Song Fight! Live 2020 Berkeley CANCELLED

All about the next annual live event. Are you coming?. Discuss travel & lodging. Recruit band members, discuss equipment, setlists, etc.
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fluffy
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Re: Song Fight! Live 2020 SF Bay Area Aug 28/29

Post by fluffy »

Lunkhead wrote:
Sat May 30, 2020 12:06 pm
I think more realistic would be a series of live streams of folks playing individually from their homes. I don't know what a good schedule for that would be. One long marathon series of streams so everybody plays their sets roughly contiguously? A few folks a night for a week? One person a night all month?
yeah that's the direction I'm leaning as well, there's ways of having twitch streams rebroadcast other streams (either via hosting or via rebroadcasting, or having someone set up a rebroadcasting endpoint which is apparently not that hard?), and then folks can set up OBS (which is nontrivial especially with audio stuff) or something.

This is something that if we decide to do it we should hammer it out and get non-tech-nerd folks to help figure out useful, generic instructions or something

(also for me this is great since it's likely I'll need to do it as a karaoke thing anyway because I can't play instruments right now and who knows if I'll get better by August)

maybe we could collaborate on backing tracks for each other so we're not all just like... sounding exactly like our fight recordings or being an endless slew of guy/gal/goober&guitar
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Re: Song Fight! Live 2020 SF Bay Area Aug 28/29

Post by Lunkhead »

Ooh, I like the idea of at least collaborating in backing each other up via pre-recorded tracks. I'm a total novice when it comes to video streaming stuff, sadly, but on the bright side maybe I could help test out instructions to verify if they are idiot proof or not. :lol:
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Re: Song Fight! Live 2020 SF Bay Area Aug 28/29

Post by fluffy »

Yeah streaming setups are very much a "well if a 14-year-old kid playing Minecraft can figure it out, how hard can it be?"

Turns out, pretty hard. (Also a gaming streaming setup is way more straightforward than a music streaming setup.)
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Re: Song Fight! Live 2020 SF Bay Area Aug 28/29

Post by Caravan Ray »

Time differences and technical stuff may be difficult - but it would be fun if maybe Pepper Jane and I could dial in live from T-Bar.
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Re: Song Fight! Live 2020 SF Bay Area Aug 28/29

Post by j$ »

Might well be up for some virtual stuff, though I think the latency issues I have experienced watching bands play together over Zoom or Teams* or whatever might scupper it.

*Seriously, I have never watched an online concert on Teams ... Don't @me
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Re: Song Fight! Live 2020 SF Bay Area Aug 28/29

Post by Pigfarmer Jr »

Unless you're trying to play live with people in various locations it should be fairly easy to do Zoom or discord or whatever and have people take turns playing songs or a set. I can see it be a song circle or it could be a scheduled 20-30 minutes per performer doing their own set. If you wanted to a band setting you'd either have to recruit locals or record a backing track to play/sing along with. But it seems doable.
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Re: Song Fight! Live 2020 SF Bay Area Aug 28/29

Post by bartok2112 »

I'm a school music teacher, and I've been doing lots of zoom calls with my students. Zoom is very difficult for music, even with optimizing the audio settings, and a really good connection. It was designed for the business community. There is a lot of screen freezing, distortion, and even with my nice microphones, it has a rather tinny sound quality.

Something to think about is maybe have everyone prerecord their set, then submit their video to a cloud account of some sort. Someone then could take the various videos and assemble them into a live stream of some sort. A fellow band director did this with his students performing solos and small groups from their homes, then assembled them into an end of the year live stream concert.

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Re: Song Fight! Live 2020 SF Bay Area Aug 28/29

Post by fluffy »

I would think a twitch stream would be more appropriate since then we can have more viewers watching, whether we do the individual performances live or prerecorded. Of course if it's prerecorded then why even do it as a live concert at all? Why not post a compilation video on YouTube?
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Re: Song Fight! Live 2020 SF Bay Area Aug 28/29

Post by Lunkhead »

I personally don't like the idea of it being 100% prerecorded.

My wife has done Zoom "dance parties" and the sound quality for us for those was actually surprisingly OK to me. That was via sharing just the audio from an app on the laptop (iTunes or Chrome). The video is still shared too but the audio comes from the app instead of a microphone. I wonder if the same could be done if folks use a DAW app and an audio interface and a decent mic, and if that would sound better? Or "bartok2112" (ha, didn't know you have a board account!) are you saying that is what you already tried and that still didn't work?
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Re: Song Fight! Live 2020 SF Bay Area Aug 28/29

Post by Lunkhead »

I like the idea of "song rounds", maybe this would be a great opportunity to return to the original format of going title by title, with folks taking turns playing their song for the title? That would take a fair amount more organizational work, and we'd need to have enough attendance of folks from similar eras of Song Fight. But I'd be interested in taking on the organization part if it looks like the song overlap part would work enough for it. Or maybe we have just one night of the event be that format.
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Re: Song Fight! Live 2020 SF Bay Area Aug 28/29

Post by j$ »

Will it be every song? Or just "popular" titles? For someone like me who did every fight for c. 10 years, that's a lot o' learning and a long ol' stream!

In theory, it would work if it was mainly "acoustic" performances and there aren't any online/not present in the room collaborators. I've never used Twitch but the big threat is latency which make the song night on impossible. I joined a "karoake" thing on Zoom and you had to synch up with an online provider, which didn't go that well, as you can imagine. Volumes and synching were a nightmare.

However, I am willing to give anything a go, as I would like to be involved and I am keen not to sound entirely negative about the whole thing :)

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Re: Song Fight! Live 2020 SF Bay Area Aug 28/29

Post by Lunkhead »

j$ wrote:
Fri Jun 12, 2020 3:16 am
Will it be every song? Or just "popular" titles? For someone like me who did every fight for c. 10 years, that's a lot o' learning and a long ol' stream!
Good questions. I like the idea of the fight by fight style being one night, maybe we just try to see if we can get a critical mass of people for each title (maybe 4 songs minimum?) for enough titles for a few hours of music? (Maybe 10-12 titles?) We wouldn't have to have the same set of people participate in ALL the titles either, so, nobody would need to learn and play 10-12 songs for it. Maybe somebody who attended one of those early day Song Fight Lives that used that format could explain better how it worked though.
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Re: Song Fight! Live 2020 SF Bay Area Aug 28/29

Post by fluffy »

Lunkhead wrote:
Fri Jun 12, 2020 7:58 am
Maybe somebody who attended one of those early day Song Fight Lives that used that format could explain better how it worked though.
I was at the last SF Live to do this and it didn't work all that well. Even in 2003 the number of titles was way too diverse to make a sufficient match-up for most titles, and the artist changeover was a mess. Plus we had a bit of drama where one of the people who was drumming for a bunch of other people just up and left without telling most of the bands he was involved in. Obviously that's not an issue for a twitch sitch, but it seems analogous to issues like having tech problems where someone's stream isn't quite working or ready.

Oh and the voting was a chore and just took a lot of time away from when songs could be played instead.

Anyway. My thoughts for how a Song Fight Live sort of thing can happen with twich is: each band is responsible for figuring out their own streaming setup, and they take turns streaming to a shared rebroadcaster, which then rebroadcasts that stream to twitch or whatever. Bands would have the option of watching the stream's chat and maybe address comments between songs or something. I've seen a few online music festivals work this way and it's pretty okay. None of this helps with multi-musician performances though. People with local actual-bands are at an advantage here, if they're willing to break social distancing anyway.

Also setting up a streaming setup has gotten a lot easier, but there's still a bunch of stuff to watch out for. If anyone is interested in doing streaming stuff I recommend playing around with OBS, which is the most commonly-used software for this purpose these days. Maybe set up a Twitch channel and experiment with that too. It's hard to do a simple writeup that captures everyone's technical situation and it's something you need to practice ahead of time to make sure that the right audio is going through and that you've got a reasonable quality tradeoff.

And I would absolutely not recommend trying to do a virtual jam through Zoom or any other group conferencing app. It's good enough for dance parties but the latency is just terrible when it comes to having multiple performers playing together. I've posted my ideas on how multi-artist stuff can happen elsewhere on the forum but I think if you really want to have other Song Fight participants perform on your set, the best bet is to have them record backing tracks and only have one actual live performance on top of them.
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Re: Song Fight! Live 2020 SF Bay Area Aug 28/29

Post by j$ »

I think I agree with most of what Fluffy said - so from my situation, I could play ukulele through an amplifier and sing live (as I have the set-up for that) - and at a push, play over backing tracks. Blimey, I could even buy new strings for my acoustic guitar. Anything else more ambitious I don't think will work, unless I meet a punk band who live on my street and can support me!

Fortunately my stuff is so sloppy and badly arranged, it should work just fine. As anyone who saw me in 2010 in LA will agree :)

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Re: Song Fight! Live 2020 SF Bay Area Aug 28/29

Post by Lunkhead »

I imagine it's going to be nearly all solo performances, possibly with backing tracks, possibly with the exception of folks who collaborate with members of their households. Although if BSS could figure out a place outside where we could live stream a performance I might be interested in that! :lol:

I forgot about the voting for the winner each round part with the title-by-title format. Maybe we could just have a poll for each round, and allow the voting to go on throughout the whole thing? That way we wouldn't be blocked from moving on to the next title waiting for the winner for a title to be chosen. For "the number of titles was way too diverse to make a sufficient match-up for most titles, and the artist changeover was a mess" we could try to work through that with advance planning. Just see if we can get four or more songs per title for enough titles, and we wouldn't need to have the same people participate in all the rounds. Somebody could just play in one round if they didn't have songs for other titles, etc. And we're going to face tech issues no matter what format(s) we use.

Good points about setup and streaming and experience. Maybe we could have a thread where noobs work on getting set up and experts offer help and pointers?
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Re: Song Fight! Live 2020 SF Bay Area Aug 28/29

Post by j$ »

Perhaps a thread where someone can volunteer to hear a song via whatever method which is chosen for the big day, to check levels and latency and balance etc in advance?

Anyway I will stop now as I am only vaguely internet savvy when it comes to such things.

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Re: Song Fight! Live 2020 SF Bay Area Aug 28/29

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Re: Song Fight! Live 2020 SF Bay Area Aug 28/29

Post by bartok2112 »

Lunkhead wrote:
Thu Jun 11, 2020 4:43 pm
are you saying that is what you already tried and that still didn't work?
It's more a case of the lag from the internet connection than the quality of microphone, DAW, or soundcard. A lot of time even with the enhanced audio settings, the sound goes into this weird crackly slow mode, kind of like a 1950s B science fiction movie.
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Re: Song Fight! Live 2020 SF Bay Area Aug 28/29

Post by fluffy »

bartok2112 wrote:
Sun Jun 14, 2020 9:18 am
Lunkhead wrote:
Thu Jun 11, 2020 4:43 pm
are you saying that is what you already tried and that still didn't work?
It's more a case of the lag from the internet connection than the quality of microphone, DAW, or soundcard. A lot of time even with the enhanced audio settings, the sound goes into this weird crackly slow mode, kind of like a 1950s B science fiction movie.
That's usually an indicator of low bandwidth or CPU rather than lag.
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Re: Song Fight! Live 2020 SF Bay Area Aug 28/29

Post by Caravan Ray »

j$ wrote:
Sat Jun 13, 2020 5:31 am
Perhaps a thread where someone can volunteer to hear a song via whatever method which is chosen for the big day, to check levels and latency and balance etc in advance?

Anyway I will stop now as I am only vaguely internet savvy when it comes to such things.

j$
Yeah That would be good.. i have zero interest in how this may work. But if someone sets something up - happy to test it.
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Re: Song Fight! Live 2020 SF Bay Area Aug 28/29

Post by iVeg »

Two months. Who knows? Maybe I can get some people together to LiveStream by then.
For Title by Title, what if you choose 3 or 4 titles now? That would give people time to re-learn or write something new.
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Re: Song Fight! Live 2020 SF Bay Area Aug 28/29

Post by jb »

Would it be useful for some people if we documented a decent streaming setup of various types?

(Also it feels so common knowledgey to me that playing together over the net doesn’t work that I am always surprised when people go through the discussion again...)
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