Giving the band a stage display from your Pro Tools rig
The band is playing to a click and to stems. That means every player on stage has surrendered a piece of their own judgement to a machine in the booth, and the only thing you can give back is information: where we are, what's coming, how long.
Most rigs give them a click and nothing else. This is about closing that gap using what you already own.
What musicians actually need to see
Ask an operator and you get a long list. Ask the band after the show and it collapses to four things:
- What song is this. Sounds absurd. It is not — in a 20-song set with a changed running order, at song 14, after two encores of rehearsal, "what are we playing" is a real question, and it is a question the drummer cannot ask.
- Where are we in it. Section name is usually enough. Verse, chorus, the bit before the drop.
- How many bars until the next thing. This is the one that changes performances. A count of bars remaining lets a player arrive at a section instead of reacting to it.
- What's next. During a talk break, the drummer wants to know the next tempo and the next song, and they want to know it without turning around.
What they do not need, and what actively hurts: timecode, file names, error messages, connection status, anything red that they cannot act on. A musician who sees a technical warning on stage now has a problem they cannot solve and a performance to deliver. Everything diagnostic belongs in the booth.
That principle is worth stating as a rule, because every method below either respects it or doesn't: the stage screen shows the performance, the booth screen shows the machine.
Three free ways to put a screen up
1. Mirror the Pro Tools edit window
The zero-effort version: run a second display to the stage and drag the Pro Tools window onto it, zoomed so the marker ruler and playhead fill the screen.
It works, in the narrow sense that the band sees the playhead move.
What is wrong with it: your mouse cursor is on stage. Every menu you open is on stage. Marker names are rendered at a size designed to be read from 60cm away, not 6m. There is no "how many bars left". And the moment you need to look at something in the session, the band's only reference disappears out from under them. Fine for a rehearsal room, not fine for a paying audience.
2. OBS window capture, cropped and scaled
Significantly better and still free. OBS Studio can capture the Pro Tools window, crop to just the region you care about — the marker ruler and playhead, or the Memory Locations window — scale it up to fill a display, and output it full-screen through Projector (Fullscreen) to the stage monitor.
Why this beats mirroring: you can crop out everything that isn't useful, scale text to legible size, put it on a black background, and keep working in Pro Tools without the stage view changing.
What it still cannot do: bar counts, "what's next", per-song information, or anything conditional. It is a magnifying glass, not a display. It also costs CPU on the machine that must not glitch, which some engineers will not accept on principle — if you go this way, put OBS on a second machine capturing an HDMI output rather than on the playback Mac.
3. A slide deck someone advances by hand
Keynote or PowerPoint, one slide per song, big type: number, title, tempo, key. Full-screen on the stage display, advanced by a person.
Do not dismiss this. It gives the band the two most-needed items (what song, what tempo), it never crashes, and it survives every technical failure in the rig because it is not connected to anything.
Its cost is exactly one thing: a person, all night, whose only job is to not lose their place. That person costs more per show than any software, and they are the single point of failure — when they miss a change, the screen is now actively lying to the band, which is worse than a blank screen.
Placement, brightness and sightlines
Whatever you put on the screen, most of the value is decided by where the screen is.
- Drummer first. They are furthest from the front, most locked to the click, and the least able to turn around. If there is only one screen, it goes where the drummer can see it without moving their head off the kit.
- Eye height, not floor. A screen on the floor is a screen nobody looks at after song three.
- Brightness is a show-look problem. A 100%-brightness monitor upstage is a lamp. It shows up in photos, it shows up on camera, and the LD will ask you to turn it off. Being able to dim it — properly dim it, not turn it off — is what keeps it in the show.
- Dark background, light text. Always. A bright screen behind a performer silhouettes them.
- Assume it will be looked at for half a second at a time. Anything that takes two seconds to read is decoration.
Reaching every player without six monitors
Here is where the free methods run out of road. One screen is a drummer solution. Six players who each want a different amount of information is a different problem, and monitors, arms, cabling and power for each of them is real money and real load-in time.
The way around it is that every musician already brings a screen: their phone. If the display can be delivered as a web page over the local network, the setup cost per player drops to "scan this, leave the tab open."
This is not exotic — it is a small HTTP server on the show Mac and a router. If you are handy, you can build a rough version yourself: a script that reads position and writes a JSON file, a page that polls it, a phone on the same Wi-Fi. Plenty of engineers have built exactly that. Budget a weekend, plus a second weekend for the reconnect logic when the venue Wi-Fi dips, plus a third for keeping the phone screen awake.
Two hard-won details if you do build it: it needs its own router, not the venue network — a small dedicated access point in the rack, no uplink required — and the page must freeze rather than blank when the connection drops. A player reading a frozen screen behaves correctly for several seconds. A player reading a black screen has already stopped trusting it.
What we built
Prossible is the version of all of this that we ship, because we were doing the OBS thing and got tired of it.
It reads your Pro Tools memory locations over PTSL and follows position over MTC, then renders the stage display the band actually needs: song title, song-form timeline, section name, bars remaining, next song, tempo, key. What appears and where is yours to arrange — there is a layout editor, two starting presets (one timeline-focused, one built for the drummer), and you can save your own.
The booth/stage split above is built in as a rule, not a preference: technical errors never appear on the stage screen, they appear on the operator panel. If the connection drops, the stage display holds its last frame and only a small status dot in the corner changes. There is a master dimmer with 15–100% range, adjustable during the show, that never goes fully dark. Per-song count-in bars are a right-click away for the moment the drummer says the number doesn't match their chart.
On the Pro tier, the same display is served to phones and tablets over the local network — up to 24 devices at once, in any modern browser, nothing to install for the band. Each device can choose which layout it looks at. It works entirely offline; a router with no internet uplink is exactly right. Access is PIN-protected by default, viewers are read-only, and you can approve exactly one device — normally your own phone — for transport control.
Requirements: macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon, on the same Mac as Pro Tools 2023.6 or later with PTSL.