I am excited to report that yesterday we had our first successful Live Stream from Taylor’s Playground Recording Studio.

Yay.

Facebook introduced a Live Streaming function at the beginning of the year and I have been trying to figure out the best application for something like this at Taylor’s Playground.  I have landed on the idea of Live Streaming segments at the end of my Thursday sessions and Sunday evening sessions.

This first Live Stream featured IF WE (which was perfect since Rocky Favia, Jr. is the Studio Assistant this year).  I am planning to have more IF WE Live Streaming in the near future. We would love to have people sign in and participate. I think I will also look for ways to get people involved before the Live Stream since there seems to be a bit of a lag while we are actually streaming.

The basic format that I am looking at is to share songs and just “hang out” for a bit. This first Live Stream was probably longer than it should have been. I am thinking 10-15 minutes max in the future. That probably means 2 songs total and some opportunities to ask and answer questions.

I used an iPad Air2 with a Shure Motiv MV88 iOS microphone plugged directly into the iPad. I was not necessarily impressed by the audio or video quality when I played the video back through Facebook. I do have a copy of the session on my iPad, and the quality is much higher there. So apparently there is quite a bit of compression happening on Facebook’s end. That is my guess, at least. If anyone has any suggestions of how to improve the quality, I would really appreciate the feedback.

I was not expecting the video to be in square format. I was expecting widescreen, but that was not available. I will certainly want to take that into consideration in the future, as this first Live Stream featured Rocky coming in and out of the frame. Good times.

One thing that I want to try in an upcoming Live Steam is setting up actual studio microphones and processing the signal through my mixing console, then coming out of the mixing console with a processed and compressed signal going directly into the iPad. If that works (which I think it should), that would allow for a full band Live Stream without any particular instrument destroying the signal at the microphone (I’m definitely thinking drums and electric guitar here) and without any particular instrument getting lost in the mix (vocals!!)… again, if anyone has any suggestions here, I would really appreciate feedback.

I’m also going to look for a place to post an upcoming Live Stream schedule so people can plan to tune-in if possible. As of right now, this is the schedule:

• Sunday, April 10 @ 8:30pm – POLEN
• Thursday, April 14 @ 2:30pm – IF WE

The Live Stream is playing from the Taylor’s Playground Recording Studio Facebook page, so if you want to tune-in, you may want to “Like” and “Follow” that page. You can always watch it after the fact, too.

Here is the link to yesterday’s Live Stream featuring IF WE:

https://www.facebook.com/TaylorsPlaygroundMusicStudio/videos/479847932213835/

Any feedback is welcome and appreciated. Thanks!