The current world situation has put a stop to most forms of live music. I helped found a group called the Arlesey Musicians who would jam in a pub each week with monthly open mic nights. We are all missing that experience, but have been trying some alternatives.
First we tried a Facebook Watch Party where we each upload videos and then watch them together. That worked fairly well, but lacks that instant feedback. We also tried Mixlr which does a similar thing for audio and you can create a live radio show.
Of course the app of the moment is Zoom that allows for video conferencing. I have used it at work before and now use it for family chats. Apparently they have seen a 20x increase in usage recently. We have now done a few open mic nights with Zoom and it works fairly well, although it is not designed for music and so the quality can be lacking. We did one of these last night. It is just for our little group rather than public consumption. Some people do not want their performances broadcast, but I do not mind. One of the group pays for Zoom and so bypasses the free time limit. She recorded the whole thing. I used OpenShot to extract one of my songs.
This cover was an experiment in that I recorded some backing to use on the intro and outro solos using my Boss looper pedal. Apart from issues stopping and starting that at the right time the audio balance is not great.
Note that some people set backdrops for their webcams. My PC does not seem to support this. It may be a Linux limitation of Zoom.
For our next session I may try to improve on this. My guitar is plugged into my Zoom G3X multi-effects that goes to my desktop speakers which the microphone did not pick up so well. I have this little mixer that I could use to get a decent balance of guitar and vocals to feed the audio interface. This could also fix some issues I had with the microphone only coming from the left speaker on a video I recorded before as I can set the left/right balance too. I have all this equipment, but do not always use it fully. Lockdown ought to provide opportunities to learn more about such things.
Yes, I do have a couple of Raspberry Pis on my desk doing nothing useful.
I will experiment with this set-up for my next guitar video.
I have not been checking up on the Guitar community. I see there are more posts here. I will be listening later. Please keep posting.
Rock on!
