How Soapbox lets artists really explore the studio space

Betting on the future of music in augmented reality

This is a commercial for the launch of the Soapbox app for Meta Quest. Soapbox is a music company, so please read on even if you don’t know anything about augmented reality, the Meta Quest, or the Apple Vision Pro. The Soapbox display technology is going to develop and improve incredibly quickly, so keep in mind that the actual performances captured in the studio are what’s important for the future.

Rather than try to explain how this works in the lede, I’m going to offer some context before I try to dig into how this all works. There will be video and a link for Meta Quest owners to sign up for a few beta test slots and to get an alert once the app goes live in a few weeks.

For now, imagine the experience of being able to walk right up to your favorite artists as they perform right in front of you. You can get an up close view of their fingers on a fretboard or walk around and look over their shoulder as they play a song or tell a story.

This is nothing like the ABBA show that’s been running in London and a million light years beyond the artificially-generated Tupac hologram that appeared onstage at Coachella in 2012. These are real performances by the actual artists preserved forever.

Buddy Guy captured live at Soapbox in 2023.

What is Soapbox?

For the past few years, I’ve been working as an advisor to Soapbox founders Kevin and Ryan Sellors, the most talented brother duo from Marietta since Chris and Rich Robinson of the Black Crowes. Kevin is a gifted producer and recording engineer who realized that continuing to operate a full-service recording studio wasn’t going to provide much financial security, and Ryan is a talented entrepreneur who was looking for a project that could have a long-term impact.

Kevin and Ryan saw the practical potential in augmented reality at time when people were mostly just talking about what was going to happen someday, and they understood how the technology could offer artists a new way to communicate, something far beyond anything we’ve seen before.

I’m going to try to explain what’s happening now, but it’s really hard to fully understand what’s going on until you actually see how it works. Fortunately, anyone with access to the current generations of Meta headsets can give it a try.

Over the course of several years, the company raised money to build a studio outside of Atlanta and recruit artists to film and record at Soapbox. Here’s what happens there.

Once our pants are on, we make gold records

Soapbox is a recording studio where the main tracking room is painted green and outfitted with 48 4K cameras that simultaneously capture all the action inside a 15-foot circle.

Because there’s no overdubbing or editing of the visual performance, the master-quality audio recordings are something far more akin to early stereo recording. It’s all about microphone placement and creating an environment where a musician can deliver a pure performance that’s far removed from the digital perfection that was forced onto artists after the rise of digital recording.

Once the performance is complete, the 48 video streams are processed into a single 3D image that captures the performance from every angle. A substantial part of the company’s budget has gone into refining the software that processes the images and then building an app that displays the performance in space.

We’re making records here. When potential investors ask what’s to stop someone else from buying some cameras and some software and cutting into Soapbox’s business, I always remind them that it’s the creative production that sets Soapbox apart from a tech company. This is a production studio that’s staffed by creative people who know how to work alongside artists to capture the best performances possible.

There’s quite a bit of technological secret sauce that’s also in the mix, and the Soapbox team has a far more detailed understanding of the issues involved in rendering video images and bringing them to users than a random startup could possibly acquire in time to catch up with what the company has been so carefully developing over the past few years.

Buddy Guy sends us back to schooling

Buddy Guy was the first major artist to visit Soapbox, and he recorded seven solo songs on electric and acoustic guitar before sharing some amazing stories about his career. In the beta version of the Soapbox app, you can see Buddy perform “King Bee” and hear a story about how the young British blues gunslinger guitarists traveled to Chicago to hear him play in the mid-’60s.

The tracks are spectacular, and I’m willing to bet that they’ll be released someday as audio-only LP, CD, and streaming files. It’s a great Buddy Guy record, laid down in about an hour in the most old school manner imaginable.

Seeing these performances in a room is breathtaking. Soapbox realized that this was a new way to introduce digital native kids to the history of music, so the company has been developing an education curriculum that will put Meta Quest headsets into schools starting this fall.

What’s a Meta Quest?

The Meta Quest is the consumer VR/AR headset from Meta, the company that also owns Facebook. You can buy the current generation Meta Quest 3 for around $500 or the previous generation Meta Quest 2 for around $240. The Meta Quest Pro retails for around $1000, but the newer Quest 3 is a better overall headset.

If you heard about the Oculus Rift back when that device was supposed to take VR mainstream, know that Facebook bought the Oculus technology just before Mark Zuckerberg rebranded the main company as Meta.

Soapbox is focusing on augmented reality (AR) which involves putting an image in your actual surroundings. In some ways it’s the opposite of VR, which aims to put you into a completely artificial reality.

The current Meta Quest headsets represent a staggering improvement over the earlier (and over-hyped) versions of the augmented and virtual reality. At the same time, they’re just a suggestion of what the technology will become over the next few years. Things are getting better very quickly and headsets from Meta, Apple, and Magic Leap will seem absurdly primitive as the projection technology improves.

The Soapbox Beta App

This video is an early demo of the upcoming Soapbox app for Meta Quest. You can get an idea of the touch interface and see a performance from Buddy Guy and Memphis May Fire lead singer Matty Mullins. You can also catch a glimpse of T-Pain at the beginning of the video.

Memphis May Fire came to the studio and each member mimed along to their song “Misery.” They took those individually rendered members and used Unreal Engine to place the band in an incredibly artificial environment for the “Misery” video.

The core concept for Soapbox is live performance capture, but we’re also experimenting with artists who want to perform alongside prerecorded tracks. The artist who’s most taken with the concept has been T-Pain, who filmed a performance of his new single “Dreaming” and then took the files and made his own video.

In addition to all those hit records, T-Pain has become known as an entrepreneur and new technology enthusiast. He’s released a video about the making of the “Dreaming” clip and included some great footage of his experience at Soapbox.

What I love about this clip is how it conveys the artist-first experience that Soapbox aims to provide for anyone who walks in. Not every artist will want to create the kind of historically accurate clips that we’ve created with artists like Buddy Guy, Diego Torres, Ralph Johnson from Earth, Wind & Fire, Kevn Kinney from Drivin’ N’ Cryin’, Ed Roland from Collective Soul, Seth Tiven from Dumptruck, and Abe Partridge.

I’m looking forward to working with performers who aren’t interested in a perfect capture and want to find ways to break the processing technology to create something that no one has seen before. No one at Soapbox is locked into a fixed idea about what this technology should be. The whole idea is to give a new tool into creative people, and see what happens.

We’ve conducted some successful experiments with a full five-piece band. For the moment, the files are just too massive to be crunched down for Meta Quest distribution, but I can testify that the experience of walking between members of a band that’s fully rocking out will be amazing once the display technology catches up.

Soapbox has dates booked with a growing list of artists, both legendary names you know and up-and-coming performers who’ve been making a splash. I’m not naming names until the sessions are complete, but word’s getting around and Soapbox will be rolling out amazing performances all year.

If you’re an artist who’d like to film at Soapbox or just work with one, let me know and I’ll hook you up with the booking team.

Sign up for the beta here. Make sure you tell them you heard about Soapbox from Stars After Stars After Stars.

You have questions

Ok, I tried to anticipate what people might ask in the comments. Here’s my best guess.

Why didn’t Soapbox make the app for the Apple Vision Pro?

The Apple Vision Pro version is coming soon. When Soapbox engineers figured out how to make the app work on the Meta Quest, the company recognized that launching on an established platform with a $500 headset was going to get the music into the hands of a lot more people than focusing an Apple unit with a price that starts at $3500 and goes up quickly from there.

When the Apple Vision Pro version launches, I expect that the images will look even better than they do on the Meta Quest.

I am never, ever going to wear a headset. Why should I care?

I can’t emphasize this enough: These headsets are a transition technology designed to prove that the basic concept works. Over the next few years, the headset versions may get small enough that you’ll wear something that looks a lot more like sunglasses. I’m betting that there will also be projection technology that works from a projector that sits on the floor or in an overhead light fixture. No glasses required.

On the downside, guys like Elon Musk probably want to implant a chip that will jack into your eye circuits. Proceed with that at your own peril.

No one loves the headsets, but we’re on a mission to capture artists while they’re alive with the assurance that we’ll be able to reformat the video for any future display technology as it’s invented.

My Meta Quest speakers suck. Why are you putting so much effort into the audio recording?

Audio playback may be an afterthought for Meta, but there will soon be a world where the audio is just as good or better than the visuals. Soapbox will have a catalog of master-quality music performances that no one else can match.

What are the real world applications for these videos now?

Watching an artist perform in your living room is an amazing experience, but we’re also in discussions with several music museums about providing content for exhibits that can exist today. Soapbox’s education platform is especially exciting to me, because it’s using new technology to introduce kids to the history of music. Arts education has not been a priority in public schools for at least a generation, and I’m hoping Soapbox can contribute to the fight to inject creativity back into our education system.

T-Pain’s “Dreaming”

T-Pain isn’t just a recording artist. He’s an entrepreneur who hosted the show T-Pain’s School of Business on Fuse. He appeared as Monster on the first season of Fox’s The Masked Singer and won the competition by using his real voice without the advanced Autotune that had become his signature style.

He’s also the producer and director of “Dreaming,” plus the guy who dug into the rendering software and acted as a true hands-on creative through the entire process. T-Pain brings endless enthusiasm to his work and he’s an artist who sees technology and changing times as a way to explore new avenues for his creativity.

T-Pain’s energy has been both infectious and inspirational. He’s welcome to visit Soapbox anytime he wants.

8-track of the day

I like to think that David Bowie would have loved Soapbox.