On Sunday, April 5 Natasha, Eliott, and I performed a song on Facebook Live. Shelter-in-place was in effect, so we were limited to the members of our family and the equipment already in our house.
Here are behind-the-scenes photos.
My guitar and floor board.
The floor board controls a Kemper Profiling Amp. The XLR in the bottom-right goes to the mixer.
The keyboard is a simple MIDI controller — it doesn’t generate sound on its own. The stand is from a table saw. The MIDI signal goes out of the keyboard, …
… into an iRig adapter, into an iPad, then into the mixer. GarageBand on the iPad generates the bass sound (“Liverpool”). See the shattered glass? I broke it on Saturday when I dropped my guitar while setting up the equipment. I feel really bad since this is Eliott’s iPad that he bought after saving his allowance for two years. I got AppleCare for it, so Apple will replace it. After the Apple Stores reopen in several months. :-(
Natasha’s drums. We don’t have much space in our house, so these have moved from a spare bedroom (later Eliott’s room) to setup in the garage to stored in cases in the garage.
An SM58 in the kick drum. I only had two XLR cables, and both were in use. I couldn’t run to Guitar Center for another XLR cable because of shelter-in-place, so I combined adapters to use a 1/4" cable.
Did you know that headphones can act as microphones? This is how I mic-ed the snare and hi-hat.
Continuing the go-with-what-you’ve-got theme, I deployed earbuds as overhead mics on the drums.
An old Tascam Portastudio 414 4-track recorder acted as the main mixer. I didn’t have enough channels for all the mics, so I used an ART headphone mixer to mix the drum mics to the Tascam’s sub input. The Boss Digital Delay generated DIY reverb.
OBS Studio is a versatile Open Source video mixer that directly uploads live streams. For this live stream I only needed one camera, my iPhone X. OBS can handle many cameras. In past testing I’ve successfully simultaneously connected three iOS devices both wired and wireless.
