Concert under quarantine

Hansentd

Member
Hi All,

An company I do tech for is interested in doing a separated concert.
Basically, each musician would be on web-cam from their home- broadcasting in to a site where they could be viewed by the "audience".
I can think of about 15 problems that I can foresee, but does anyone have any advice on how to make things easier/smoother?

Hope all are well.
 
Latency and lag/delay is going to be a major issue... Good luck

Agreed, per-stream latency and degradation will probably be the hardest to control in terms of keeping people in sync. This is partly why podcasts that record with remote guests will have the guests record their own audio and send the files afterward rather than use the streamed audio for recording.

Might be good using something external as a metronome or something or having a conductor so everyone isn't cueing off of the other musicians on delay.

I imagine people will be very forgiving to any complications. Let us know how it goes!
 
Sneaking in just before the apocalypse this year NAMM had several great sessions on the future of technology and highlighted the new technologies being explored through 5G. A group in Spain had considerably great success with a "virtual" concert. While the technology was interesting to explore I imagine it's now catching fire and exploding... I'm struggling to find a summary of the session/s. Unfortunately, not much help for a quick known setup in your current situation but in theory... the technology is out there.
 
Just from my limited experience using Zoom - it cannot handle multiple sound sources. There doesn't seem to be any true bi-directional communication, everything is time-sliced one-way. The end result is muddled, choppy sound and you never hear anything clearly.

As others have said above, recording audio streams from each individual and editing them together into a recording - where you have a common "clock" (metronome, conductor video to watch, common recording they listen to in headphones and play along with) seems the only way to accomplish this.
 
Hi All,

An company I do tech for is interested in doing a separated concert.
Basically, each musician would be on web-cam from their home- broadcasting in to a site where they could be viewed by the "audience".
I can think of about 15 problems that I can foresee, but does anyone have any advice on how to make things easier/smoother?

Hope all are well.
Latency will kill you amongst other things using the internet, getting it all timed out won’t happen live.
The simplest thing to do is use a prerecorded
track from a rehearsal or previous performance. To do this a tech will have everyone on their phones as a conference call, then playback the recording with musicians using their ear buds to listen and play along with the track. Only the previously recorded track will go out on the web with the “lip sync”video
 

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