Saturday night live

Posted 2021-10-10.

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I wasn't feeling very well yesterday, and I have no idea why. The entire day I went around walking and mumbling like a zombie, a complete downer making my entire family worry. My roommate Mortadela had, on the other hand, spent the day at school, and when he got home he immediately turned his laptop on and began playing around with his streaming setup: his avatar, his OBS scenes, and his microphone. When everything seemed to be going well, he streamed for a while, and who knows how many people went to watch. I stood beside him and looked at the screen. Sadly, his OBS crashed not even 20 minutes into the show thanks to a buggy game and so did his stream. He didn't try to fix anything and so went to sleep, saying he would try again some other time.

I, however, was bitten by the bug of an idea, that I would stream too. I didn't actually listen to the thought, and instead whipped out my MIDI keyboard to try and make some music. An hour later and with the sun well set, of course I couldn't come up with anything. I tried another method. I took my Volca Sample (a drum machine), sat on the couch and pressed buttons and turned knobs randomly. Eventually, because it's a miracle machine, I had come up with a nice loop that I could see myself turning into a full song that very night.

But I was still feeling down and that didn't completely cheer me up. I opened the chat I have with my girlfriend and told her I was bored and lonely. But then the idea came back to me, and I invited her to do a stream with me, completely on a whim. She said yes, so I opened OBS and very quickly, taking less than 10 minutes, set up my stream. A while later we were live.

It was a nice experience. We talked and discussed stupid things for about an hour, with an audience of about 10 to 12 people. Then I played what I have ready of my next album. It was 20 minutes of music without commentary for which people stayed! I wanted to end it after that, but then other people arrived and I played live with the Volca, improvising with the loop I had come up with earlier. That took ten minutes. Great fun all around. People were enjoying themselves, which made me feel very good.

I don't know if I'll stream more often than once in a blue moon. Though it was very pleasant and I was free to say whatever I wanted, which is something "professional" streamers can't afford, it was still exhausting. However, it ended up being a nice way to show people my music, practice playing live, and convincing myself once and for all that, yes, it seems my work can have an audience that values it too.