Italian rockstar Vasco’s 2025 tour reaches new technical heights with Disguise

In Italy, few artists command the cultural influence of Vasco Rossi. Known simply as Vasco, the 72-year-old icon continues to sell out stadium tours in seconds.

His 2025 tour spanned 14 shows across seven cities, drawing over 600,000 fans. With performances running close to three hours, the production demanded a visual system capable of delivering both scale and precision, night after night.

The show’s visual direction was led by Creative Show Director Pepsy Romanoff for EXCEPT, bringing together a collaborative graphics team including Chunk Studio and Gate1Studio (responsible for Notch content).

For this show, the team developed a fully real-time visual system that could respond dynamically to the live performance on stage.

To bring this vision to life, the graphics team leveraged Disguise – using Designer and a network of high-performance Disguise GX 3 servers to deliver Vasco’s most technically advanced tour to date.

The Challenge

Vasco’s team introduced a new requirement for his latest shows: a clean, camera-led visual experience that would keep the artist fully visible on screen, while also allowing the show to be captured for a potential concert film.

Working as part of the wider graphics team led by Pepsy Romanoff, Chunk Studio and Gate1Studio collaborated to create visuals that were impactful without detracting from the stage. Gate1Studio focused specifically on developing Notch-driven content within this broader creative direction.

They chose a series of triangular-shaped frames that could be integrated into the LED walls that would adjust to the lighting, tempo, and camera perspective in the concert.

Yet with this solution also came some technical challenges. The first was that, with irregularly-shaped screens, the team needed extensive help previsualising what the graphics would look like and to troubleshoot any issues. 

The second challenge was ensuring the media server system could cope with the intense graphical output, alongside multiple motion-tracking systems required to create responsive, fluid visual changes.

With the visuals needing to react immediately to what was going on stage, this was a situation in which any lags or delays would have really affected the overall look and feel of the entire performance.

The solution

The graphics team had a six month lead time to plan the visuals, allowing for multiple rounds of research and testing using Disguise’s Designer software. Designer was an essential tool for helping the team to effectively map their content to the triangular screens.

In terms of hardware, the production utilised five Disguise GX 3 servers to deliver seamless playback across the performances.

Notch content development and optimisation was handled collaboratively within the team, with close coordination between Gate1Studio and Disguise programmers to ensure stable, high-performance playback.

Lorenzo explains: “One of the issues we had is that you can’t guarantee performance quality – even when doing something like creating fire simulation on Notch. You would have to downgrade the simulation or change the content. But with Disguise we could really rely on the performance on stage. It was a real upgrade.”

The results

Vasco’s 2025 concerts delivered a cinematic level of quality: immersive, creative, and technically ambitious, while maintaining consistent performance throughout the tour. No other artist in Italy currently produces a show with this level of visual impact and resources, with Vasco Live XXV standing as a truly international-level production in every respect. This includes the closing two shows at Rome’s Olympic Stadium, where Vasco performed in front of a crowd of 120,000 people.