☆ VENUE - BASICS

WORK IN PROGRESS

One of the things that makes Rock Band customs unique is the ability to create highly customizable stage shows for your charts. This page will help you understand how this works.

The stage show is authored in the VENUE track, allowing you to pick camera cuts, lights, post-processing and pyrotechnics.

This is primarily done via Reaper, using text events and some MIDI notes. The guides on the wiki will refer to this method primarily.

Add info here on how to do this and what program to use

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• Singalong Notes - Place these when you want other characters than the vocalist to also use lipsync animation. Be aware that if you have Harmonies authored, by default Guitar will always be HARM2, Bass will be HARM3 (or HARM1 if no HARM3 is charted), and Drums will be HARM1. Keys will take over for either Guitar or Bass's lipsync.

• Spotlights - These creates a spotlight at the desired character for the duration of the MIDI note. The spotlight takes a short moment to activate fully, so we recommend having them start a 16th triplet early to account for this.

• Text Events - Where you put most of the authoring for the venue.

Creating the venue is essentially like being a music video director and stage show programmer at the same time, with your goal being to make something that fits the song and makes for a better experience for players and spectators alike.

Here are some tips about how to achieve this:

• Camera cut density - A common trick in film making is to use quick changes in camera cuts for intense parts, and long drawn out shots for more mellow parts. This can be used to great effect to help match the mood of the song.

• Camera cut variety - Try and focus a little bit on everyone in the band across the song. Try mixing up which type of shots you use during repeating parts to make it feel more dynamic.

• Map out big camera moments first - Find out which moments of the song needs some big dynamic camera work, and then add filler shots between those to make the process easier.

• Play around with lights and post-processing - You can create some truly artistic and fantastic effects and colors using these. Just be careful about stuff like strobing lights and the red/blue post-proc filter, as to not give any photosensitive players a seizure.

• Take inspiration from official music videos and live recordings - Sometimes it can look real nice to try and recreate memorable visuals from real life performances of the song. Even if you can't recreate something 1:1, having an approximation of it can still serve as a fun reference and a good way to create the bedrock for your venue.

We will go into more detail about what each camera, light and post-proc event looks like in-game on their own respective pages.

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These MIDI notes will tell characters other than the lead vocalist to activate lipsync animations for the duration of them. By default everyone but the lead vocalist will instead do unrelated face animations while playing, hence why you need to specify this to the game.

There are three different MIDI notes for singalongs; guitarist, bassist and drummer. These do not decide who sings what however, it only activates their animations.

Depending on if you have just solo vocals, two-part harmonies or three-part harmonies, it changes who lipsyncs what part:

• Solo vocals - Everyone lipsyncs the same part
• Two-Part Harmonies - Guitarist lipsyncs HARM2, everyone else lipsyncs HARM1
• Three-Part Harmonies - Guitarist lipsyncs HARM2, Bassist lipsyncs HARM3, Vocalist Drummer lipsyncs HARM1

Keep these in mind when authoring your venue. You can also change this by editing the DTA, using the external MiloMod software bundled with ConTools.

You might have noticed we haven't mentioned Keys in all this, and well… this is where stuff gets complicated. Depending on your band lineup in-game, either Bass or Guitar singalong markers gets assigned to Keys instead:

• Guitar and Keys - Keys lipsyncs Bass singalong
• Bass and Keys - Keys lipsyncs Guitar singalong

Be sure to author the camera cuts in the venue to account for this, and keep things like stacking priorities in mind; Keys shots will always have priority over Guitar and Bass shots, for example.

This can be an absolute nightmare to deal with for songs with multiple lead vocalists, such as a song with several rappers having their own verses. In those cases, we recommend building a dummy file with just solo vocals or all parts on every harmony, then extracting the milo animation file using ConTools and using that instead, with both Guitar and Bass lipsync markers active. Use creative camera cuts to hide that both members are lipsyncing.

You can add pyrotechnics to your stage show using one of two text events:

• [bonusfx] - Makes the pyro go off
• [bonusfx_optional] - Only makes the pyro go off if you're in the green on your performance meter

Adding pyro can add a nice, dramatic flair to your venue, especially in Rock and Metal songs. Put them at the start of choruses, breakdowns, solos and wherever you want to make it pop. The pyro also goes off automatically at the end of a Big Rock Ending if you hit the final note, wether or not you have an event for it in the venue.

Pyro looks different between different stages, for example having firework sprinklers on smaller stages or huge fireballs on bigger ones.

Harmonix built a system that allows the game to automatically generate a venue for you, if no authored venue is found in your MIDI when building. HOWEVER:

Using autogenerated camera cuts or lights as a base to work off of is fine in moderation, but the wacky results you get from full autogen has that AI-generated stench all over it.

You can select which vague theme for it to use for this in Magma. For the love of all gods and deities there is, NEVER EVER use the “Aggressive Metal” theme, its pure eye strain.

Even a minimal, low effort custom venue is miles better than anything that can be auto-generated.