Islands in the stream

Oh how things change in just a month! Since then the UK has been in full lockdown mode and all the festivals and gigs for most of the year has been cancelled. However it’s not all doom and gloom, the world keeps turning, life goes on and the wonderful people of the NHS are doing daily miracles to keep the public safe and bring things under control.

Since the lockdown i’ve done a few online gigs in association with The Graham Steel Music Company on The Online Music Club, there are almost daily gigs from a variety of talented artists.

That is what we are

I was initially hesitant to stream my music online as I try to ensure that what i put in the public domain is as good as it can be and with streaming the video can be a challenge but the audio is the hardest part. Not that there’s anything wrong with streaming from a phone, I just wanted a level of professional presentation that is a challenge to get on a phone, particularly with the varying dynamics of some of my songs.

I wanted my streams to be of the highest quality I practically could achieve. My home recording setup is a mid-range imac with a scarlett 2i2 and an old Behringer C1 condenser mic. It’s really difficult to get a good balance of recording if you’re trying to capture vocals and guitar on one mic so my first port of call was an APK P170 ‘pencil’ condenser mic. I installed OBS to help manage the video and audio feeds locally before then streaming using facebook live.

How can we be wrong?

I did my first stream with that setup and the sound was good but I didn’t like the backdrop of a room in my house so, slightly controversially, I bought a green screen for my next stream so i can, using OBS, chroma key the green and have a background that wouldn’t distract from the performance. However, I had issues getting the lighting right, using a series of lamps and uplighters to try and catch a the shadows. It was a pain to setup, the slightest movement of the green screen would create a shadow which would ruin the effect, and it would get very hot. So after a bit of googling I bought a couple of softbox lights which has made the whole thing much easier and look better making me more comfortable with streaming my music.

You can check out the full video from my latest stream

And I’ve uploaded my cover of The Beatles Helter Skelter to my youtube channel