Maestro VR

Maestro VR puts you in the role of an orchestra conductor. You conduct by moving both hands independently: either can keep the beat, cue a section, shape a crescendo or hold the orchestra on a fermata with a closed fist. You can also leave one hand still or have both hands mirror the same pattern. Gestures have musical meanings, and you can choose how much guidance the game provides.

Conducting modes

• Rehearsal: Practise without an audience, money or pressure. In Full Run, play a piece from beginning to end, mute the strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion or choir, and use the metronome. In Free rehearsal, stop and restart the orchestra with voice commands. You must rehearse a piece before premiering it.
• Performance: Conduct for a paying audience, with ticket revenue, critics and your reputation at stake. If the orchestra loses confidence in you, the performance falls apart.
• Pro Performance: Conduct with greater density and no visual aids.
• Concert: Arrange several pieces into a programme and conduct them in one evening, with intermissions, applause and a single verdict at the end.

A screen setting changes how cues appear. With the stage screen on, a large display guides you. With it off in Performance, cues float in 3D space around you; with it off in Pro, the score on your stand is your only guide.

Rehearse and study scores

In Free rehearsal, voice commands let you stop the orchestra at the current bar, jump to a specified bar, bring it back in on your downbeat or restart from the beginning. Rehearsal has no XP, medals or game over. Offline voice recognition supports 12 languages, needs no internet connection or account, and listens only for its own commands; nothing you say leaves your PC.

Levels can include the complete score as an open book on your stand. You can turn its pages by hand and raise, lower or tilt the stand. Use a graphite, red or blue pencil, or a highlighter, to mark breaths, entries and dynamics. Notes are saved for each score and appear in every mode, including performances.

Concert programmes

Build a programme of up to 16 pieces, set their order, choose where the audience applauds and name the concert. You can allow applause between movements of the same work, but it is not included by default. Choose from halls that can seat the orchestra for the entire programme.

The evening runs from start to finish, with intermissions between pieces, audience reactions and one set of results for the whole concert. Critics reward programmes that are coherent, such as those focused on one composer or period, as well as varied programmes. Longer concerts can sell more expensive tickets. You can publish programmes on the Steam Workshop and download other players’ concerts from within the headset.

The orchestra and halls

The orchestra includes 38 instruments and voices across strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion and choir, with up to nearly 100 musicians on stage at once. Each musician plays an individual part, with movements such as bowing, fingering, vibrato, pizzicato, col legno and tremolos. Percussionists alternate hands and vary their striking force with the music. Musicians look between the score, your baton and the audience; a badly cued musician can lose focus, stop playing and take time to regain confidence.

There are 11 venues, each with its own acoustics, reverberation, capacity and economics. They range from a chamber room and rehearsal hall to symphonic auditoriums, a cathedral with a long reverberant sound, and a modern hall with a cinema screen for live film concerts. When a piece suits more than one hall, you choose where to premiere it, which also determines the rent, risk and potential reward. The audience’s physical size reflects how many people you attract. Applause grows with the crowd, standing ovations spread from the front rows to the back, and a collapsed performance can draw boos. After a great performance, you can point to the concertmaster and raise the orchestra for an ovation.

Build a conducting career

You begin as an aspirant with a cheap baton and no money, and earn everything else. Gestures earn experience points, with streaks, multipliers and bonuses. Your honorary ranks are Aspirant, Assistant, Associate, Principal, Maestro, Resident and Emeritus. Your reputation ranges from zero to five stars, rising or falling with performances and reviews; as you become more famous, musicians charge more.

Each piece has four musical notes to earn: for completing its rehearsal, Performance, Pro Performance and Virtuoso interpretation. Virtuoso requires a flawless performance without a single mistake. Notes can be upgraded from Cyan to Green to Gold.

Talents and techniques

The talent tree has almost 50 talents across three specialisations, five tiers deep. Mutually exclusive paths lead to a mastery talent at the end of each branch:

• Conducting: rhythmic precision, timing windows, fermata control, consistency multipliers and stamina.
• Leadership: easier cues, section trust, shields that absorb a mistake, higher income and better reviews.
• Expression: dynamics, accents, expressive range, graceful recovery and standing ovations.

Talents include passive effects, active techniques that you equip in two slots and use with controller buttons during a performance, and trade-offs that increase your power in exchange for greater demand. Mastery talents can change how you conduct entirely. You can respec freely and try a different build for each piece.

Finance and reviews

Before a performance, choose how to fund it. Self-financing means paying all costs upfront and keeping the profit if it goes well, but losing that money if it does not. A patron covers the costs in exchange for half the earnings. If you fail, the patron’s share rises to 60%, 70% and then up to 75%, until you deliver a success; you cannot run an advertising campaign with a patron.

Advertising campaigns come in four tiers. Greater investment can bring more people into the hall, but results vary from night to night and are reported after the campaign. The post-performance financial report lists attendance rate and headcount, hall rental, musicians’ wages, advertising costs, gross revenue, bracketed taxes, the patron’s share and net profit. Highly profitable nights incur a success surcharge. Conducting a piece with fewer musicians than the hall usually requires earns an efficiency bonus, while a break-even point means you can lose money regardless of how well you conducted. Critics then review the performance, and your reputation changes accordingly, with the movement shown star by star.

Batons and appearance

Collect dozens of batons in five rarities: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic and Legendary. Each has its own passive ability or active technique with a cooldown. Many are tied to a musical era—Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, 20th or 21st century—and the game automatically equips or removes era-matched batons when you select a piece. The finest batons work in any era.

You can buy several copies of a baton to keep them on different stands, or sell batons you no longer want. Baton stands are purchased individually, with their own designs and rarities; the table and display cabinet have limited space, so your collection involves choices. You can also choose your conductor avatar and adjust their attire.

Masterclass and profile

A masterclass forms part of your career, with eight lessons—seven classes and a final exam—taught by a professor in a virtual classroom. The voiced lessons have lip sync and are available in several languages. Written exams use controller buttons and explain each answer, whether right or wrong; nearly every lesson also includes a piece you must conduct to pass. Your academic average is permanently recorded, and major achievements appear on a diploma wall in your studio with your name and the date earned.

Your Maestro CV presents your rank and reputation, experience and money earned, performances offered, completed and abandoned, best accuracy, repertoire and medals, unlocked talents, masterclass grade and baton collection by rarity.

Seasonal events

Your dressing room changes with the calendar for Mozart Week, Valentine’s, Carnival, Spring, Holy Week, Music Day, Halloween, Christmas and New Year. Each season has a Steam achievement, earned by completing a performance while it lasts. You can hide the seasonal decorations in Settings.

Create and share pieces

Maestro Level Editor is a separate, free desktop application for PC that uses a mouse and keyboard and does not require a headset. It is the tool used to build the official levels and can turn a piece of music into a playable Maestro VR level. Pieces are shared through the editor’s own Steam Workshop: install the editor, browse and subscribe there, and downloaded pieces appear in Maestro VR. You only need the editor to obtain the pieces.

In the editor, choose one of the 11 halls and its layout, then set the orchestra instrument by instrument or use a preset. It warns you if the lineup exceeds the hall’s physical positions. You can import one audio track per instrument in MP3, OGG or WAV format using Import Stems, or use a single stereo recording. Instruments play from their positions on stage with the chosen hall’s reverberation.

Create the gesture score by setting tempo and changes, time signatures, cues, dynamics, crescendos, accents, fermatas and the final bar. Place them by bar and beat or at an exact time, and fill in the conducting pattern for the whole piece with one click, for either hand. MIDI import places tempos, time signatures and dynamics, and lets musicians perform note by note. Adding a MusicXML score also gives them its slurs, staccatos, accents and articulations. Import a score as a PDF for players to read, turn pages and annotate in VR.

The editor also includes a Level Assistant that reviews a level and fixes most problems in one click, a MIDI editor, Tap Tempo for syncing to recordings, live film concerts with video, a modular workspace, full undo and redo, and a built-in user manual.

Comfort and accessibility

Maestro VR supports different heights, dominant hands and play spaces. Full left-handed mode mirrors everything. Automatic height calibration works seated or standing and readjusts if you change posture mid-piece. You can set latency offset in milliseconds and adjust gesture sensitivity with a live meter showing the force each hand applies. An interactive calibration tool includes a practice piece so you can feel changes immediately. Controller vibration can be off, limited to perfect gestures or always on. Optional hand tracking is available on supported headsets; controllers remain the more precise way to conduct.

Performance and streaming

Quality presets and manual settings let you adjust image sharpness, edge smoothing, four shadow levels, and orchestra and audience detail separately. Distant characters are simplified automatically to help keep the frame rate stable with a hundred musicians and hundreds of spectators on screen. The game is optimised for SteamVR.

For streaming, mixed reality with LIV places you in the concert hall in front of the orchestra. You can adjust camera frame rate and quality, show the musicians’ sheet music on camera, and use smooth fades to black during loading screens or when the camera leaves the hall. Direct output to OBS includes an adjustable head-mounted camera with field of view, tilt, height and forward offset controls, anti-motion-sickness stabilisation, horizon levelling and output up to 1080p at 60fps. Both options are available through a dedicated Steam launch option.