Tomorrow night, that's Sunday 17th I'm going to be taking part in this Open mic songwriters showcase on Google plus. Maybe you read my last blog and know all about this but if not here's what it is.
There's someone who plays host and is joined by another nine songwriters live at a predetermined time, this ones at seven in the evening. We all connect via the host via some sort of you tube connection, and the show lasts for about two hours.
I've checked out a couple of these and then the other day I noticed that they still had one slot still available so I messaged the guy who was hosting it saying, perhaps foolishly that i would like to do the 3rd slot which was still empty. He came back to me and said OK, so that was it I'm now committed.
So I rigged up my mic through the desk in the studio and ran it through my old soundblaster external sound card, that still seemed to work, put on a pair of headphones and fired up the webcam. Next thing was to try and connect with Jackie via this thing called Hangouts on Google plus. This is a sort of one to one affair a bit like Skype I suppose. Well it seemed to all work ok except that I was a bit dark, so I need a bit more light but seemingly the sound was fine, I was at Ford park, Jackie was home in Sun Street. Tomorrow night this set up will have to work across the Globe.
Now there will only be nine of us in the songwriters open mic hangout room but one of them is in India, the rest in the States. In fact all the participants I've seen have been in the Americas, they seem to have sussed it out first, but they're doing this one at an earlier time to try to encourage musicians from Europe to get involved.
As far as I can see there's so much that can go wrong, cause in the end it's all connected up with bits of wire and wireless connections, somethings bound to fail. Although saying that the ones I've watched have had very little in the way of glitches, and what glitches there have been have in a way made it entertaining. Well maybe not entertaining, maybe thats the the wrong word. But you know what I mean, it's like going to see any live event, there's always that air of flying by the seat of your pants.
So here it comes, tomorrow at 7pm, we even get a soundcheck half an hour prior to the show going live, so even though I don't know what is going to occur there will be some preamble where hopefully I'll understand how it all fits together and works.
Back in the year 2001, when the internet was new I used to run a recording studio where we had a webam to film our artists. I would record them and then afterwards encode the video on real producer and upload it to our website. It would be so compressed because we were all running on 28k modems that it was very pixalated, but I could get it all done within an hour or so, almost live. To think that it has taken 10 years to get to do what we were trying to all those years ago. but now we've all have broadband it's all come to pass.
So I suppose that's why I diving in to this tomorrow, so wish me luck, and if your plugged into google plus come and join me, and the other nine songwriters on our global open mic experiment.
There's someone who plays host and is joined by another nine songwriters live at a predetermined time, this ones at seven in the evening. We all connect via the host via some sort of you tube connection, and the show lasts for about two hours.
I've checked out a couple of these and then the other day I noticed that they still had one slot still available so I messaged the guy who was hosting it saying, perhaps foolishly that i would like to do the 3rd slot which was still empty. He came back to me and said OK, so that was it I'm now committed.
So I rigged up my mic through the desk in the studio and ran it through my old soundblaster external sound card, that still seemed to work, put on a pair of headphones and fired up the webcam. Next thing was to try and connect with Jackie via this thing called Hangouts on Google plus. This is a sort of one to one affair a bit like Skype I suppose. Well it seemed to all work ok except that I was a bit dark, so I need a bit more light but seemingly the sound was fine, I was at Ford park, Jackie was home in Sun Street. Tomorrow night this set up will have to work across the Globe.
Now there will only be nine of us in the songwriters open mic hangout room but one of them is in India, the rest in the States. In fact all the participants I've seen have been in the Americas, they seem to have sussed it out first, but they're doing this one at an earlier time to try to encourage musicians from Europe to get involved.
As far as I can see there's so much that can go wrong, cause in the end it's all connected up with bits of wire and wireless connections, somethings bound to fail. Although saying that the ones I've watched have had very little in the way of glitches, and what glitches there have been have in a way made it entertaining. Well maybe not entertaining, maybe thats the the wrong word. But you know what I mean, it's like going to see any live event, there's always that air of flying by the seat of your pants.
So here it comes, tomorrow at 7pm, we even get a soundcheck half an hour prior to the show going live, so even though I don't know what is going to occur there will be some preamble where hopefully I'll understand how it all fits together and works.
Back in the year 2001, when the internet was new I used to run a recording studio where we had a webam to film our artists. I would record them and then afterwards encode the video on real producer and upload it to our website. It would be so compressed because we were all running on 28k modems that it was very pixalated, but I could get it all done within an hour or so, almost live. To think that it has taken 10 years to get to do what we were trying to all those years ago. but now we've all have broadband it's all come to pass.
So I suppose that's why I diving in to this tomorrow, so wish me luck, and if your plugged into google plus come and join me, and the other nine songwriters on our global open mic experiment.
How can you talk so much crap with only 1 head....
ReplyDeleteI see you can talk the talk but you cannot walk the walk.
You talk of when you used to run a studio a Tascam Porta Studio really does not count now does it?.
Yokels with Stylephones that could work..........