The Eden Show livestream is nearly one year old! I’ve done 37 episodes as of this blog post. I love doing this show and hope it keeps going for a long time.
The Eden Show started in fall of 2019 as a live event, held in a Providence restaurant. I was trying to recreate the old Hollywood/Broadway feeling of musical guests dropping by to chat and sing, very much like: “Hey, Judy Garland just walked through the door! Let’s give her a cocktail and have her do a tune at Truman Capote’s secondhand white baby grand!” I aimed to be David Letterman, Paul Shaffer, and Johnny Carson all in one.
The Eden Show live, with jazz singer Tish Adams and bassist Joe Potenza, fall 2019
The live show was a successful test, but also a tremendous amount of work. We were schlepping pianos, sound systems and cameras up a flight of stairs and back down again three hours later. And the venue really didn’t know what to do with me, so there wasn’t much promotion. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could broadcast this show from home?” But that’s crazy talk, Eden.
Then, something happened in March 2020. I’m sure you remember.
I saw plenty of livestreams during lockdown, but they tended to be one-sided: One person performed in their own space, singing to a karaoke track or accompanying themselves, while everyone else just watched. Bo-ring. Collaborative videos had to be filmed, recorded, and edited in advance. Exciting, but also a ton of work! . . . Like this one I did in April 2020.
The big problem was (and is) delay, aka latency. You’ve experienced this on Zoom, right? You talk and it takes a second for the other person to hear you and respond. And if you try to talk at the same time, you cancel each other out and can’t hear anything. That’s how computers and internet connections work. And that’s a music-killer right there. Unsolveable, right?
It seemed impossible that two people (or more) could actually make music together online, and livestream at the same time. But that’s what I wanted, and that’s all that I wanted.
I didn’t want to host a bunch of players and not get to play myself, and I didn’t want to sit around staring into the screen watching other players do solos. There was enough of that already (some of it decent, most of it frustrating). The Eden Show would be livestreamed interactive musical collaboration, or it would not exist.
In November 2020 I was testing some livestream tech with jazz singer Wendy Jones, who I jokingly call my Tech Wife. She’s willing to try any online tech with me. We were already skilled at using Soundjack, a free low-latency streaming service. We decided to see if I could send the audio from Soundjack into a livestreamer and then send it out to the world.
SUCCESS! We sang and harmonized for an hour, both astonished at how well it worked. Our audience was astonished too. As far as we know, we are the first people in the USA to livestream a low-latency musical event where the performers are 889 miles away from each other. So now I knew, it could work!
And so I decided to revive The Eden Show. It was the middle of the pandemic, live gigs were many months away, and I had lots of performing friends who were at loose ends and looking for something to do! PERFECT STORM!
I knew I wanted to livestream to more than just Facebook. And so I found StreamYard, a low-cost, browser-based streaming service that allowed me to send the stream to multiple channels. Because it was browser-based, the streamer required less computing power, allowing me to save that power for better audio connections if I chose to add them. It was very easy setup for a streaming novice like me, and easy for my guests to log in and be part of the show. I set up to stream to Facebook and YouTube and I dutifully included my Venmo for tips. My first guest was my country music-loving friend Justin Petersen. My emcee was my student Dan Chaika, broadcasting from his law office.
I tested all the connections between me and my guests a few days before the first show and was amazed at how little delay there was when I was playing piano in Rhode Island and Justin was singing live in Boston. So I decided to skip the extra step of adding Soundjack as the audio connector. Our first livestream was January 22, 2021. Watch it here.
As the first show went on, the connection did get a little slower. I adapted my piano playing style to compensate for the slight lag, but mostly it just sounded like Justin was singing country tunes and was backphrasing a lot which is typical in a lot of music. (What’s backphrasing? It’s when you don’t sing on the first beat of the measure, you wait a little bit. It makes songs sound more casual and in my case, it effectively covers audio delays. A good example is John Lennon singing “All You Need Is Love”.)
And now here we are, 37 shows later! Every show has the same basic format: A “cold open” with my emcee Dan, songs performed by me with my musical guests, some promotion of whatever my guest is working on (or whatever I’m working on), and some improvised songwriting at the end of the hour using suggestions from our viewers.
I’ve welcomed jazz singers, country crooners, blues shouters, instrumentalists, comedians, and fellow piano players. The longest-distance guest was my high school friend Ryan Bueter based in California, but when we got vaccines I started welcoming a few guests into the studio, including my sax-playing friend Stephen Grueb! The setup procedures are a little different depending on whether the guest is live in the studio or livestreaming from further away. I’ve tweaked a lot of my setup over 37 shows. I’ll talk about how I prepare and produce each episode in another blog post!
I love livestreaming. All of the musical fun, none of the schlepping, I only have to dress up from the waist up, and I can jam with my friends from far and near. If Judy was around to sing in my studio, I’m sure she’d raise a glass and say, “There’s no place like home.”
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