General Music Chat

Are you looking for a piece of software you can use to project responsive graphics behind you on stage during a performance? Like a media player but totally geared to your look and sound?

You can use your own band logos and images. All you need is a PC and projector. It looks fantastic.

You can use lots of different effects and visuals for each song in your set PLUS you can make it respond LIVE to your sound the way you want it to.

You can get it for £39 - it is well worth the money and will really enhance
your gigs.

You can get it on ebay at the moment. Search for "Audio Visual Performer"

Want one? Let me know your opinion.

Check it out :

First ever version:
http://www.grahamreed.co.uk/WebAVP

New COBALT version pics:

While I believe that this software is relevant and quite useful to the extensively touring bands, there are a bunch of free alternatives out there. They may not have a fancy GUI, but they do the work.
Good luck

Hi - do you have some examples of these free versions?

Google is your friend.
All you need is a few ready-made looping GIFs and you're good to go. Usually musicians don't go around making their own background visuals. It's usually ready-made and found on the web or so.

Interesting.

If you do use gif's what do you use to chain them together during a performance? How do you play them? AVP sets up everything for a set for a gig so can easily recall what you need.

AVP does not use up any disk space - it actually uses gif's/jpg's as it's basis - the difference being that it can manipulate them in response to sound. There are no large AVI/WMV files involved. (You could have your band logo responding to sound if you wish)

The reason I came up with this software was because I have been gigging
for many years and recently have done more solo gigs using sequenced
keyboards. I needed a visual tool.

AVP also responds to frequencies, so low frequencies such as the bass guitar will make it do different things and high frequencies e.g. symbols will cause it to react differently again - this can all be set up by the performer.

It is really powerful as I can make it react to my guitar during a solo. It just adds an extra dimension for your audience.

Good to hear your comments though.

That's quite nice.
In my (intermediate) experience in programming, I found that speech/sound stimulation isn't as responsive as you would expect it to. It's down to what range of sounds that this program accepts as input and ultimately execute an action based on the input.

It's definitely interesting.. good luck

The new breed of projectors
http://www.projectorcentral.com/

For use with a laptop connected can do wonders. I've not done this myself but with a history in graphics I'm sure even someone with some knowledge can create a backdrop to awe people.

They are basically a gif slide show that blend together which makes an image, gifs are the animations we saw before the arrival of flash which I think will always be the better medium.

the input based on what you do interests me but I think any good coordinated band with a bit of imagination could do just the same provided the set were set in stone.

Thanks for your comments!
Certainly there are other ways to do this kind of stuff - but I still think mine is fairly unique (I would say that!) -

Perhaps the screencasts on You tube e.g.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=AR03YcCu4fs
will illustrate it better (You tube video quality is rubbish)
Search for 'GrahamPReed' on youtube if you want to view other screencasts.(there are a fair few)

I think it is pretty unique in the way that you tell it how to respond to sound.
I think it also has applications in the audio sensory field too.