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.

To extend the runtime of my show a bit, I looked back at some demos for new songs that I recorded in early 2024. They were unfinished in places and definitely needed some further work to get them to a state where I’d feel comfortable publishing—but I could see myself playing them live, using the demo tracks as backing tracks.

One song in particular stood out to me: a disco-y, dance-y song about being in love called “Dancing on the Moon.” It had been on my mind ever since I produced a demo for it. While the other demos didn’t feel ready to be shown to the world, this one did.

I also remembered a Twitch stream I did sometime in early summer 2024, where I just kind of noodled around with Ableton Live and my guitar while talking to my chat. At the end of that stream, I came up with a version of a song I wrote for Herr Flamingo in 2011 called “Discopunk.” Originally a punk song with small disco elements (I know…), this version became much funkier and more danceable. It felt like the perfect candidate for my set!

I dug into my box of old songs once more, unearthing one of the first songs I released on my own in 2015: “Places to Go,” a prog-rock song inspired by Genesis that deals with a breakup. This felt like the perfect song for the beginning of the set because it slowly builds up before unleashing its full power in the first chorus.

The setlist for my gig was complete, with a runtime of about 30 minutes, including a few breaks for talking. With that in mind, I began putting together the central piece of the performance—the project in Ableton Live that would play all the backing tracks, clicks, and control my guitar’s effects.

First things first: I collected my project files for the songs I planned to play and began exporting stems, grouped in a way that made sense to me. I ended up with separate files for rhythm guitars, bass, percussion, synthesizers/keys, and brass instruments, as well as one track with cues and a click to keep me on track.

The cue and click tracks were recommended by Scott Uhl, whom I mentioned in the last blog entry. Essentially, it’s a track with a metronome clicking in time with the song, along with short cues that I recorded. These usually consisted of me counting down for the start of the guitar or vocals, just to really make sure I wouldn’t miss crucial moments. Incredibly helpful when you miscount a bar or get nervous while playing live!

With the bounces done, I began importing the stems into my Ableton Live project. Each song got its own scene, with each stem in a separate track. I also set each scene to the tempo of the song, which isn’t strictly necessary if you have your own click track for each song, but for what I had in mind, this would make things easier (or so I thought!).

The problem is usually in front of the screen

This might be a good moment to talk about my setup outside of the computer. I planned to run the Ableton project with an Ableton Push 2, which I’ve had for a while. If you’re not familiar, it’s a controller specifically designed to be used as a remote for Ableton Live. This would be my launchpad for every song in the set, playing the stems at the push of a button.

For my vocals, I opted to use my Shure SM7b, which I usually use to record vocals for my songs. I like the sound, and as a dynamic microphone, it gives me less room tone and should pick up less noise from me stomping on foot switches or tapping my feet to the beat.

During some of the songs, I needed to change the sound of the guitar: turning distortion, phaser, reverb, or echo on and off. I wanted these changes to happen automatically during the set so that I wouldn’t have to worry about anything mid-performance. The solution I came up with: automations.

If you’re not familiar with audio production software, automations allow you to program changes to almost anything in a project. Want an instrument to become quieter in a certain part of a song? Or move an instrument from the left speaker to the right over time? Automations can handle all that and more. They’re incredibly useful, and I use them all the time when I produce music.

I created some clips for the tracks I needed the automations on and made them the same length as the song they were associated with. These were otherwise empty clips that only contained the automations I needed for each song.

While this setup would work, I quickly realized it limited me in a crucial way: I wouldn’t be able to trigger any changes manually. This approach could work, especially for a highly choreographed show, but during rehearsals, it felt awkward. Waiting for a sound change to happen at a specific time instead of being able to trigger it myself with the push of a button left me feeling more restricted than supported.

So, I needed a different solution. From my old stage days, I still had my old effects pedal board. However, from previous experience, I knew that using its actual effects wouldn’t work well with the rest of my setup. Without an actual amp, I didn’t want to rely on my old board.

Join me in my next blog entry to find out how I solved my guitar FX problem and how the gig actually went! This is turning into a longer series than I anticipated. Thanks for reading so far! I’d love to hear your feedback or ideas in the comments below!

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!