Welcome back to this final entry about my FediWave live show from August 2024! This time I would like to talk about how the actual gig went from my point of view. If you’d like to catch up on the previous blogs, you do so here, here and here!
So, how did it go? At the time of writing this, the gig happened over a year ago. Life gets in the way of blogging sometimes, huh? But I still remember it very vividly, it being the last time I live streamed playing music additional to it being the last time I played a live show for anyone. Since my last two entries took a very close look at the technical side, let me give you a much broader overview of the tech setup as a whole, before a little postmortem for the show is in order.
Never use an untested cable
The whole setup was in a way surprisingly easy. I have talked at length about my Ableton Live set, which was basically the brain of the whole show. With it, I controlled the playback of backing tracks, click and the sound of my guitar and microphone. My Ableton Push 2 enabled me to launch a song with the press of a button and load all the necessary effects at the same time. The microphone of choice was a Shure SM7b, which has a great sound but was not the ideal choice for reasons I will talk about further down. Both guitar and mic I routed into a Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 audio interface and from there into Ableton Live. A pair of Shure in-ear monitors and the aforementioned MIDI enabled pedal board completed the hardware setup.
At the center of it all was my 2020 M1 MacBook Pro, which handled the audio processing, as well as the live streaming, without any problems I could speak of. OBS is usually my software of choice for any live streaming purpose. I did a few test runs and rehearsals on my Twitch channel in the days leading up to the show, to iron out some kinks here and there, but in the end I was pretty satisfied with the whole setup.
But of course, there’s always something you overlook, forget or otherwise miss in preparation for a show like this. Sometimes, it’s just a cable that becomes a problem. In my case, I swapped my guitar cable with a new one right before the gig and introduced some horrendous, intermittent noise into my guitar sound. From time to time, my guitar would suddenly emit a crackling, scraping noise for a moment, that I could not fix during the show. Not a massive problem, but a very unpleasant sound for the audience.
Did you hit record?
My much bigger mistake was simply overlooking the option to record the show on separate tracks in Ableton Live. With a simple button, I could have recorded my guitar and my vocals, as well as any background tracks playing as separate files, giving me the option to remix and correct anything that didn’t quite work out during the show. This way, I could have had a better sounding version of the gig, that I could have released as it’s own album on my Bandcamp page. But alas, the only recording of the show that I had in the end was the stereo audio track from the stream, limiting my options for post-produce it drastically.
So, what did we learn?
Overall, I am quite happy with how the gig went. Some of the guitar solos were not amazing, which I will chalk up to my nervousness. The mix of the whole show is not necessarily to my liking, but it worked fine in the context of a live show. My decision to use my Shure SM7b for this gig turned out somewhat sub optimal. While I really love the sound of this microphone, it turned out to be quite receptive to me stomping on the pedal board. A better choice would have surely been a Shure SM58, which I have laying around. This tried and true stage mic would have picked up way less of all the noises I made outside of singing and would have give me a cleaner sound overall.
The next time around, I would really make sure to record the separate tracks, so that I could mix anything a little nicer. I would also record more of my rehearsals, so that I could fix any problems with the mix in advance and make it a better experience for the audience in the first place.
Still, I think the lovely folks watching my gig had a good time. I got to play songs I had never played live before and even premiere a song, that I had not released anywhere yet. It was a great experience and I am still extremely glad, that I took the plunge and did a show. I would love to do another gig like that in the future, if the occasion ever arises.
If you’d like to see me play live like this, feel free to follow me on Twitch. I am not very active on there, but you might get lucky and catch the occasional recording session or live gig from time to time.
Thank you very much for reading my musings about this very exciting topic for me. I hope you enjoyed this look into my thoughts and reasoning behind the technical side of doing a live streaming gig. You can watch the whole show below, even in its somewhat unmixed and imperfect state.
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