The From Studio to Stage Secret Master Plan
The secret master plan (just between you and me)
Will Doggett — June 2026
Table of Contents
- Where We Started
- The Real Problem
- The Plan
- The Software: Pliris
- The Infrastructure Nobody Sees
- Where Pliris Is Going
- The Education Platform
- Who This Is For
- How One Person Builds This
- The Short Version
Where We Started
Eight years ago, From Studio to Stage launched with a simple mission: help artists and bands get their show from the studio to the stage.
The original plan was straightforward: a subscription community, a new course every month, templates to speed up the process, and regular calls to answer questions and build community. Over the years we experimented with different formats for teaching, but the teaching revealed the same thing.
No matter how good the framework, no matter how simplified the process was, the student was still left with lots to do to create a great show. Connecting multiple apps, lots of admin and management... and you thought you got into music to avoid those things!
That insight changed everything.
The Real Problem
Death by a thousand edits
Here's what nobody talks about in the playback world.
Programming a show takes an enormous amount of time. Coordinating stems, arrangements, timecode values, band parts, production files....
It's a lot of info, scattered across multiple apps. It all lives in a dozen different places, passed around through emails and unsecured links.
And when the artist changes their mind, which they always do, someone is up all night making it work, while probably swearing under their breath.
The Problem of Scale
The playback engineer who wants to grow their career is caught in a trap. Taking on more clients means more hours, not more leverage. The artist who can't afford a full-time engineer is stuck either doing it badly or not doing it at all. And the system as a whole is designed around a workflow that hasn't fundamentally changed in twenty years.
I think there's a better way.
The Plan
The goal for the next three years for From Studio to Stage is straightforward:
- Reduce programming time by 90% or more
- Reduce rehearsal time by 50% or more
- Eliminate the all-nighters required to handle last-minute changes
When programming time approaches zero, a playback engineer can serve 10x the clients they serve today without burning out.
When rehearsal time drops in half, you can spend more time doing the actual work, and less time waiting 15 minutes for each edit.
When the system is built for change instead of against it, creativity can flourish and you can create the show of your dreams.
I'm going to accomplish this through two things: software and education. They're more connected than they might seem.
The Software: Pliris
About a year into searching for a better way to track and store arrangements, I ended up building exactly what I needed in a weekend with a little help from AI.
What started as a vibe-coded database experiment has become a platform I genuinely can't imagine doing my job without.
Pliris is the key to achieving those three goals in the next three years.
Pliris launched with eight apps:
For programming: Bands — the original app, the database for storing files, rehearsing, and communicating with your band.
For live performance: Lyrics, Video, and Presets — a confidence monitor, a video playback app, and a MIDI programming tool. Over the past year I've used them across more than sixty shows to simplify and scale up my impact.
Utilities: LTC, Cues, Monitor, and Transfer — tools for generating timecode files, song slates, monitoring your rig, and moving files between computers.
But the most important part of Pliris isn't any of these apps. It's what you can't see.
The Infrastructure Nobody Sees
Pliris is built around a shared data structure: what I call the pipes.
When you add a song to Bands, that song and its arrangement become visible to every other app. Let your band rehearse and learn their parts, program their MIDI preset changes in Bands. Add that song to a setlist and it shows up in Lyrics, Video, and Presets. Upload stems and timecode values are automatically assigned. Timed lyrics are generated. Every department has everything they need from the same single source of truth.
When I introduced Pliris to a bootcamp cohort, it turned six weeks of curriculum into a single step: upload your files. Pliris transforms every aspect of a playback engineer's workflow.
Where Pliris Is Going
Without giving away too much, here's the direction.
First: finish the pipes. The data structure is built for change: songs, arrangements, setlists, all of it designed around the reality that things will change constantly and the system should support that, not fight it. The server-side infrastructure will expand to handle audio analysis, arrangement processing, and set programming in the background, continuously, without requiring anything from the user.
Second: make getting content in effortless. The goal is a local entry point so seamless that adding a file to Pliris is no different from moving a file on your computer. And downloading what you need should be just as simple.
Third: simplify live performance. Playback, video, lighting, MIDI: all of it already works. The next step is making the connections between them automatic, so the process of connecting playback to your production is easier. And responding to changes faster, keeping everything in sync across the whole production, and making sure every update flows back to Pliris effortlessly, whether you're in rehearsal or mid-show.
Fourth: solve the beginning of the workflow. Before programming comes capture. How does a music director take what was recorded in the studio and translate it into a live arrangement? Imagine being able to effortlessly capture rehearsals and instantly get updated audio in Pliris.
The Education Platform
Alongside the software, Playback Academy is being rebuilt from the ground up.
Not wider. Deeper.
The Playback Method: the first of its kind in the world, and as far as I'm aware, still the only curriculum on playback covering everything a world-class playback engineer needs to know, is being re-recorded and redesigned. Anyone who walks through it will be able to walk onto any stage in the world, ready to respond in the moment, knowing the why behind every decision, and going far beyond pressing spacebar.
The legacy courses aren't going anywhere, for now. But there won't be new courses. The focus is on rebuilding and maintaining the Playback Method, and enhancing it with guides, coaching, and the ability to ask questions and get instant answers.
The second evolution is Playback LLM: built by training on every piece of content From Studio to Stage has ever created. Twenty years of frameworks, tutorials, and hard-won experience, now available the moment you need it.
What does that mean practically? It means you can ask a question and get an instant answer drawn from that entire body of knowledge: not a Google search, not a Reddit thread, not a YouTube rabbit hole. It means you can initiate a real coaching session and be coached through a problem in real time. It means that hour-long course you never had time to watch becomes an easy-to-scan, step-by-step guide you can follow in the moment.
The knowledge has always been there. Playback LLM just makes it actually accessible.
Third: bootcamps are becoming certification programs. The first-ever certified playback engineers: people who share a common curriculum, know Pliris inside and out, and have the backing of this community. This creates a new kind of career path. Not just doing shows, but building systems, coaching artists, and running a business doing work you love.
Who This Is For
Pliris and Playback Academy are built for two groups of people.
Playback engineers who want to grow. Managing multiple artists is now possible in the time it took you to manage one artist. Programming that takes seconds, not hours. The ability to adapt to arrangement changes mid-rehearsal without rebuilding from scratch. More clients, more leverage, less overhead.
Artists and bands who want control. Small to mid-size acts who understand they need playback but can't afford a full-time engineer. With Pliris, they can handle the programming themselves, communicate confidently with contractors, and never have to hold their creativity hostage to someone else's schedule.
Both groups share the same need: a system built for change. One that doesn't punish you for having a new idea at sound check.
How One Person Builds This
Four things.
Weekly releases. Every Monday, Pliris ships new features, bug fixes, and refinements. Release, feedback, iterate, release. Every week.
Tiny experiments. Not every idea becomes a permanent feature. Some are web apps. Some are desktop apps. Some are simple utilities that focus on one task. Some survive. Some get removed. Most get consolidated into something better. The goal is never to build the perfect product before anyone sees it.
Co-creation with customers. Not every requested feature gets built. The goal isn't to build everything: it's to deeply understand how people work and build the things that will actually change that. Weekly communication with paying customers, not building based on social media comments. Real listening, and a clear enough vision to know what belongs.
Build the agents that run the business. The goal isn't to automate everything: it's to use AI for what it's genuinely best at, so I can focus on what only I can do. The agents handle the repeatable work. That frees me to show up for the conversations, the coaching, and the moments that actually matter.
The Short Version
- Build the infrastructure for live performance that nobody else has built
- Use that infrastructure to make programming time approach zero
- Use the time saved to help more artists get to the stage
- Build the education platform that trains the next generation of engineers
That's the plan as far as I know it. Don't let the secret out.
Will