Oh wow thank you! Those are excellent resources! I will definitely be diving more deeply into that area once I wrinkle out some other things that are ahead of that in the chain. I originally asked this question to see if it was possible, as right now I only have the 1 strip of DotStars, and until I have several of them this won't matter, although I could get the code working on 1 strip ahead of time. I was afraid I was going to have to force myself down to a 60 LED per meter strip to make up for it, but assuming I can get this working, I can have a LOT of LED's going which is awesome! (the wall I'm hitting right now is how to specify a different channel as I've used up all my available notes and I can only light up 1/4 of my strip. I'm going to make another forum post shortly about it asking for help)
But I still ask, Why?! Why not send scene-change events to Teensy and let it implement the digital logic to set the individual parameters
I apologize as I'm not very well versed in this sort of thing. I'm a musician and not a programmer, and have only been at this for a couple of months, so I'm not even sure what you mean by "scene change events". Typically in a musical context a scene change would mean for example you have a MIDI controller with 16 pads that control the program. By changing the scene you could use those same 16 pads to control different things effectively giving you 32 pads or more depending on how many "scenes" you have available. That's the first place my mind goes and I'm not seeing the connect to using it for a light show. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something? Again I apologize. I am very open to suggestion if you think there is a better way. I do not think that this is going to be the best way, it is just the way that I thought up in my head and am pursuing because I don't know of any other way.
Also, how? How on earth will you tell Abelton what changes to make to the thousands of parameters from one tick to the next?
So far what I have planned is the simple On/Off messages from the MIDI notes. I already have brightness connected to velocity and it's working great. I was thinking of using aftertouch to control individual LED brightness if I want individual pixel control, and I was thinking of using the ModWheel to control the brightness of the entire strip (From what I've read this isn't the best way to do it as it erases the previous brightness values so it may not work how I want). Again, if there's a better way I am very open to suggestion. Right now I have it working pretty good functionality wise on one strip, but it's maxing out at 40 LED's and there could easily be problems when I get up to 1,000 (If I get that far, or use that many).
I've used Ableton to automate quite lot of things using very CPU intensive synthesizers, so I don't think the MIDI part is going to be much of a problem for it.
Assume you want to make all the lights swell and color shift... you will have to figure out how to get Abelton to make thousands of adjustments to send thousands of near identical messages.
Ableton is fully capable of doing this with the MIDI functionality. It's more the implementation within Teensy and the limitations I will encounter from the DotStars that I'm worried about.
Also... if you did need to repurpose MIDI why limit yourself to note-on... you can use seven of eight values in the TYPE nibble.
I apologize again, I'm a newb programmer. Could you explain to me what the TYPE nibble is?
If you really need to send all the data required to show a given scene and you can only use MIDI I would check into SysEx support form the software.
If you can send arbitrary sysex data you can design your own means of passing the data much more efficiently.
I'm not against this if it's a better way. One guy I saw online talked about how programming custom MIDI controllers using Max4Live was far more reliable than what I'm trying to do (I think that's how I would implement SysEx in Ableton Live), but it's going to require some more research on my part. I've never used Max4Live, and don't know what I'm doing, but I didn't know what I was doing with Arduino either (I still kinda don't), and I learned. I would definitely appreciate some guidance if you think there's a better/ more efficient way to go about doing this.
Like I said I am a musician and not a programmer, and I had a vision in my head of how I could have a portable lighting rig for live performances to help set me apart from the crowd. I chose MIDI because I am very familiar with it from my many years experience with music software. I appreciate your ideas and your challenging of my ideas. I want it to be as reliable and simple as possible.