About The Show



During the winter of 2006, our family went to see the Trans Siberian Orchestra at the Bradley Center. This is initially where my inspiration came from. At that same time, there was a Miller commercial on TV that featured a house with lights synchronized to the all famous Wizards In Winter TSO song. The one-two punch of the Trans Siberian Orchestra and seeing that commercial over and over really peaked my interest. I started looking around online at other houses who did similar displays synchronized to music. I finally discovered how they were creating those displays. Light-O-Rama is a company that makes the software and all the hardware to make these shows possible. I told my parents that I could do that to their house. Of course the family was skeptical, so I set out on my mission to prove it. Luckily Light-O-Rama allows you to download a demo (free) version of their software. I downloaded the demo and went to work. I used the Wizards In Winter TSO song and started making my own "Sequence".





The program allowed you to draw up a simple schematic of your display so you can kind of see how the lights would look in action. So I created an animation like the one pictured above. This one is actually from 2008, so there's a few more items on there than when we first started, but it gives you an idea. So I created my own musical sequence and dreamed up what kinds of lights we could put where and showed my parents the final product. Well, apparently it was enough to convince them that we could actually make this happen! The very next year, 2007 we had our first light show. We couldn't believe how big of a success it was. Everyone loved it! We were even featured on TMJ4 and AM620 on the news. So once again in 2008 we went back to the drawing board and added the leaping light arches as our new lighting effect. After 2008, however, I got my first job out of college, which happened to be in Waverly, Iowa. So I moved to Iowa and because of that, there was no light show for the next two years (2009 and 2010). BUT! In early 2011, I found a new job back in good ol' Waukesha, WI and was able to move back into the area. Since I was back, the light show was definitely going to happen. In 2011 we added our home-made "candle sticks", the red LED spotlights across the whole front of the house, and added one new song. This year, we did away with the old snowflakes on the roof and made our own snowflakes that we thought added a whole-nother dimension to the show. We also added the green spotlights pointing up at the tree branches in the yard. Instead of everything being at eye-level we wanted to draw peoples' eyes all over the yard and house. This year we are also added two new songs. One is a very short 1 min song. The picture below is this year's channel drawing that I used to visualize our display as I was programming the songs.







Below are a couple examples of the software I use to program the songs. All of the "channels" we have are on the left. We currently are using about 138 channels. Then each second of the song is displayed along the top. I have to listen through the whole song first and place marks where the beats hit, then I go back and fill in that I want the lights to do at each beat mark. It can take anywhere from 10-14 hours to program one 2-3min song.