Skip to content
Sidechain Software

What is CueConductor?

In short, CueConductor is your one cuelist to rule them all. Your show likely has a lot of cuelists - a console, SFX, effects engines, software, and more! Managing all of those cuelists traditionally means accepting one or more of these tradeoffs:

  • No operator transparency
  • Limited programming ability
  • Slow programming
  • Triggering multiple cuelists
  • Introducing inherit system complexity

Tradeoffs No More!

CueConductor is a Mac app designed to give you all the benefits of a single go-button system, without any of the tradeoffs. It is:

  • Extremely easy to see what different devices are doing in each cue
  • Very powerful
  • Quick to program
  • Easy slotted into your current workflow
  • Simple to understand

Where did this come from?

CueConductor came out of a need to put together a show with complex show control very quickly. I (Kai) was putting together a sound design for a local high school’s annual musical. The main components of the system were a Behringer WING, TheatreMix, and QLab. QLab was to be the “main” cuelist (that is, the single go button) and would trigger scenes on the console and TheatreMix cues, as well play back SFX.

Coordinating it to do all of those things correctly and only when needed was something of a nightmare. It involved a lot of spreadsheets, time spent going over and over the script, and several show stops to fix errors. There had to be a better way.

Enter, CueConductor

CueConductor is the tool I wish I had for that show and will be using on shows like it going forward. If you think of your show control as a “hub and spoke” model, CueConductor is the hub and all your other devices that need to do “things” (we call them actions) on cue are at the end of the spokes. Its sole purpose is to virtually press “go” on every other device in your system when you press “go”. When you create your show in CueConductor you’re presented with a very simple layout - a big table, with cues down the left and external devices (we call them sinks) across the top. This view allows for complete transparency into what each device is doing, allowing you to troubleshoot if something goes differently to how you expect.

CueConductor also natively understands the concept of tracking, which is the idea that not every value is going to change in every cue, so values set in previous cues should “track” down the cuelist. These values are presented in an intuitive way to ensure an operator can see what devices are doing, while also understanding that those values have been tracked down.

But I like my current workflow

That’s totally fair! We understand that while the pitfalls of single go-buttons are frustrating, the reality is that working around them is worthwhile. That’s why CueConductor also has a concept called Sources. Sources are things that can trigger cues in CueConductor, such as OSC, MIDI, or even a separate cuelist on a separate device.

For example, many mixers are used to the ergonomics of using a single go-button on the console, and understandably so. Sources allow you to get the benefits of faster programming and greater observability without any workflow changes, because sources allow CueConductor to chase other cuelists. So in this example, you could program your show and have CueConductor watch the console for cues being fired over the network. When a cue is fired, CueConductor will see this and automatically fire its own cue of the same number, keeping the console in sync with itself.