When people think of Christmas lights, they don’t normally associate this with technology. However, as you’ve probably seen online, many people are setting up elaborate LED light setups that flash to the beat of music. If you’re a techie like me, it’s actually pretty easy to synchronize your lights to music. By setting up different objects on different channels, we’ll guide you through the process.
The first thing you need to do is buy some LED Christmas lights. Now it normally wouldn’t matter when you buy them, but in this case it does because we need a lot. The cheapest time to buy them is literally the day after Christmas. You can get them at extremely discounted rates compared to the months leading to the big day. Try this here for some good deals on lights.
The next step is buying a control system. Depending on how confident you are in your electrical abilities, you may want to purchase a ready to go kit. These cost around $20 per channel. However, that adds up fast and a good LED system will have upwards of 60 channels.
Your next option is a kit that includes all the parts but does not assemble them. I like this option the best because assembling is pretty easy and just involves putting the boards into the enclosures. It’s also fairly inexpensive at $10-15 per channel. You can find these kits pretty cheap on ebay or on Amazon.
Your last option is to buy the pieces and assemble them yourself. You’ll need to know how to read wire diagrams, and solder all the pieces on. Unless you’re fairly experienced, I wouldn’t go with this option.
Next you’ll need to download the software that activates each channel during certain segments of a song. I like Light-O-Rama which is the most common for houses. It’s got a few different package levels ranging from free to advanced. The only downside to using this is it can take literally hours to configure your LED lights for just one minute of music.
To perfectly synch your music to your LED Christmas lights can take months. You have to program what the lights do for every .1 seconds of song. That means to program a minute of song can literally take hours. There’s a lot of trial and error involved in this process, but it’s worth it in the end. I typically have best results with electronic music, a popular choice is often “Gangnam Style”.