You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - 7 Ways to up Your Streaming Game

Episode Date: September 8, 2021

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Hey, Peter. Hey, Adam. Do you like old school things? I do. Do you like the You'll Hear a podcast? I love the You'll Hear a podcast. What if I told you you could have an old school version of the You'll Hear It podcast? Would that be something you might be interested in?

Yes, it would. I'm Adam Manus. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to The You'll Hear podcast. Music advice and inspiration. A brand new season. It's a brand new season. Coming at you.

Coming at you. Of course, sponsored by Open Studio. Go to OpenStiojazz.com for all your jazz lesson needs. But Peter, it's time for a new season. and we were just on a little bit of a summer hiatus. We totally redid the pod suite here. And we also revamped how we're going to be doing this podcast. I'm very excited because we're going back to the old school style short 10 to 15 minute podcast.

Don't box me in, bro. Hold up. Well, no, no. I'm on casual lists of seven. You know, you like that. Speak pipes. User questions, ratings and reviews. Give us some seven stars.

All that stuff is back. You know, we had a little bit of a hiccup called the Global Pandemic. I don't know if you heard about it. Right. Where the earth kind of shifted under all of our feet, but we are, we're going to try to get back here to the old school spirit of the podcast. It's exciting. It's exciting. It's a new season, but yeah, we're going to rekindle some of the old favorites.

And we never let go of any of this. And most importantly, we never let go of our dear listeners. Thank you guys so much for being here on this journey. We're here to serve. I mean, that's what we're here. We're going to be three days a week. Yeah, yeah. Monday, Wednesday, Friday drops.

That's when the pod drops. That's right. That's right. I don't know what that means, but. No, it's when the pod. drops on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. So our very first episode here is Wednesday. Expect another episode on Friday.

And we're going to just continue this cadence as we go here. We're stoked. Thank you for joining us here. So today, we have our very first list of seven in a long time. That's right. And it's seven ways to up your streaming game. Now, speaking of the pandemic, this is something we both have learned a lot about. Yes.

Yes. And we get a lot. I mean, we've gotten more questions about this specifically. Yeah. than I think even like how do I voice an F7. And, you know, we've learned some things, but we still got some things to learn. So this is fun. Like we're going to kind of lay out some specific ideas, but also just some general

concepts that will hopefully be helpful for you. And I think, you know, what we've certainly learned is that even as we are reemerging and getting the chance to do some live gigs, the streaming thing is here to stay, which is very exciting because, you know, especially if you're not, you know, especially if you're you're willing to kind of expand your mindset and the framework of sort of how you think of performances and tutorials and communication and reaching people. You know, the beautiful thing about this is you do have the ability to reach many folks at a time when you couldn't reach folks, you know, with live performance. Yeah. And you don't even have to be like a professional streamer or

YouTuber or anything like that or have your own, you know, Friday night solo piano concert to do this. We're all on Zoom now. We're all doing lessons over Zoom. You're probably. probably even doing some kind of concert or rehearsal or something over Zoom. We're all doing it now. So just some little tweaks can really up the quality of what you're sending out. And then also more importantly, your experience with it. Because as we know, like one of the most important things here is actually your flow on the back end. So that's one of the things we want to talk about.

Well, and I think that, you know, what we've discovered here, and I've done a little bit of reading on this even just beyond music, Like this whole thing of Zoom fatigue and like really getting your energy sapped out of you. Sometimes there's some specific things you can do to avoid that. Sometimes that's not, I mean, look, if you're staring at a screen all day, that's going to take its toll. So you've got to kind of pace yourself with all these different kinds of things. But we've discovered certain things like when you're meeting with or talking with someone being able to look them in the eye on the screen instead of looking down. Like those little things make a huge difference on the energy level when you come out of a meeting or a conversation. Just like if you're in, you know, in IRL, as the kids say, in person with each other, if you're talking to someone and they're looking, now you can't see because this is an audio podcast.

But pretend like you're in the pod tweet. That's right. I'm looking at Adam and having a discussion. But it's very awkward because I'm looking directly to the right to the right of his. How do you feel Adam right now? It seems like you're looking at me. Oh, I'm not looking at. It seems like you're kind of interested in what I'm saying.

Exactly. So when you don't make that eye context. So little things like that make a difference. And we're going to try to give you seven ways. specific to music that you can up your streaming game. All right. So let's hit it. Number one.

Yes. Understand what you're trying to do. Okay? So streaming is something that it's so easy to just press the button. It's so easy we do it by accident sometimes here. Often. The on air button. But a little bit of just taking a breath and, you know, kind of figuring out what it is

that you want to do will help you not be frustrated and not, you know, kind of temper your expectations into a way that I think is appropriate. You don't want to look at if you're going to do like a streaming. performance of yourself playing jazz guitar or whatever don't think about it the same as a concert because what happens is like an in-person concert because if you do you're you're going to be deflated when you don't get that energy back from the audience because there isn't an audience there right so you have to find other ways to get that energy that might be from the chat or whatever but it's mainly just going to be more of like you're practicing performing and you're open to it

being available to other people so it's a kind of a different mindset so make sure that you're thinking about that as you go in. I've found that if you study folks that are really good, like, YouTubers, and it doesn't have to just be music or jazz or whatever, that are just really good at going live. And look, some of the best YouTubers will tell you they are no good at streaming. Like, they can craft a beautiful video. Like record it. Recorded it and edit it.

Yeah. But when they're just standing in front of the camera, they either freeze up or they're too much a perfectionist or whatever. But you've done so much of this directly, you know, talking head right into the camera. What's some stuff that like for you to really get your framework and your mindset, right, that you like to go into with? So this is where we're really going to, I think the most important thing here is to get an easy flow with your technical setup. So that you don't have to be opening menus in your computer and trying to find things as you're streaming live, right? So if you're on a Zoom and let's say you're getting a lesson, you don't want to be like searching for everything.

If you can get your hands on hardware. So we use here a few different pieces of hardware. The first is that A10 Mini, right? And so we'll recommend that straight away. This is the Black Magic A10 Mini. It's what we stream almost everything from. Yes. And it is an incredible piece of equipment just to have some physical buttons.

And I know you're thinking like, well, wait, we all have computers here. Why do I need a box with physical buttons? Yeah. Because you would be surprised at the difference that headspace you get from having tactile buttons that are set up in advance and you don't have to find the mouse, find the cursor on the screen, and then put your eyes inside your computer. All of that takes away from the moment, whereas if I just have the button, bam.

We also use a thing called a stream deck for our macros, which is a super important thing. A macro is where you can set up literally a bunch of different actions over many different pieces of equipment like your computer, your A-10 Mini, your audio, all kinds of things to happen. I use it on all of my YouTube streams to help me with things like notation on screen. I set it up all ahead of time.

And really, it's all about prep, It's just like having a gig, man. It's like if you walk into the gig and you didn't work on the tunes at all and you had no idea what you were doing and you just are kind of winging it and you're hoping that maybe you can get away with it, not knowing anything, you're going to suck. That's right. If you walk into a stream not having prepared, not having set yourself up in the right way, it's going to suck. But if you can just take that extra bit of time, get the right kind of hardware that you can literally see and feel everything all at

once, then you're really, then that's when for me, when I got that set up, I took my game to the next level. Sorry, we also use a thing called a roadcaster here for the podcast. Not like we're gearheads or anything here. No, I'm just giving our basic recommendation. So it's the three things. A-Tem Mini Black Magic for the stream itself. Yeah. The stream deck for the macros, which you hit me to, man. That's changed the game for me. And then for the audio, the Roadcaster, that means you don't have to have logic or anything else. You can just stream all your audio right there, go right into the A-TM-M-M-Bing. Bing, bam, boom, you're done. You're done. they are all beautiful.

They all have great buttons so that you can program and sliders and faders and all kinds of things. It makes it so, so much easier. Again, so that you're not on your track pad

with your mouse. Then you can just use your computer to be with your audience. Right. And then this will also help with what we're talking about with just screen fatigue in general because you're not even having

to be in the screen so much. You're using it more as a monitor or to see folks depending on what you're doing. Totally. But I think too, just to let you know, like the gear that we're mentioning

is really good for a, I mean, really beyond a basic setup. This you can do a lot with. Don't feel like you need to go out and get all this today. No, not at all. In fact, you want to slowly build up. Like, you can, really, your first stream should be just like what our first stream, which is literally just your phone.

On your phone. That's your phone. It's a great streaming device. It's great because there's not going to be any equipment getting in the way of you. Totally. Of, of your, you know, tutelage or your performance or really your creativity coming through. And that's what all this is about. And when we say, you know, understand what you're trying to do.

you're trying to translate some creativity, some inspiration to somebody through the internet anywhere in the world. And these things can enhance them, but you've got to add them slowly and purposefully so that they don't get in the way of the creative process. So number two is going to stream right into this. And it's rehearse everything in advance so that you can concentrate on the music or the show

and you can use private streams to check quality. I'll add to this to stream every day. You know how you get good at something? We've talked about this before. You've got to do it every day. Oh, yeah. 10,000 hours? 10,000 hours.

Malcolm Gladwell? Stream every day, even if it's to yourself. Yeah. Just stream a little bit every day. With me, with here at Open Studio, we do the daily guide of practice session on Zoom. That's really what's made me better at it. Right. Because I do it every day for at least an hour.

Sets and reps. It sets and reps and it forces you to kind of get your setup together. Yeah. And it's a really good impetus to grow. And you can, yeah, and by rehearse, we mean like just, you know, you want to rehearse the different steps so that they don't get in the way of your creativity once you do go live. You can still rehearse and then just do it to like a private stream on YouTube or whatever and then check that because that's going to also give you the confidence to know,

bam, I'm going to press this, I'm going to press this. And then you have a way and we'll talk about some different ways to have confidence. Because a lot of times if you're alone, the best is to have somebody else kind of producing and they can be at another location. It doesn't matter. Yeah. But you might not have communications with them. Because once you get into the moment, you want to know things are working without having to check on them.

But it does take a certain amount of rehearsing and then just a certain amount of repetition. It's all about the reps. And you can even do it like we were talking about with the phone. You know, we did our challenges, right? Where you could do just like, I'm going to do a different key of a scale every day. And just stream it to your Instagram or to Facebook. Yeah. And look, if you feel like, oh my God, there's so much crap out there, there's TikToks, there's YouTube.

There's so much crap out of the world. There is a lot of crap. There is a lot of crap. But don't let that stop you from putting your great, non-crapy story out there. We want to hear you. We want to hear you unless you sound like crap. No, no, no. But I mean, it's like a lot of times people get frustrated.

There isn't that there's too much. I mean, look, this is all digital bits. They come and they go. Yeah. But, you know, you might have something to say or to play on a day that touches and moves one person seven thousand miles away. So you're going to be selfish and be like, well, I don't have the right equipment. Or I don't want to, I don't want to contribute to too much digital noise. So you're going to, that's selfish that you didn't provide that beauty into the world that that person needed.

Number three, was that too dog, no, it was great, man. It's totally, totally on point. Number three is to hashtag ABL. Oh, we're bringing that back. You said we're going old school. Hashtag abel. Hashtag it, everybody. If you're always being learning.

Wait, I didn't say it. Always be learning. Always be learning. Or always been learning. And learn from YouTubers. So Peter has here some of his favorite. Well, I'll throw out some of my favorites. I want you to talk about because I think with YouTubers, and this doesn't have to be

official YouTubers, but basically these are, folks that you kind of follow that you trust so that you don't have to always be going and chasing the latest trends and that also you can learn from how to use things and they are just generous people and that they put all this stuff up there to show you their travails and their successes with different equipment or techniques for streaming yeah and then you can you almost get to skip over that step of trying things out or trying techniques out and seeing if they're going to work because if they work for them then they'll show you how to do it then you can go right to the success part And like you said, man, some of the best ones to follow aren't even music YouTubers.

Right. Like photography YouTubers are amazing at this because they know all about lighting. They know all about cameras. They're so good for learning. Exactly. So a couple of my favorites and big shout out to Aaron Pirecki, who, you know, really taught us here how to use the A10 Mini Pro. And just how to be consistent with live streaming and really have good quality. He's got nothing to do with music.

He just does a thing about live stream. It's like a meta thing about live stream. And so we mentioned our Aitem Mini and our stream deck and the. Roadcaster. All of these are things we found with YouTubers. Just searching on streaming and YouTube. Right, right. Because there's so much different equipment available. And we're not saying that this is definitely not the only way. The main thing is you find a path that works for you. And that's the cool thing about the following these YouTubers and and cash tag ABL, learning about stuff from them is because you can kind of find ones that have a similar philosophy to you to you. And then you can

apply it to music or whatever you're doing. Totally. Gerald Undown. I love his stuff. I mean, he's a great photographer and videographer, Peter McKinnon, who's like, I actually a really big, big time YouTuber, but shows a lot of like setting up a studio, you know, how to really, you know, kind of nail that kind of thing. Yeah, great for organization, Peter. Organization, exactly, that kind of stuff. Caleb Pike is great DSLR shooter for really creative stuff. He's the one that I learned about those Ukrainian lenses.

He's kind of quirky. I like that too. Like how you're going to give it your own kind of look and that kind of thing. And I would just shout out a couple of music YouTubers that I think do a really good job. Of course, Adam Neely does an amazing job. He doesn't stream a lot, but his videos will give you inspiration for how to, he's got a very simple lighting setup, you know. Right. Glenn Zaleski does a great job with notation on screen, as does Nari Sol, who's really, really good at making videos that have great looking notation.

And shout out to Rick Beato, too. Yes. His stream game has upped recently. I don't know if you said. Well, I think that his stream setup is super simple, but like you can see the keyboard. And look, the whole thing is like the content is king. I mean, the equipment and the lighting and all that, that's really important, I think, and great. But if you have crap content, and Rick is like really, he always has very, whether you agree with him or not on something or whether or not he's being a little bit dogmatic or not, he's got, he knows what he's talking about and has some really good.

And when he streams, he's very like, it'll be like, he goes into professor mode. Like when he gets in front of the blackboard, breaking down the circle of fifths and stuff, you know. But I mean, it just shows he's very comfortable as a teacher in that thing. Number four is to have a big monitor. It's called the confidence monitor for a reason. Here in our pod suite, we have two monitors, one right behind Peter, one right behind me, so we can actually make some eye contact and then keep an eye on the stream as it's going. I thought we had this one because you love looking at yourself.

I do love looking at myself in this light, I do. But no, you know what? This is another one of those things, like we were talking about with those hardware boxes. This is another one of those things to, if you invest in a nice big monitor that gives you a lot of space. You'll be surprised at just the amount of bandwidth. It gives you that when you're live, you don't get nervous. You know what's going on. You're not scrambling trying to find things. All of that is super important in the flow. Yeah, absolutely. Because what we're talking about in terms of streaming is basically producer lists and camera operator list. We do everything

ourselves. Yeah. And I mean, there's some streams, some bigger stuff that we obviously have camera folks and switchers, but it's a matter of the whole thing with having the confidence. And big monitor is just one way. There's other ways. Some people use tally lights and things. Like basically you want to have a setup so that as you're playing or as you're teaching or as you are putting your creativity out, you have to think as little as possible about whether or not it's working. Like you don't want to have to be looking in the chat. I mean, that's fine at the beginning.

That's a form of confidence monitor where we, you know, you'd say like, let me know if everybody can hear it and stuff. But the thing is and it's not like, okay, you just don't want to see anything because you have to see something because if there's, you see. nothing, then your mind starts thinking, wait, is this working? You know? Yeah, you don't want to do a whole hour-long stream, and you weren't streaming. Exactly. Yeah. So there's different setups.

We won't go into each one, but something that you can just glance out without having to, again, go to your computer and your mouth. You just want to be able to, out of the corner of your eye, know that everything's working. Super important. Another really important thing, something that you can actually get a lot of mileage on without spending a ton of money on is lighting. And this will go back also to the YouTubers. There are a ton of great YouTubers that are, you know,

really good at simple tutorials for lighting, some of the ones you mentioned actually. Yeah. And there's, I mean, there's just too many to mention. You can just Google like three point lighting. Yeah. Something like that, just a basic knowledge of how to light yourself can make your streaming game

go from terrible to really good in one afternoon. Absolutely. And you don't even have to spend a ton of money. Like if you wanna invest in a big, we have two actually really affordable GVM softboxes in here that we use. I use one at home. It makes me look 10 years younger, you know, automatically.

But just using things like practicals, using a backlight or a hair light to separate yourself, using our little brick lights for our red, blue, green lights that we can put. Aperture MC, big shout out to them. I mean, the lighting game, it's a deep rabbit hole. But it's one of those things that, again, if you just spend half an hour on, an hour on tops, right? You will up your game by like 80%. Just the way everything looks will look so much. better. And by the way, it's the same thing with sound as well. If you just, if you do like a lot of

Zoom calls, do everybody a favor right now, pause this podcast and Google how to how to get good Zoom audio with music because there's settings that you need to adjust to do that. And we won't even like part of, I mean, we name some some YouTube folks and we can name some more, but you this is also kind of part of the process is to like Adams just said, is to search for specific things, especially on YouTube to watch videos because it's fun when you discover your own folks because at first you just want to have answers to certain things like you said three point lighting so you might not want to go directly to Peter McKinn's concept on that because he's so like I mean his equipment is on such a high level so yeah and he's fun to watch and stuff but you might want to just really start

with some basic folks and then folks that you can kind of watch and that's part of the fun thing because then you're learning how to stream and how to put together videos at the same time as you're learning the specific crap it's actually really fun it's really fascinating thing I'll learn about Number six is to iterate carefully. You have to trust the equipment. Yeah. So this is so important because, and that's why we said, start with just your phone.

Like, catch yourself on a schedule. And look, we can attest to this from personal experience. Like, add things just as you can. Don't add everything at the same time because you want to keep your confidence up as you're streaming. And you don't want to be like, I want to keep developing until I get the perfect setup. And then I'll start doing this. You have to be working on it as you go. So it's just like adding different.

scales to your repertoire. You're working on them all the time, but you're not waiting until you have all those in your hands before you start improvising over something. And you also don't try to be like, I'm going to add a new kind of scale every day to my improvising. Yeah, you would never do that with you. No. Yeah. Because you're not going to learn in a deep way. And you can actually see Peter and I do this in real time during the pandemic. If you watch Peter's Shelter and Place concerts, I mean, it was good from the start, but you could see Peter growing week by week. And if you look at the first one and the last one, you'll see a huge difference in the quality. And the same. And the same, Same thing if you look at my guided practice sessions on YouTube.

I mean, the first ones, I just literally took a box here when the world was shutting down and threw some stuff in it, right, and set up at home. And then eventually, you know, as I was learning more about lighting and cameras and everything, you can see it start to look really, really good. And it just takes time. So don't try to do too much too soon. Absolutely. All right, we're up to number seven. Remember how we do these lists?

I love the clapback. Can we just get a shout out to the old school you'll hear it style? That's right. Wait, something was supposed to happen when we did, like, number one, two. Nah, number seven, there we go. There we go. Oh, by the way, so this is Wednesday. Friday, we have a speak pipe.

And so before we do number seven, if you want to leave us a question, we use this service called speakpipe. You can go to you'll hear it.com. There's a little thing that says podcast, hit that podcast button, and then you could leave us a voice message with your question about jazz, improvisation, the piano, streaming, whatever you want to talk to us about. Yes. We are happy to answer your question.

And we're using a speed pipe on Friday, but please hit us up at you'll hear it.com. That's right. Okay. So number seven, this is, this is how, there we go. This is kind of how we really are able to continually grow with this beyond just ABL, always learning and checking stuff. This is to get feedback from actual viewers. So you can do this in real time.

You're really good at this, Adam, where, you know, you're able to kind of scan through the chat as you know the live chat as something is going on that's really good um but you can do it reading the chat afterwards you can also just call folks probably one of the most important was is to watch your own stream this is painful sometimes especially when you're starting yeah but that's how you can kind of experience it's very hard it's impossible to be objective about it but try to find some people that are watching if that's a friend a loved one your mom or whatever and say what did you think about how was the pacing how was the lighting did it look good did it sound good was it loud enough because all these things are

iterative in terms of how you fix them but you really want to have your finger on the pulse because each stream you have the chance to make adjustments and you want to treat it just like you treat learning music you want to compare yourself to people who are doing it right yeah and you want to do that with like a very open heart

you know be light have a light touch on yourself you don't have to beat yourself up if you're not streaming just like Adam Neely out of the gate right or Peter Martin like you want to just make sure that you are kind of seeing like okay well why do they sound better. What's going on here? What can I learn from them? Why is, why is that look better? Is it the lens? Is it the lighting? All of that can be very, very helpful. Yeah. And then just remember,

the most important thing is the content still. So so so you're going to be working on that as you go. So really getting this feedback from folks, it's as much about like did they get the message? Like you just you could have the greatest content ever. But if you didn't have the stream, you got one digit wrong with the stream key and it's you're not actually live. No one gets to hear that. So There's that that kind of binary thing about it too. But you want to be working on like making sure that your brilliant concepts and brilliant music are actually reaching people and that they're getting them in a way that's satisfying. You know, it's never going to be perfect. It doesn't need to be.

That's just like live television or live anything. That's part of the excitement. Like a live gig is the excitement of what's going to happen. But you want to get the quality to a level where you're comfortable with it and you have confidence in it and your viewers can can be delighted by it. Totally. Let's recap, Peter. Number one, understand what you're trying to do. Number two, rehearse everything in advance.

Number three, always be learning, hashtag ABL from YouTubers. Number four, have a big monitor. Number five, become a lighting guru. Number five, research some lighting and some sound. Yeah. Number six, iterate carefully. Don't change too much. Number seven, get feedback from your viewers or self-feedback.

Peter, this was so much fun to do classic style, man. Man, this is awesome. I'm enjoying it. Yeah, this season's going to be dope. Again, you can go to Open StudioJazz.com for a deeper dive on any kind of jazz lessons. You can also go to you'll hear it.com. Leave us a voice message. Hey, what about a rating and review?

Well, you know what we're starting a new thing again on that? Every single rating and review is going to be. Well, you have to leave a review. If you just leave a rating, what are we going to be like seven stars, seven stars? We know that happens. Leave a review. Leave a review. It can be positive or negative, but we will shout you out for every single review.

We won't read the negatives. Okay. Good. No, we should. Cavalcade of Cravocate of crappy. reviews. Thanks, Peter. Thanks, everybody. All right. Until next time. You'll hear it.