I was this many years old when I figured out how to livestream with a jazz singer who lives about 900 miles away from me.

Why is this a Big F_____ Deal?

To the best of our knowledge Wendy Jones and I are the first who’ve successfully played live and shared live, from such a distance. So, we think it probably IS a B.F.D!

We know of no other pair of musicians who’ve done what Wendy and I did on Saturday night. Lots of players livestream by themselves or with their COVID-free bandmates from a single location (Billie Eilish!), and lots of distanced players pre-record their playing (virtual choirs!), edit the audio and video, and upload it to socials. We’ve done plenty of both. (Shameless plug for this playlist.)

It means (at least!) two musicians can play together, in real time, and can also send their music out to viewers on YouTube, Twitch, Facebook Live and other channels. It means that even in the darkest days of a pandemic, distance is no obstacle to playing live with your friends and sharing it with the world. Concertizing is available right now. This makes us feel great now, but we predict it’s gonna be reaaaaalll useful for the rest of our careers.

Musicmakers everywhere: Let’s play NOW!

Jazz singer and teacher Wendy Jones has been my tech partner-in-crime since summer. She’s a fantastic singer! She’s based in Hendersonville, North Carolina, 889 miles away from me in Wakefield, Rhode Island. Sitting at home during the pandemic, we started reading about SoundJack and other low-latency music options. We talked to each other in a teacher group called The SpeakEasy Cooperative, and we decided to see if we could connect to each other, even from such a long distance. TL; DR: It worked!

1. This was our first experiment, using Cleanfeed to see if we could collaborate with each other in real time. (Thousands of miles apart? Uh, no. Math is hard). I recorded our session, threw it into Final Cut Pro with some still photos, and released our results.

2. This was our second experiment, using SoundJack to speed up our connection. This time we each recorded video in our own studios, and I recorded the audio to my computer’s hard drive. And I put it all together in Final Cut Pro. It worked . . again!

3. Emboldened by our success, we added a third singer to our SoundJack experiments — Dr. Amy Stewart in Fort Worth, TX. And It worked again. This time, I recorded my screen video using QuickTime and threw that into Final Cut Pro.

Wendy and I then began to test our tech with other people, constantly sharing our results with each other (and on my YouTube channel! Go subscribe!) We wondered if it would be possible to livestream our low-latency music sessions, rather than record, edit and upload them. Could our tech handle it? Yes, yes it could!

Was Saturday night’s “live rehearsal” perfect? No. I had to ask my desktop Mac to give me quality video, excellent audio, and then bounce it all live into a different platform. We had some difficulty hearing each other at times, and viewers told us that sometimes there was a faint echo, or it was difficult to hear my piano (which sounded really loud to me, live!). This is a lot to ask of any consumer-level tech.

But you bet your bippy I’m going to keep asking my tech to make the impossible possible. Wendy and I have music to make! Subscribe to get notified when Wendy and I do our next Long-Distance Livestream!