Thunder N Lightning

[John Ciuffo]

Anybody out there have a Thunder-N-Lightning Sequence they would like to share.

[toymakr000]

There are several ways to do lightning.
Do you have spotlights? Strobes? Mini's? Other?

I use all three. Most of my display are mini's. I have 6 floods and 35 strobes for the lightning.
The fence along the front of the house is posts with swagged minis. The minis are 3 colors orange, white and blue. All in separate strings on separate channels. The floods are painted blue and are in the big tree in front of the house, pointed at the house. The strobes get dispersed with a long string with about 4' separating each of the strobes.

The sequencing is done for each thunder clap. I mix my music and thunder tracks in Audacity. It is real easy and the software is free on the internet.
Here is an example of one clap of thunder in LOR sequence editor.



The thunder starts at the 5.00 mark. Before the sound happens the strobes are fired. Then as the sound hits the orange strings of the fence are turned off and the white and blue come on. The floods also turn on and off in a very random pattern.

One thing to remember about real lightning is the sound always comes after the light, unless the lightning strikes you:shock: It is "scarier" if the sound is closer to the light , but if your timing is off a little it won't matter. The lighting can also be cut short of the sound because the light is generally fast and the sound can roll.....