The real impact of xLights can be found in its music sequencing tools. 

Now that we've done our setup and our mapping, it's time to play! Create a new sequence and choose "musical sequence". Keep it 20fps for better rendering. Choose a song that moves you: I prefer songs with visual imagery in the lyrics to make it easy to come up with animations for the different parts of the song.

I started out using "Girl on Fire" by Alicia Keys. xLights has a "Fire" animation that can be made music reactive (click the "grow with music" checkbox) so it was a lot of fun to make my different costume pieces "burn" in time to the song. 

There is so much that can be done using just the fire effect. Things I found that were very effective:

• Stagger the start and end times over the three pieces so they come on one after the next
• Switch between running the animation individually and running it on the group
• Turn it upside down! Or make it burn left to right
• Change the hue slider to have the fire change colors
• Have all the pieces go dark and then come on with the beat / hook
• Don't change animations too fast - give your audience time to take it in