Tips for Sequencing Light Shows

• Always purchase legal copies of MP3 files for light shows you are creating or downloading; common sources are Amazon or Apple Music
• Sequencing an entire light show from scratch will be time consuming, especially at first — figure 30-40 hours of work for a 3.5 minute song if you want to make it look good (you will get faster the more you do)
  • Start early! I usually start sequencing new light shows for Halloween in February while it’s cold and there’s not much to do outside — that way I’m not trying to do it in August-September while it’s still nice out.
  • For your first season, choose a few (3-5) songs to do a really nice job on (versus 15 badly sequenced songs) – classic Christmas songs like “Carol of the Bells” or fun ones like “Mr. Grinch” will be particularly popular to a broad audience
  • It might make sense to start off by downloading some free sequences and adapting them to your layout and props when you import them — this will still take some time, but not nearly as much as creating sequences from scratch
  • In xLights, go to “tools”, “download sequences/lyrics” — can also find these on xLights Google Drive
  • Check https://xlightsseq.com for free and paid sequences
  • See our how-to article on Importing xLights Sequences!
• Adding lyric tracks to sequences: it is super time consuming to try to manually line up the lyrics to the music; avoid doing this if you can — the tips below will save you hours and hours — Lyric tracks are what enable singing props!
  • Tip 1: First check to see if anyone has already figured out the lyric timing for your song – in xLights, go to “tools”, “download sequences/lyrics”, then scroll down to “timing tracks” — there are lyrics tracks for some popular light show songs; you can also check the free sequences to see if you can download one of those and pull in the lyrics if they have them — can also find these on xLights Google Drive
  • Tip 2: Check https://xlightsseq.com to see if there’s a free sequence that has the lyrics you are looking for — download and import the lyrics track
  • Tip 3: Use AutoLyrics by Lighting Fanatics — this online tool lets you upload a legally owned MP3 file, along with the lyrics (I use AZLyrics.com to get the lyrics) for to a song, and will auto-generate an xLights lyric timing track for you in a few minutes; it’s not perfect (claims about 90% accurate) but it saves a HUGE amount of time vs. manually trying to align the lyrics; you may need to tweak a few words after you import the track, but I find this works really well