The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Because of the current situation I've been wanting to livestream concerts with folks, but doing multiple-musician concert streams is infeasible due to latency.

Last night I had an idea for how we can do streamed concerts "together" although I don't know how well it'd work.

Basic idea: someone does a simple solo concert stream as just a solo guitar+voice (or whatever), and streams it and records it. Then, someone else takes the recorded stream, and then streams+records themselves accompanying it on another instrument (in splitscreen with the original video or whatever). And so on.

It probably wouldn't work too well past 3-4 instruments but it'd still be fun to try, I think. And then in the end there's a fun recording. Setting up the actual streaming setup might be the tricky part for most people. I have a bunch of experience with OBS but even with the gear I have it's challenging to make that sort of loopback-and-record thing work well.

But, does anyone want to give this a shot?

(I was originally thinking of just doing this with myself multiple times, too, slowly building up a full band of fluffies. But I thought I'd get this idea out there in case anyone wants to make it a more collaborative thing.)

I'm certain this method is how the latenight shows are doing their songs-- the Jimmy Fallon stuff with The Roots, and James Corden's bit with the cast of Dear Evan Hansen.

You'll need someone at the end of the chain mixing the tracks, and someone (if not the same person) brady-bunching the videos.

(That said, I'd be into doing some part of something like this.)

I'd be interested but might need some hand-holding as far as the technical aspects of making this work...

I don't watch Fallon or Corden, but they also do everything in advance and still have, like, a real editor behind the scenes. I'm talking more about like doing a live show on twitch or youtube live or whatever.

I guess this falls apart for those media because it makes it more difficult to do banter with the chat audience though.

Anyway as far as the basics of streaming go I wrote up a rough guide of my setup a while ago, although it's definitely not a tutorial by any means. Also I should update it with my current gear since I've upgraded to the Focusrite Scarlett (not that it actually changes anything in the setup but the mixing panel looks different).

Another idea, which might be more fragile: each band member streams their part while watching the previous member’s live stream. The band then streams the final one to the actual channel. The intermediate streams would just be, like, limited to one viewer or something. I think I know how to set this sort of thing up but it’ll take some experimentation.

Why not just have one "main streamer" stream a feed using Reaper w/ Ninjam? So it's all live... no editing needed? While other people who join the main streamer would have videos that were a bar behind sync wise visually (if you could figure out how to get other peoples video feeds in your main feed) all the audio would be coming from your main feed and therefore be in sync with the "main streamer".

Isn't Ninjam loop-jamming-based, with the assumption that the chord progression is entirely regular? That wouldn't work for a lot of songs.

Also I never mentioned anything about editing.