Recipe: Visibox for Cover and Tribute Bands
A Dozen Ideas to Amplify Audience Engagement
In the dynamic world of live music, cover and tribute bands hold a unique position. They recreate the essence of iconic acts, offering audiences a taste of nostalgia and a connection to music history. To elevate this experience, leveraging cutting-edge audiovisual technology like Visibox can transform a standard performance into an unforgettable event. Visibox, an audiovisual performance environment, allows musicians to control videos, images, cameras, and audio files seamlessly during live performances. Using MIDI, a guitarist or bassist could trigger videos with a foot pedal, a drummer could trigger with sticks, or a keyboard player could trigger with their fingers. This integration not only enhances the visual spectacle but also strengthens the memory association with the original artists.
Requirements
- A computer (probably a laptop) running macOS or Windows
- A video projector, television, or LCD display
- A MIDI controller (optional)
- Visibox
Planning Your Visual Strategy
First, you’re going to need to decide how you want to use Visibox. There are a lot of different ways that you may want to integrate visuals into your performance. Here are a bunch of ideas:
- Backdrops and Virtual Sets: Create a virtual stage for your band. You could have a different backdrop for each song, or you could have a single backdrop that changes over time. Virtual backdrops literally set the stage for your performance. Simple photos of the interior of The Cavern Club, Shea Stadium, Studio 54, The Fillmore, The Grand Ole Opry, The Apollo Theater, CBGBs, or The Royal Albert Hall, transport the audience and set an attitude and intention. Maybe you’ve got a country act and you want to set a country vibe, or perhaps something more urban sets the scene. You can also add motion to your otherwise sedentary performances as you roll down the road or fly through the sky.
- Brand Visuals: Enhance the brand of your band with motion graphics, logos, or other visuals that tell the audience who you are. These don’t need to do a lot. You don’t need your logo to be attracting too much attention to itself. But you’ve got an opportunity to remind the audience who you are and perhaps give them information on how to stay in touch with social media links or web URLs. Other than logos, there may be other signature or brand-specific imagery associated with your act. So keep that in mind too.
- Slides: You don’t necessarily need video content to create a compelling show. You can do a lot with still photos. Here again, we’re creating a vibe, telling a story, or triggering memories for the audience. Most of the photo management apps out there will create a video file from your digital photo albums. For more fine-grained timing, you can just drag your photos into Visibox and trigger them on the fly.
- Vibe Clips: These set a mood for your performance. Uplifting clouds. Heavy metal skulls. Disco balls. Soothing waters. Psychedelic weirdness. They can be short, looping clips, without much in the way of narrative to upstage the performers. This is a really easy way to set a mood and elevate a performance. Visibox has retriggering effects such as "stutter" to sync up “action-based” clips with the song.
- Original Band Footage: Capture signature imagery from the bands you’re covering. While putting up footage of the original band members may upstage your tribute, you might still be able to use iconic footage associated with the original band: music video clips, stage visuals, or movie clips associated with this music. Audiences like to get nostalgic. Bring them back to that experience where they discovered this music for the first time.
- Live Footage: Visibox lets you show live camera streams on the screen. It’ll show the camera from your laptop or a USB-connected camera. This is great if you want to show close-ups of performers during specific parts of songs. Focus on hands during a guitar or keyboard solo, or draw focus to something happening on stage. You can also aim the camera at the audience and encourage participation and reactions. When aiming the camera at the audience, be sure to choose Flip > Horizontal on the camera Clip. This will give the audience a mirrored “selfie”.
- Lyrics and Sing-Alongs: Even if you’re not playing to a click track, Visibox makes it easy to trigger specific Clips at specific times in your performance. “You are the dancing queen”, “I get knocked down, but I get up again, no you’re never gonna get me down”, “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go!” If you’re performing with backing tracks, you can put together a song-length video where the lyrics play in time with the music. But even if you’re performing more conventionally, you can simply trigger the lyrics at the correct time and they’ll usually stay enough in time with the song to get through a chorus or two. You can set these Clips up to auto-advance, so they won’t repeat when they’re finished. In Visibox, you can do this by selecting the “When Clip Ends” option and setting it to “Play Next Clip”.
- Narrative Visuals: This is all about storytelling. This is long-form content, that intentionally upstages the performer or causes interplay between the foreground and background on stage. Taylor Swift did this on Saturday Night Live recently, with a 10-minute movie that underscored her performance. Narrative visuals don’t necessarily need to be too linear. They can be a poem for the eyes. Think theatrically. Think about your favorite rock operas, musicals, or concept albums. If you are performing with backing tracks, you can create a single video file that contains both the audio and video. If you are performing conventionally and your tempos are usually pretty consistent and the content of your narrative video doesn’t need to be perfectly aligned with your performance, you may be able to get away with a single video file that plays for the duration of the song. But Visibox is particularly good at live-editing a video together, allowing you to advance to the next scene by stepping on a pedal or touching a button or pad with your finger or a drumstick. You can create clips for each scene or section of the song and either cut them longer than you expect that section of the song to be, or Visibox can just loop this Clip until you hit the button to advance to the next Clip. In this way, you’ve got a narrative video that is cut in time with the performance on stage and ends gracefully with the end of the song, even if you decide to improvise the song form a bit from night to night.
- Virtual Props, or Effects: Add explosions, fireworks, or smoke on stage without alerting the fire martial. How about a virtual flying pig for your Pink Floyd tribute? Need to put a virtual car on the stage? Some kind of props for your show? With Visibox these Clips can loop or you can set them as one-shots. And with MIDI control, you can trigger these exactly when you need them.
- Virtual Performers: How about a virtual duet? Or a virtual backing band? Or virtual guests that come in for some comedic interaction? To make this work you’ll usually need to sync up the on-stage action with the video rather than the other way around. This means backing tracks of one type or another. There are lots of examples of this type of thing out there, Paul McCartney with John Lennon, Tupak, Gorillaz… These are easier to create than you might think. Once you’ve got your backing tracks together, you can send them off to your collaborator who can perform their track in front of a smartphone. Then line up their phone footage in your video editing software. Or perhaps your footage becomes the backing track by itself - I’ve done this with virtual drummers or an entire virtual backing band. This can be really powerful, and elevate a show by expanding the scope and geography of a show beyond the walls of the venue.
- Dancers: Watching dancers makes people want to dance. It’s just human nature to want to join in with the action — even if that action is happening on a screen as part of the show. The dancing doesn’t need to be especially choreographed. It doesn’t even need to be particularly in time with the music on stage. That attitude and intent seems to be more important than synchronization. Our brains will fill in the timing gaps. Of course, if you’re performing with backing tracks, you can sync things up. But it’s less important than you might initially think.
- Interstitial Clips: This is probably a topic in and of itself. “Interstitial” refers to the stuff between the stuff. These are videos that happen between, before, or after the action on stage. While most of the Clips I’ve mentioned previously are silent, it’s totally appropriate for the interstitial Clips to upstage the performers. Your Beatles tribute band can come on stage to screaming black-and-white fan footage straight out of 1964. You can insert a tongue-in-cheek commercial, reminding people to buy your t-shirts and merch. You can distract people during costume or instrument changes with era-defining or nostalgic clips. You walk off stage and leave a QR code up to get people on your mailing list or social media.
Setting Up Your Visibox Project
Start by creating a new Project in Visibox. You can add multiple songs, each with its own set of media files. Visibox is set up like a set list with a chunky interface that’s easy to see from a distance on stage. Add Songs to your Project and then drag in your audio, video, or image files.
Each Song may have a single Clip or multiple Clips. You can mix and match these options. Put together your whole set list in Visibox, or just add a few songs to get started. You can always add more later.
Configuring Playback
Visibox’s default settings will probably work well, but you may want to make adjustments. Here are some things you might want to consider:
- Video Clip Looping And Retriggering - Visibox’s default setting is to loop video Clips. However, if the video runs the entire length of the song (and perhaps contains the backing track), you probably don’t want it to start over while you’re introducing the next song. In this case, select one or more Clips and right-click. Then select “When Clip Ends” and choose either “Stop” or “Cue Next Song”. This will stop the video when it ends and optionally cue the next song in your set list. You might also choose “When Retriggered” and select “Do Nothing” so that if you accidentally trigger the video again, it doesn’t start over.
- Volume Levels - If you’re using multiple video Clips, you can adjust their volume levels relative to one another. This is useful if you have a video with a loud soundtrack and another with a quiet soundtrack. You can also adjust the volume of the video relative to your backing tracks. To adjust the volume level of a video Clip, right-click on it and select “Volume”. To adjust the volume level of audio attached to a Song, right-click on the Song and select “Volume”.
- Audio End Behavior - If you’re using audio attached to a Song, you can set what happens when the audio ends. Right-click on the Song and select “When Audio Ends”. You can choose whether playing Clips will stop, cue the next Song, or play the next Song and keep the party going! This is useful if you’re using backing tracks and want to make sure the visuals end when the music ends. Cueing the next Song is useful because it’s one less button to push when you’re ready to start the next song.
Presenting and Performing
You can control Visibox using MIDI devices (pedals, pads, keyboards, etc), an Elgato Stream Deck, or just the keyboard and mouse on your laptop. You can use an external audio interface, or just plug your computer into the sound system. You can control Visibox from the stage, or have someone else control it from the front of the house.
With your visuals set up, you’re ready to perform. Visibox is designed to adapt your Project to most video projectors, monitors, LCDs, and televisions. Visibox will quickly adapt your input content to your output format, cropping, scaling, and adapting 4:3, 16:9, 16:10 and other aspect ratios to fit your output device.
- Place Your Computer - Place your computer on stage or at the front of the house. Laptops are generally better for this because they have built-in screens and a battery so you won’t need to reboot if the power gets unplugged. Put the laptop somewhere where you can see the screen and control it easily, but where it won’t get in the way of your performance.
- Connect The Video - Connect your computer to your video projector or LCD. This can usually be done with a simple HDMI connector, but you may need some adapters. Bring long cables because you never know where the video projector will be located.
- Connect The Audio - Connect your computer to the sound system. This can usually be done with a simple 1/8” to 1/4” adapter, but you may need some adapters. Bring long cables for this too!
Tips
- Test, Test, Test: Test your setup in a variety of environments. You may not know what kind of video projector or sound system you’ll be working with. You may need to adjust your settings on the fly.
- Bring A Backup: Bring a backup computer, video projector, and sound system if you can. If you can’t, at least bring a backup of your media files on a USB stick. You never know when something will go wrong.
- Practice: Practice your performance with the visuals. You may need to adjust your performance to fit the visuals, or vice versa. You may need to adjust your lighting to make the visuals look better. You may need to adjust Visibox’s settings or even re-edit your videos to make everything work together. You often won’t know what needs to change until you’re actually in the midst of it all.