On Sunday, I played a set on the Do Lab stage at Coachella with my friend Wolfie and was once again reminded of the difficulties presented by playing in bright sunlight. Not only does the computer screen become difficult to see, the LEDs on your controller can become washed out as well.
There are a few things you can do to help with this problem. Today, I’ll start out with one of the less obvious ones: enlarge the mouse pointer. Even if you’ve got everything in your set MIDI mapped, the mouse is a great backup – especially if gigging conditions make it difficult to see what’s going on with your controller & screen.
On today’s high-resolution monitors, the mouse pointer tends to be pretty tiny so you can lose sight of it easily in difficult conditions. In OS X, the solution is in the Universal Access pane of System Preferences. In the Mouse & Trackpad section, you’ll see something like this:
Crank it up from Normal to Large, and you’re in business. Sorry PC users, I don’t know the method for doing this under Windows, but it oughta be possible. If you know, lemme know.
