Today, a test of VS Visual Synthesizer on my little laptop. This was made in Ableton Live 11 Suite using the VS Visual Synthesizer plug-in, which is currently on sale for about 60% off, so I figured I should try it out to see if it would be useful as a part of my plan for world domina… er … future live performances.
!!!WARNING: VIDEO CONTAINS FLASHING AND PULSING IMAGES!!!
The Live set is a psuedo-generative track consisting of three MIDI tracks driving VSTs including a custom bass sound made up of two layered basses and a couple of layered effects racks, an Ableton electric piano, and a simple pad made in Vital, as well as a couple of drum clips. The visualizer is driven by the bass (one of the “squares” layers), electric piano (which is driving three layers of circles and squiggles!), and pad (another layer of squares). The laptop, which runs Windows 11 on a Ryzen 3 processor with on-chip graphics, was pretty much driven to the limit to produce this, but it hung in without a single stutter — pretty impressive, considering it sold for less than $400USD and was really not intended to be used for music making.
Video capture was on my desktop PC, which runs Windows 10 on a Ryzen 5 2600, using an Elgato HD60 S and Elgato’s own Game Capture software. In the future, I’ll test using a Blackmagic ATEM Mini Pro to simultaneously capture and stream.
I still need to figure out how to make the Windows window title bar go away when live-rendering the video, but I’m thinking this is going to be great for background video for projection, and also so I can have something other than a still graphic when I post music to the web or do a live stream.