Our VIP Wristbands
If you’ve been to one of our recent shows, and especially if you ordered tickets online, you may have noticed an option for the VIP wristbands. These are white bracelets that glow in coordination with our lights at the Brass Mash shows. What are those about? How do they work? Colin Dean, our band leader, took a minute with me to explain the ins and outs of this unique feature.
“The idea is that the audience is part of the light show and they’re going to have these wristbands all blink along,” says Colin. “I really try to make the light show match the music. Like, for a really fun song, it lights up really bright. For ‘Smells Like Church,’ I try to make the stage look like a church with stained glass windows. I really think about the lighting design, so to include the audience in that - or have contrast against us. Like for ‘Fireflies,’ I made sure that everyone’s wristbands went absolutely nuts, with crazy blinking white lights. For a slow song, they would go blue. For the Nirvana song, it would do this blue-green thing like in the music video. So including the audience in that, I think it’s a really fun extra layer.”
We love a glowy thing!
Where did this idea come from? I (Stephanie) had never heard of a light show-coordinated wristband. I wore the inaugural, experimental wristband at the Rib Line in January and at the end I thought, “Okay, neat. But why?” Colin explains, “I was watching a video about Taylor Swift. Because I’m a technical guy, I just really like to know how everything works. If you look at these Taylor Swift shows, they can control the audience wristbands to create shapes. I remember thinking…that’s wild. I figured out how they did it and it was really cool. I thought, I don’t know if we can do that.
“So I went on a super Internet deep dive, and I finally found this Chinese company that manufactures them. Through all sorts of translated emails, we came to an agreement and I bought the box. There’s a box I have to connect to the light system to make everything blink and work. Now every couple of months I have to order a big palette of these things from China.”
“It’s something that nobody else in this area is doing,” Colin continues. “It’s just another thing that’s cool about Brass Mash. It was very secret - I was like, ‘Oh, this is such a good idea, I don’t want to tell anyone about it.’ I can tell you all my friends who are into technical stuff were like, ‘You’re doing what?’
“People want to be able to plan out their night,” says Colin. “If they want to come to Liquid Gravity, and the tables are sold out, we have this VIP pass that allows people to put their name on the list. It’s guaranteed entry, and it comes with this light-up bracelet. I suspect that as people get more used to it, we’ll have more people with more bracelets out there. I think people are going to have more fun on the dance floor.”
An important note - we like to re-use these! Colin explains, “The wristbands only work at a Brass Mash show. It pretty much just blinks until it dies, you can’t even turn it off when you get home. I encourage people to please drop it off in our basket on the way out…We will sanitize them, change the batteries, shut them down and use them for a future show. It’s electronic, it’s plastic. Just like a pair of 3-D glasses at the end of a 3-D movie -you don’t need 3-D glasses in real life, and you don’t need this wristband when you’re at home.”
“As our band grows, and our players dedicate more time to it, we’re going to eventually need to raise our prices. This is a way that we can do that, and offer our audience something really interesting and special.”