Singing To My Computer

What a world of change since my last blog post. From intimate house concert to singing on a Zoom call with 300 other people (and others watching on youtube). (The picture above was taken before the call officially started. And yes, that is Mark Peres’ book of his writing from his podcast “On Life and Meaning” that my computer is propped up on. Dan’s episode of the podcast here; mine here.) Given that all gigs have disappeared for a couple of months—at a minimum—I was delighted to be asked by the local chapter of Creative Mornings to be one of the musicians on their first virtual event. What a learning experience! I’m fairly new to Zoom but have been using it a lot recently for family calls, yoga sessions, and board meetings. But music—that’s another whole thing. Getting the sound right for performances is always hard but when it is squeezed through an app and directed onto people’s personal computers?? Ugh. Really not the medium.

My first try at getting the sound right was to sing through a mic, plug in my guitar to the speaker and let my computer pick up that sound. It worked OK in the run-through (as we all learned about how to use the “raise your hand” feature so the moderator can feature you on the feed). Then I tried plugging my vocal and guitar directly into the computer (which involved a lot of old equipment I hadn’t used since I first started doing youtube videos). I did solo Zoom calls, recorded it and then watched it offline. I sounded like I was singing under water. So I spent an afternoon tweaking computer software and drivers and inputs. Good grief. Not my strength.

Finally Steve from Skookum did a Zoom call with me. Best result? Plugging my guitar into the sound system and singing without a mic. That’s a first. Something about the way the sound was being picked up, it kept cutting out the guitar! So I sang to a computer with my guitar booming in my ear. In the end it’s all about the connections we make, not a perfect sounding performance, right? Anway, enjoy the video. My portion is a little over 45 minutes in (at @-48:01). As John Prine would say, it’s a “big old goofy world” isnt’ it?

Screen shots of the comments after my performance. (I turned off my video feed so no one would see me messing around on my computer!)

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