Well, George just got his box of CDs from Sunnyside today! If you want to pre-order Runaway, his first release for the label, it’s available at Amazon.com. Official release date is September 9. There will be a CD release party - details TBA. I’m so excited!
…stop by the Metropolitan Room to watch the Metrostar Competition! I know this is a long shot, but I’m one of 66 contestants. There will be 20 per night for three nights, and three semi-finalists will be chosen on each of these nights. Audience participation counts!
ETA: I had a blast last night, was one of 22 performers. There were all kinds of performances, from a woman who put cigarettes in her ears to a man who performed a lounge-style Baby Got Back! The first knockout song of the night was a selection from Dream Girls, soon after, there was an amazing opera singer named Sarah Rice… a lot of talent in one room. Congratulations to the fabulous four winners from last night: the elegant Ejaye Tracey, who sang “Blame It On My Youth,” Bill Brooks who did a wonderful “Taylor The Latte Boy,” Robert Fowler, who oozes star quality, and Anne Steele who really floored me! I’m not really hip to the cabaret scene in New York, so it was a pleasure (and a surprise!) to be included in this competition.
I’ve had my eye on this for a while. It weighs about the same as my Yamaha MS-202 powered monitor-speaker, but it’s 10 times more powerful. This little gadget features 150 watts of power, a 3-channel mixer and two mic/line preamps with 48V phantom power. It comes with a boom extender and mic stand adapter, and will be perfect for coffee shops, singer-songwriter gigs and small cocktail parties.
ETA: I used it at an outdoor show and it worked well. I just upped the mids and lows so that my keyboard would sound less trebly. The little PA actually has a ton of power! Today I went by Sam Ash to look at the battery-powered amps, but they only have about 5-15 watts. I think I made a good investment.
I thought I’d write about performing in the virtual reality world of Second Life, because although I’ve seen some tutorials around the Internet, I haven’t seen any which address the various issues and problems a newbie performer might face.
(Some background: I lurked around Second Life for months, attending shows and wondering how I might try to play one as well. But I was too intimidated by what seemed to be insurmountable obstacles. I don’t have the most music-friendly computer, as I’m on a PC laptop with a Realtek soundchip. And I’m not very technical!)
So, the first step is to download the Second Life software onto your computer, and get comfortable flying and teleporting around in the virtual world. You might want to customize your avatar to look just like you, or maybe you want it to look like someone totally different! (Mine looks like a much better-looking version of me.)
Now it’s time to research a venue for your performance. Just like in real life, you can do this by attending different music events and contacting whoever appears to be in charge. You can also do a Second Life search for Places or Live Music Events. (In my case, I chose “Soho Island,” because a performer I was familiar with held an event there.) Events usually last an hour. Event hosts are really cool people who often promote your event, entering it into the Second Life calendar and various Second Life music blogs. They sometimes ask you to send them jpegs of your band so they can create snazzy virtual posters for you.
If you want to practice streaming from your computer before attempting a live performance, you can hold a “listening party” of tracks of your music. (This is how I started.) To do this, I downloaded the Winamp application and added my CD tracks to its music library. Then I enabled the Shoutcast DSP plugin (some people use Simplecast and Icecast). The event host gave me a port number, URL and server password, which I entered into my settings, and then I clicked on “Connect.” If you want to talk to the audience via your computer’s microphone between songs, you’ll have to keep disconnecting from the stream to change the Winamp output source back to the soundcard. (This got a little unwieldy when I did it, so I didn’t talk to the audience very much! I just let the music play.)
So now you know how to stream and feel bold enough to perform. The simplest interface to play into is a nice USB condenser microphone. (Many Second Life performers instead opt for more complicated audio interfaces like the Presonus Audiobox, or the Edirol UA-4FX.) If you go this route, make sure that you don’t mistakenly set your Winamp input to stereo. (If you do, you’ll have the same problem as me - I ended up streaming out of only one channel, and people would say, “I can only hear you out of the left channel!” It took several calls to various music stores and finally E-mails to the Samson company to figure out that I needed to set the input to mono. Apparently you can take your dual mono channels and pan one left and the other right to mimic stereo, but something is up with my soundcard and I can’t do this. At least the sound is coming out of both channels now.)
Performing is a bit easier for guitarists than keyboardists, because they can just sit down in front of the computer with the guitar and type and sing. I wanted to be able to sit down at the computer like a guitarist, so I had to look for a keyboard that I could put on my lap. It’s not easy to find a keyboard you can put on your lap that actually sounds good! I also wanted the keyboard to have onboard speakers so I didn’t have to worry about hooking up to an amplifier. The 12-lb. Yamaha NP-30 is awesome, but at 76 keys, it is too long to hold on your lap (this didn’t stop me from trying a couple times). The 10-lb., 61-key Yamaha PSR-E313 has cheesy sounds, but the piano sound is OK, so that’s what I am using.
You might think that after setting up the microphone, getting the right keyboard and downloading and configuring the proper software, you’d be all set to play on Second Life. But there’s also the whole aspect of manipulating an avatar in an online virtual world. Some venues have virtual “pianos,” where you can plant your avatar so it looks like it is performing. But you might have to go shopping for a keyboard or piano that you can break out whenever you need. (I bought myself a “synth,” but I’m not very good at moving objects on Second Life, so whenever I try to use it, it ends up in the middle of the audience instead of the stage, or it’s floating in the air, or it’s facing away from me. Yesterday, I had to ask someone to help me put the keyboard in front of me. For guitarists, this is easier - I think you just attach the guitar to your avatar’s body.)
Now you are all ready to play; you have your venue, date and time, the proper instrument, interface and software. It’s good to teleport to your venue 15 minutes before the show to address any technical issues. (Some of these are out of your control, like when the whole Second Life grid goes down. This happened to me a couple weeks ago - the performance was obviously cancelled. If you want to see the status of the grid, you can visit the Second Life Website.) Remember that due to streaming, there will be a delay between what you play and what the audience hears. So you could finish a song and 10 seconds later you will see people clapping! This could also figure into when you decide to make your avatar bow, or stop playing between songs.
(If you want to get a little fancy, you can “rez,” or create, a jpeg poster which hyperlinks to your Website. Of course, if you don’t feel like getting so involved, you can always pay another Second Life resident to do this for you. Once you have it, you can drag it out onstage wherever you perform, so people can click on it if they want to find out more about you. I have sold CDs this way!)
We all want to get paid, right? You’ll want to make sure you get yourself a tip jar, which you will place next to you. If you don’t have a jar, people can click on your avatar and select “Pay,” but a tip jar makes this process a little easier. Also, when people see a tip jar, they are reminded to tip you! The venue may pay you as well. At the end of your show, you can sell your Second Life money (”lindens”) on the SL Exchange, process the credit and transfer it to your Paypal account. Voila! You’ve been paid for singing into your computer!
I hope this has been helpful for the newbie. If you have any questions, feel free to E-mail me.
It looks like Sunnyside is going to release George’s new album (the one I sang on) before the end of September! I’m very excited, as this is an awesome label with a lot of great music on it.
I never did figure out how to add the Gallery2 plugin to this site, but I finally figured out another way to add a photo gallery.
Unfortunately, it seems that spammers have now found this site, so I just had to replace the guestbook (and all of its comments) with a moderated version, and I must moderate all comments on this blog as well. So, if you are posting a legitimate comment, it will show up eventually! (If you are a spammer, your comment will no longer appear.)
Well, I’m not very technical, as you might be able to tell by the fact that I still don’t have a working guestbook or photo gallery on this Website! But I did ask for some cool musical gear for the holidays:
1) The Samson G-Track. This USB condenser mike is powered by your computer, and what’s so amazing is that you can record your voice and a line-in instrument at the same time. And it comes with Cakewalk Sonar! I eventually want to try to use this mike to perform on Second Life, after having a successful virtual listening party in that 3-D world. (In order to do this, I had to download Winamp and the Shoutcast plugin, and enter a series of configurations in order to be hooked up to the URL of the “island” where the party took place. Also, I had to disconnect and reconnect whenever I switched between streaming the music on the Winamp player and talking into my cheap little plastic microphone.)
ETA (Apr. 13 ‘08): It now seems that I have to buy a new microphone, because my Second Life performances apparently have been all in mono instead of stereo! The onboard soundchip in my laptop is so lacking that I am only able to record and perform into the left channel, so I have to invest in an external soundcard. More details to follow. Further ETA: The problem was my Winamp setting, not the Realtek chip or the fact that the Samson G-Track is a mono, not stereo, microphone. It seems counterintuitive, but I had to set the Winamp input setting to mono instead of stereo… the dual mono comes out of the left and right channels, imitating a stereo effect. MXL makes a good stereo USB condenser microphones too, but for my purposes I don’t really need one.
2) The Edirol R-09. As I said, I’m not very technical. I couldn’t even really figure out my husband’s Zoom H4. So, here is this incredibly simple-to-use Wave/MP3 recording device. According to some consumers, its main drawback is that it is fragile. But it’s about 2 pounds; if you want to keep it extra cozy, just buy a cover or carrying case. I want to use it to record my vocal lessons; I’m studying with a wonderful new teacher.
(My computer seems to have lots of sound card issues; the different programs are all fighting with each other. Right now I can’t even get the Kontakt player on my Sibelius 4 to work!)
Yesterday was the first day I sang on someone else’s album. (It was also the first day I played on someone else’s album! I have accompanied on many vocalists’ demos, but never on a CD that’s going to be released.) Whose album, you ask? George Colligan’s. And how did this work, as he’s a pianist? Well, he played trumpet on one tune and needed a pianist to comp. So that was me.
The session was with George on piano, Rhodes and trumpet, EJ Strickland on drums, Tom Guarna on guitar, Josh Ginsburg on bass and Paul Wickliffe recording. I sang vocalise on one brutally difficult melody, but the really hard part was singing this ballad George wrote called “When I Go.” There was this one note which he wanted me to sing more intensely, and I didn’t know which one it was. It also had a tenth drop at a very important place! Still, the microphone and headphones were so great that they made things easier. The studio was Skyline out in New Jersey.
When it’s available for purchase, I’ll post the information.
I am so thrilled to have this blog up; thanks to the knowledgeable Matthew Geri of www.wpgeeks.com, I finally have a blog that’s integrated into my Website! (Now if I could only figure out how to fix the Gallery2…)
