With a Little Help From My Friends

January 27, 2021 9:17 PM

Getting that "let's play together live from separate rooms across town through the magic of computers" thing together. Video of this duo performance can be seen at ye olde Tubes of You, here.

My musical partner here in Tokyo, guitarist Daisuke Kuroda and I have been doing a weekly YouTube livestream show. Just talking about stuff and playing videos and such. Every 4th Tuesday of the month we have Covers Night (We take requests! Fulfilled by the next week at the earliest!) and this is one of the ones we did for the Tuesday Jan 26 show. If you think you'd like to tune in sometime (or watch the glorious reruns), there's info in the video description at the YouTube link. Cheers.

posted by flapjax at midnite (2 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite

It looks like the problem of the lag between musicians playing together over the internet has been solved since the last time I checked...
Very nice rendition, you've made the song your own, and it sounds extremely nice the way you play it ! This is a fine duet !
posted by nicolin at 1:31 PM on January 28, 2021 [1 favorite]


nicolin, there’s one big fat workaround to the problem of latency, which is still very much an issue. The workaround is the metronome provided by the app we’re using. (it’s Yamaha’s Syncroom, which seems to be a Japanese language only thing, far as I can tell). Since my partner and I both get the same metronome, via Syncroom, we can manage to stay in time with each other. That means, of course, that we’re mostly staying in time with... the metronome. Which, of course, kinda sucks, but doing it without a metronome would be completely impossible.

I should also note that our individual audio channels (in our case, my vocal, strumstick and stompbox, and Daisuke’s guitar) are being sent to each other in real time via Syncroom, but at the same time we are recording them to our individual audio recorders (in our case, we both use Logic). When we’ve gotten a satisfactory take, he’ll send me his Logic file and I’ll mix, then sync to the Zoom video we made (that’s what you see if you check the YouTube link).

So, that’s how we’re doing this.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:05 PM on January 28, 2021


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