Songs for Saturday: Listeners' Choice, gently down the stream

[mdlbear]

... or was that down the rabbit hole? So yesterday I gave my first livestreamed concert, which you can find here on YouTube. It consisted of the two songs I'd been scheduled to sing in the Listeners' Choice concert at Consonance, plus a few extras in between. The songs were:

1. Daddy's World
2. The World Inside the Crystal
3. Ship of Stone
4. Bells of Norwich
5. The Mary Ellen Carter

(Links are to the corresponding s4s pages. Start times can be found in the YouTube comments, thanks to Rocketsong.)

I don't think it was all that successful, partly because I didn't get links posted soon enough, but I'm going to declare it okay for a first attempt. I probably didn't spend enough time rehearsing, but I did run through it once on Thursday afternoon to make sure that the setup actually worked. And spent the morning using Audacity to try different mic setups and adjust levels. (My hearing is not the best anymore, and I'm no good at picking up subtle problems like channel balance, or even not-so-subtle things like clipping. Audacity's meters and waveform display let me see those things.)

What I ended up with was my two Behringer C2 mics, normally used as a stereo pair, with one pointed at my mouth and the other pointed at my guitar. I had some trouble tracking down mic stand fittings and accessories; some were still in boxes in the garage after the last move.

I could, of course, have used a music stand and couple of mic stands in a more conventional layout, but I wanted easy access to the laptop, and had this crazy idea of using my 24" monitor to display two songbook pages side-by-side. That worked perfectly, using a shell one-liner to put up a series of PDF-viewer windows which Xmonad obligingly laid out in separate tabs. (I note in passing that a 12" laptop screen is almost big enough; it would work if the lyrics were re-formatted with smaller pages and no margins.)

Comments

[wyld_dandelyon]

Oh good!

I was hoping to hear you in last night's Heliosphere filk, but I can look at this later.

Or maybe see you tonight?

[mdlbear]

It's possible, though it looks like I've already missed an hour of it.

My brain is barely functioning today.

[kellan_the_tabby]

HI YOUR FACE

I watched it just now on YouTube -- I can't usefully stream, alas, as I live in the Land of Crap Ass Connection, so being able to watch it later is VERY good. I really enjoyed it! You music good.

[mdlbear]

Thanks! My performances tend to be a little rough around the edges; livestreaming makes a pretty good excuse for any imperfections. I resisted the temptation to do any post-editing; one of these days I might try it. Glad it worked for you.