I've posted parts of this in other threads as something I am trying to do for part of my decorations. Thought I'd share with a better subject line for those that may be interested in one way of putting on a pretty realistic thunder/lightning display.
First, right off, it's not super cheap to do this the right way. You can easily go out and buy a $8 cheap strobe that could light up a small room, and play a repeated CD of thunder sounds, but that wont look and sound very realistic. If making it look real doesn't bother you, then this is the way to go. If you want a kick <deleted> display tho, you really only have a couple of options.
There is a thunder/lightning FX box you can buy, plug in a bunch of lights, etc. The only place I saw this at was selling it for like $500. It does kick butt.. you can plug in strobes, regular lights, etc.. it dims them randomly to make it appear as if the electricity in the house is being affected by the thunder storm. But $500 is a bit of change to fork out for this, and I've done it quite a bit cheaper... read on. That doesn't include the cost of lights/strobes if you add those.
There may be other options as well, but the only other viable options is to use a DMX lighting setup to control the strobes and somehow activate the thunder at right times. OR.. you can try what I am doing.
As I said, its not super cheap.. but not too bad. I'll give you the version most people can do easily, and then what I am doing to add to it a bit. So, for $23 at musiciansfriend.com or progearwarehouse.com (actually most sites sell it for this price), you can buy a Chauvet CH-751 strobe controller. It has a built in mic and can trigger the strobes with sound activation, a knob to adjust how sensitive the mic is, and a switch to put it in stand by mode or repeat mode. In repeat mode, its like a cheap strobe, you can adjust the flash rate form 1 to 30 times a second. There is also a momentary button you can push manually to trigger the strobes. The only down side, as I found out the hard way by NOT buying the right strobes, is that you must buy strobe lights that take a 1/4" input, also known as being linkable. The controller has a 1/4" mono output and it comes with a 33' cable as well, very nice for the price if you ask me. There is enough power to chain up to 6 strobes so you can fire off up to 6 strobes with this cheap little device.
So, the cheapest "controllable" strobe I could find online was $40 plus shipping. This was an American DJ. My controller is Chauvet. I do not know if there is any difference between strobe controllers, but unlike DMX which is an industry standard, there is no standard that I know of for strobe controllers. So it's quite possible each brand of strobe controller puts out a different signal and their own brands of strobes may not work with other brands of controllers. To be safe, I spent $50 on a Chauvet ST200 200watt strobe, plus $8 to ship. So, thus far I am out about $90 including shipping for the strobe and controller.
Now for the hard part... lightning always comes before the thunder. The problem I was facing was how to play a thunder track to activate the strobes, yet, the thunder should be heard AFTER the strobes fire. Even harder... I want my strobes to be a bit random.. another words, I don't want one thunder sound and flash the strobe just once, I want a series of different strobe flashes and thunder sounds to change things up a bit. To do this, I need a way to fire the strobe say, 2 or 3 times fast on the first round, then maybe a longer flash the next time around, then maybe a short quick one and so on, all the while playing different thunder samples.
So what I wasn't thinking about was that I have a 33 foot cable to run from the controller to the strobe. Natrually I need a speaker outside or inside next to a window so people outside can see the effect and hear the thunder. I am an audio guy too, love my subs, so I want people to hear the low notes, and thus for me, I need a sub and at least one speaker to be heard. So, what this means is, I can keep the controller inside the house and run the 33' cable to the strobe(s) outside. What does this do for me.. well, keep in mind that if the controller is near the speakers that play the loud thunder sounds for all to hear, that noise is going to activate the sound detection circuit on the controller and you'll see tons of continuous strobes flashing. That's no good. So, the trick is, put the controller out of range from other speakers (and for that matter, out of range of trick or treaters, people in the house, etc) and put a separate speaker next to the mic of the controller. This speaker is what will play sounds to trigger the strobes. So, most audio players, be them cd, mp3, etc will have stereo output. This is where you got to get a little creative with the audio track you play. What I did is loaded up my favorite sound editor (there are free ones on the net), and I grabbed a bunch of thunder samples from http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/index.php (do a search for thunder). With a sound editor, you can create sounds panned to the left or right channels. So, with the left channel speaker sitting next to the strobe controller, and the right channel speaker (and sub) a ways away so people can hear it, I decided I would put some sort of quick sounds like drum hits or something in the left channel to trigger the strobes. I place them using the audio editor a second or two before the right channel thunder sample. I then just vary the number of drum hits I put before each thunder track, some a couple of seconds, some right before it. To get a realistic lightning/thunder, I vary the volume of the thunder in the right channel depending on how many seconds I put the drum hits in the left BEFORE the thunder. By this I mean, if I give a 3 second interval from the time the strobe (left channel drum hits) fire and the thunder (right channel) plays, I decrease the volume to make it sound further away. For those that I play right after the drum hits, I make it louder. I also change up the thunder sounds, some have the sharp crack sounds, some have a deep rumbling and so on.
Alright, so the bad news is.. I haven't been able to fully test this yet because I am waiting on my controllable strobe to show up. But I have tested it with the sound controller a bit, and it has an LED that flashes when it detects sounds (and thus triggers the strobes). So far it seems like it will work. I wont be putting it into place until the night before halloween. We get a lot of theft around our area, so I prefer not to put anything up/out till the day of or the night before.. sadly.
Now, for those of you that are a bit more inclined, I'll add what I am really doing. I've been doing computer music stuff for years, so working with an audio editor is not too hard for me. The hardest thing is making the audio section long enough and/or repeatable without a noticeable sound change. Because of disk storage these days, including on mp3 players, it's no big deal to copy/paste a 2 minute section of audio and paste it 100 times or more, then save a big mp3 file and just play that thing all night.
What I do though is use a MIDI sequencer that can play audio samples on cue. I create two tracks, one for the left, one for the right. I then place simple notes at the times I want to fire the strobes in one track, and place the audio samples I want for thunder in the right track at times that randomize it a bit. I can choose to move my laptop near the controller or simply render this to a single file and play it from an mp3 player or what not. It's not that much better, but it does allow me to test it better/faster because I can much more easily change a couple of note positions in the track that fire the sounds, then copying/pasting chunks of audio around to make it come out right. I personally use Reason 3, an amazing peice of software that I wont go into (google Propellerheads or Reason 3). There are many free sequencers out there, I think even the most popular, Cakewalk (may be called Sonar now) has a free/trial/lite version that will play audio and midi.
Anyway, that is how I propse a very realistic light/thunder display that is about 1/5 the cost of the FX box you can buy, but involves a bit more work... although I find it fun work.
Hope this helps anyone out there that may be interested in doing something like this.
