The Stormcock Community

Live Internet Broadcasting - Andy Roberts, Tuesdays, 7.00pm

Starting a few weeks ago, I finally launched my Andy Roberts Tuesday Night Show with live guitar playing, synchronous feedback and chatroom. Wahay. What?

There's nothing like making a regular time committment to ensure that progress happens so I made up my mind some time ago that I would start doing a regular weekly broadcast over the internets. I've seen education programmes delivered this way, and the technology is stable now, with the Ustream.tv platform easily leading the way and a built-in web cam and mic on an apple computer providing the most straightforward hardware solution. So now anybody could do this, really. It's just a matter of finding a few people who might be interested in starting to build up a regular event type thing, once you can get your head round the idea of being there at the same time. I've always been a fan of asynchronous channels for catching up whenever you want and taking time to compose considered replies, but simultanaiety has always had something going for it as well, hence the popularity of instant messaging, skype etc.  For a musician,having a sense of audience is a component, it's definitely a component. There has to be a difference between a rehearsal and the real thing and that difference is mostly the sense of audience. Difficult to reproduce that in a recording studio.

So let me tell you about Ustream.tv:

You don't have to login at all, you can just be a 'guest' and still access the live stream of video and audio - just like watching a web cam or something like oneandother.com on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square. But it is better if you do get a Free account and login because then you can become a presence yourself, make comments in real time and text-chat with other visitors who are logged in on the same show. For popular shows with hundreds of people logged in the chat becomes unreadable, but that's not going to be a problem anytime soon...

A normal bradband internet connection is well sufficient, in fact I managed to cope reasonably well using one of those mobile dongle thingies whilst mine was changing over. Dialup probably isn't going to work, but heck, who stil lives in deepest Cornwall, Ireland or East Fife?

The music

I kind of like the idea of getting a bit more improvised, not just trotting out rehearsed songs but I've not quite got there yet. I like the idea of suggestions and requests too. It's another new medium that has yet to settle down and find its own conventions, unique strengths and also dsicover what doesn't work very well at all. By posting this to Stormcock.net where we know there are loads of musicians' musicians hanging out, I expect others to have a go at the same kind of thing in time, and take it further, I don't know but the key, as with everything, is to take the first step. To get started.

Here are the Links:

The Ustream Channel to go to on Tuesdays at 7.00pm , and where you can log in to create a free account:

ustream.tv/channel/andy-roberts-music

My blog post announcing the regular broadcasts:

distributedresearch.net/blog/2009/07/27/ustream-tv-tuesday-nights-andy-roberts-music-7-00pm

The YouTube channel where some of the songs from the broadcasts end up:

youtube.com/user/andyrobertsmusic

The one click upload to YouTube is one of the things that doesn't always work properly yet, it just seems to upload the first one, then stall, but it's not to much effort to download saved video from ustream and then upload to youTube manually. YouTube is destined to become the MySpace of video eventually anyway, with bleeding edge people moving on to better platforms for video such as Vimeo and viddler. I'll stop wittering and hope to see one or two new people on Tuesday Night - at least in August. I'll be in one of those remote dark ages places for the first two weeks of September but wil still try to get through somehow.

Cheers