tempo (e.g. 120 BPM). Clicking the number opens a direct numerical input to type an exact tempo value (e.g. 128.5).
2. TAP Tempo Button
The primary tool for live show busking. Tapping the button (or hitting a mapped keyboard shortcut / MIDI pad) continuously computes a rolling moving average of recent tap intervals. Within 3 to 4 taps, Unilighter locks smoothly onto the live tempo.
3. x2 and /2 Quick Multipliers
Instant half-time and double-time buttons. When a DJ transitions from a 70 BPM half-time hip-hop groove into a 140 BPM dubstep drop, clicking x2 doubles the show speed instantly while keeping the existing downbeat phase intact.
4. Beat Reset Button (⟲)
Resynchronizes the master downbeat to the current exact millisecond without changing the tempo value. If a live drummer drops a beat or comes in off-phrase after a drum fill, a single hit on Beat Reset pulls all running animations back into step instantly.
⏱️ How Engine Subsystems Synchronize
1. Keyframe Animation Timelines
- Beats vs. Seconds Mode: Timelines support two distinct time modes: absolute Seconds or musical Beats.
- Proportional Scaling: In Beat mode, keyframes are placed on musical bars and subdivisions (
1.0,1.25,2.0). When the master BPM changes, the timeline expands or contracts proportionally—your lighting cues remain locked to the music without manual re-keyframing. - Track Multipliers: Each keyframe animation includes an independent multiplier from
/8through8x, allowing rapid accents to run far above the project tempo while slow ambient color washes stretch across several beats. - Phase-Preserving Pause: Pausing an animation freezes its exact beat offset, ensuring that resuming playback retains musical phase.
2. Step Chases
Each step's duration is defined in musical beat fractions (1/1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16). A 4-step chase set to 1/4 executes a complete cycle every musical bar.
3. Node Graph Oscillators & Wave Generators
In Oscillator Nodes, toggling BPM Sync binds wave oscillation frequencies directly to master tempo subdivisions, producing sweeping moving head ballyhoos and dimmer breathing effects that breathe in time with the song.
4. Autonomous Tempo Tracking with BpmNode
With a BpmNode patched to live audio FFT input, enabling Control tempo allows the console to track tempo changes completely automatically using spectral flux analysis. Unilighter's changeBpmPreservePhase engine ensures that live tempo drifts never cause running chases to glitch or jump backwards.
🎮 Tactile Hardware Mapping
Physical controllers can be bound to the master tempo system using Assign Mode:
- Tactile TAP Button: Map a physical rubber drum pad or momentary button to TAP and another to Beat Reset.
- Rotary BPM Encoder: Assign an endless rotary dial to smoothly nudge or sweep BPM live during performance.
Note
Unilighter's MIDI synchronization is strictly inbound from hardware controllers to the console.
Read more in the Animations Reference Manual and the Assign Mode & Controller Mapping Guide.