“F*ck it, we’ll do it live!”

It’s been more than ten years since I played a live show. In mere days, I’ll play one again…

If you have scrolled through the pages of my website a little bit, you might have read that I used to play in a punk band. What feels like it was a thousand years ago actually happened between 2008 and 2013. The band was called WhatEver in the beginning, and we later changed our name to Herr Flamingo—WhatEver is hard to search engine optimize, let me tell you. But we were a punk band, and WhatEver sounds nicely punk.

That band was the first time I experienced making music. I wrote my first songs, honed my skills as a singer and guitarist, and gained experience in the studio and on stage, sometimes playing for more than a thousand people! It was a marvelous time with a group of friends and a ton of fond memories.

Fast forward to today: Nowadays, I mostly work on music on my own in my studio at home. Since the last show of Herr Flamingo in the summer of 2013, I have not played a show on stage. For the longest time, I tried to find a new band to join or form. It never came to be, so I continued working solo.

In the spring of 2024, I became aware of a project called ‘Radio FreeFedi,’ an online radio station hosted by folks over on Mastodon, that exclusively plays music made by artists on the Fediverse (Mastodon being a part of the Fediverse). I contacted them and offered my music to be played there, and they were nice enough to accept my offer. I’m still proud to be part of that roster of artists!

One of the organizers of Radio FreeFedi began approaching their artists about a series of concerts that they wanted to set up: All through August, artists should be given the opportunity to play live shows on stream. When I saw this, I felt compelled to join in, even though I had not played a live show in so long, let alone ever intended to play my solo music live.

The obvious option to play my songs solo would be to get an acoustic guitar and play them ‘unplugged,’ but to me, it feels like I couldn’t do them justice. Also, I don’t have a nice acoustic guitar, and I don’t intend to buy one for a single show. So I had to get a little more creative.

So… How do I do this?

Not playing unplugged means that I would either have to bring additional musicians in—not really an option—or utilize backing tracks and software like Ableton Live to run the set. As I have worked with Ableton before and even have an Ableton Push in my studio, this seemed like the right option. Looking around on YouTube led me to the channel of Scott Uhl, who uses a variety of different setups and backing tracks to play shows live. His videos on setting up and running a live set like this were eye-opening to me!

Now, Scott Uhl recommends different approaches here, from a small setup with an iPad with a specific app and a 1/4″ jack stereo split cable to a dedicated outboard device with multiple XLR outputs. To be clear, Scott is talking about a setup for live concerts with a band or at least a few musicians. That’s not what I had in mind for my show. I decided to play live from the comfort (and confines) of my home studio/office. And it would just be me and my guitar, singing and playing to otherwise canned backing tracks that I produced in advance or reused from previous releases.

Women in Stems

So I went back to the old projects for my 2023 EP ‘best before 05-31‘ and started exporting the stems, grouped in ways that seemed to make sense to me. I exported the guitars in one file, the bass in another. Drums and percussion instruments went into one mixdown, additional instruments like synthesizers or brass into additional wavs.

After everything was exported and properly labeled with the respective keys, instruments, and tempi, I had everything together to start building one big project in Ableton Live and start rehearsing!

In my next blog entry, I will tell you all about how I set up my project, what I had to tweak (and buy…) to make everything work the way I needed it to, and how my rehearsals went. You can also look forward to a blog about the gig itself, which is happening on the 30th of August (this Friday at the time of publishing!) at 4 PM Eastern Time right here:

Link to the #FediWave Live Stream

I would love for you to stop by and listen to me playing my songs! In case you can’t make it, I will also post a recording of the show at some point in the future! Until then, thanks for reading! You can follow me on Mastodon or Instagram if you don’t want to miss the next blog entries!