How to host and livestream a house show, warts and all
Not a comprehensive guide
“How hard could it be to livestream a show?” The answer to this sort of rhetorical question is always: “Way more difficult and complicated than you think.” Also, if you actually decide to livestream a performance, it’s not a rhetorical question at all. It’s merely the beginning of a process of figuring out how to do it.
We the Adventure Hat trio (Seth, Kristi, and Erica) decided to try. And bruther, it was—get this—way more difficult and complicated than I thought.
But it was an excellent learning experience, and we had a great time performing, and…we’ll be better at it when we do it again.
Here’s the behind-the-scenes story, mostly about what it takes to pull one of these off, but also about what not to do. Feel free to quietly judge my ineptitude. But be jealous if you missed out, because we had a good time.
The idea, compounded
My original idea was to do something simple: Let’s livestream a show from our rehearsal space in my basement. We’re always looking for unconventional or non-obvious performance opportunities (e.g., we once played a short set on an island in the middle of a river), and this seemed like a neat idea in that vein.
We have many friends and family spread far and wide, and it made sense to put something together they could all watch and listen to from the comfort of their homes. Especially during the cold months, when so many of the fun outdoor venues around mid-Missouri are closed.
The idea grew, almost like an “if-you-give-a-mouse-a-cookie” situation. It occurred to me that while we were livestreaming, it would be nice to have some folks physically present in the room to bring some energy and make it seem like we’re playing to real people instead of theoretical people on the internet.
So then the idea became: Let’s throw a house show, and livestream that.
It all makes so much sense on paper, but of course, now instead of one thing, we’re doing TWO things. If you’ll do some arithmetic along with me, that is approximately twice as much work.
We thought hard about how long the set should be. I really like a two-hour gig, with a break in between sets. But we thought about the audience: Who wants to sit in front of their computer or phone for two hours and watch us play? Nobody.
We landed on 45 minutes as a solid length for the livestream. It’s long enough that folks could settle in and enjoy the arc of the show, and get a return on their time investment so to speak, but short enough that they wouldn’t get bored and squirmy.
But that created a new problem for the people attending the house show in person, because 45 minutes feels too short. People come all the way out to the show, and all they get is 45 minutes? We needed to sweeten the deal.
Because I’m basically a grandma and like to gather and feed people, it was obvious to me: Let’s have dinner together upstairs after the show!
...that’s a third thing. Three times the work. Mm.
As we were assembling a potential guest list, we noticed that a lot of the names were fellow musicians. Soooooo with all these talented folks under one roof who should all be friends with each other and play music together…why not add a jam session after dinner? We have the whole room available, replete with the PA system, drumset, piano, organ, a million guitars, etc.
We all agreed these were fabulous ideas, and we high-fived one another vigorously.
But…that’s a fourth thing. The “let’s livestream a li’l show, it’ll be a nice n’ easy gig for us” idea morphed into a four-part evening of merriment.
This is very on-brand for me. It’s simultaneously great, fun, and stupid. So it goes.
Learning how to actually do the actual livestreaming part, actually
There was yet the issue of how to actually livestream the thing.
There are two ways to do this. One way is to pull out your phone, stick on a tripod, open an app (Facebook, whatever), and tap a button.
The other way is significantly more complex. Guess which one I did?
See, the thing is, using your phone will create results that are…fine. Smartphone cameras are great, and their audio is…fine. But I didn’t want fine, I wanted at least very good. I was concerned that fine would be grating to the audience, and maybe even adorable (in a bad way).
That meant I needed to carefully mix everything through my mixing board and find a way to run the output into a device (i.e., a laptop), ensure that there was no latency between the audio and video, and pick a software platform to livestream from.
People who are good at things like audio engineering are squinting at that sentence, like… “Yeah? So?” But I am not skilled in these areas. I’m learning more all the time, but it’s a challenge for me, frankly.
Here’s an example: While I was troubleshooting the mix, I kept getting this terrible boomy sound once in a while. I figured out that it happened every time I hit a G. But I couldn’t figure out why. After poking, prodding, noodling, and testing, I found the culprit: The loudspeakers were sitting on the ground, not up on speaker stands, and the mics were picking up their reverberations from the floor.
Okay. Fine. So I popped the speakers up on stands. (I had them on the floor to begin with because I didn’t want the speakers to be blasting right in people’s faces. I thought putting them on the floor and aiming them a bit away from the seating would lessen the severity of the sound.)
This is the kind of thing a real sound person would know how know how to handle with hardly a thought. Or, more likely, a real sound person wouldn’t make mistakes like that in the first place.
Anyway.
I studied my mixing board’s manual to be sure I understood all the features and how they worked. (Spoiler: I still whiffed on one very important function.) I spent an inordinate amount of time dialing in reverb for the whole mix that would give it some life without making it sound too weird for the small space in which we were performing.
(Why the reverb? If you capture audio output directly from a mixing board, you’re getting the sound from the mics and instrument pickups, which is always dry, soulless, and—I don’t know how else to say it—electristicky and flappy? You have to add effects—typically at least a little reverb. Whereas if you use mics to capture the audio coming out of the speakers, you’re capturing how the audio sounds in the room. Major difference.)
I decided the easiest way to integrate a camera with livestream software was to just use a laptop and its webcam.
With that settled, I then I had to decide how to get the output from the mixing board to the laptop. I tinkered with the idea of setting up a pair of stereo mics in the room with an audio interface to capture what was coming out of the speakers, and putting it into the laptop. I ended up abandoning that idea and instead experimented with running the stereo outputs from the board into an audio interface, and then running the audio interface to the laptop via USB-C.
But eventually I realized that I could omit the audio interface altogether and just run a USB cable from the board directly into the laptop. That was the simplest approach. At least, as long as I got a decent reverb effect on there. Which…I think I did.
Next, I had to figure out the best software platform for the livestream. There are various ways to do this, but I definitely wanted to stream from a platform where Adventure Hat had a presence, to reduce the friction for the end user…I wanted people to be able to RSVP for the event and jump on the livestream from that event when it started, rather than having to hunt around for it.
That’s why I chose Facebook. I went down a rabbit hole for about a day, experimenting with OBS, which is platform-agnostic software for streaming. After burning up a lot of time and energy, I concluded that I didn’t need it.
But…the Facebook livestreaming interface sucks ass. (I invite you to Google the term “enshittification” to learn why all of our tech platforms and interfaces become harder and more frustrating to use all the time.)
Basically, when I tried to set up a planned livestream, I couldn't get past the settings page. There was some dumb little thing I wasn’t clicking, or something, so the “go live” button remained unclickable.
I’ll just tell you that I returned to this screen multiple times on multiple days in an effort to find the ghostly setting. After much sturm und drang, I finally found the answer, indirectly, in some set of instructions on some forum somewhere.
Such enshittification. Ugh.
Finally, though, I had it all set: The mix was right. The interfaces were configured. The livestream page was loaded. And I was able to create an event that people could simply RSVP to.
Then we just had to plan, set up, and host an evening of merriment.
Show logistics
The logistics of executing the in-person portion of the evening were not difficult. We basically just had to plan a party within the party.
Each of us in the trio made a different dish (couple kinds of chili, some cornbread, veggie tray, charcuterie, etc.). We, along with my generous and patient partner, cleaned the house and set up the party things (tablecloth, drink station, etc.).
Between a couple of us, we cleared some furniture out of the rehearsal space and brought enough chairs for everyone. (After we set up, we were surprised to find that we could have squeezed in another 10-12 seats if we wanted to. A note for next time…)
Then it was mainly a matter of setting up our instruments like usual and tuning up.
At the appointed time, guests arrived, we fired up the livestream, and we started playing.
What went wrong
I will say, on the whole, the evening was really great. But there were some challenges and flubs.
1. Frozen pipes. We did the show in the dead of winter, and the week of the performance, we had a deep freeze. Every time the temperatures dip into the single digits, the toilet stack in my half bathroom freezes. (The stack is on an exterior wall that has no insulation, so at some point, I have to rip all that out, insulate it, and rebuild the wall. But for now, we freeze.)
When that happens, it drips through the ceiling…right at the bottom of the stairs, where all our guests would descend into the rehearsal/performance space. Not ideal to have toilet water dripping on their heads. Most people aren’t into that. (No judgement if you are.)
For days, I had a space heater running at full tilt next to the stack. Fortunately, between that and a break in the weather, the pipes thawed out the day before the show. Disaster narrowly averted!
2. A sleepy laptop. At no point did it occur to me that, left alone, my laptop would fall asleep after 20 minutes of “inactivity” during the livestream. I, apparently erroneously, assumed that ACTIVELY LIVESTREAMING counted as “activity” and would keep the laptop awake. I was wrong. Twenty minutes into the set, I watched as the laptop went dark in the middle of a song.
When the laptop goes dark, the livestream dies. So I had to stop in between songs, wake up the laptop, and reanimate the livestream. Very rock n’ roll. Awesome for maintaining a flow. And not at all bad for holding on to your livestream viewers. Especially because you can’t kick the livestream back on—it creates a new livestream, which people have to locate on their own.
3. A broken string. I play guitar aggressively, so broken strings happen sometimes. During this show, it happened near the climax of an intense song. You would think that I would have many guitars at the ready in case I needed to switch one out…this show was taking place, after all, in my home, in our rehearsal space, where most of my instruments reside.
Buuuuut no…for some reason, the one guitar that I needed as a backup was…upstairs, instead of within arm’s reach. I tried to play it off by telling Kristi and Erica to tell a joke for 60 seconds, and then I bolted. They did not have any jokes at the ready. So I left them in the lurch while I ran upstairs to retrieve the necessary backup guitar.
Also, the broken string happened during our second-to-last song, so even after all those shenanigans, we had just one song to get everything back on track, and then…we were done.
4. Too-quiet audio. This was the biggest screw-up. So…’member when I said I’m unskilled in audio engineering types of things? The livestream listeners told me later that the audio was super quiet, and they could barely hear it.
It took me a while—days later—to figure out what I did wrong. (By the way, an audio-level meter on the livestream page would be really fucking nice to have, Facebook.) I erroneously thought that all the audio levels on the board were controlled by the two main faders, plus individual faders on each channel (one for each mic, for the guitar, for the piano, and for the fiddle). And then the trim knob on each channel was there to gently fine-tune the levels.
I was almost right. The main faders and individual channel faders are for setting the base level of the whole mix, and also each instrument, respectively. But most of the volume adjustment comes from those trim knobs on each channel.
I had been barely using the trim knobs, because every time I dialed one up at all, the speakers would feed back. See, my PA has active speakers, meaning each one has its own volume controls. The problem was that I had the volume on each speaker up too high; that’s why any time I turned up the trim levels, they squawked at me.
The solution: I turned down the volume on the speakers themselves, and turned up the trim on each channel. Voila, suddenly I was seeing lights on the board’s audio meter.
This is the difference between volume output IN THE ROOM and volume output FROM THE BOARD.
It’s also the difference between a TOTAL AMATEUR and someone who KNOWS WHAT THEY’RE DOING.
Sigh. Now I know, and knowledge is power. Wooooo.
What went right
Despite the issues, the night was wonderful.
We were right to keep the set to 45 minutes. In the end, it felt like the right amount of time.
We could have hosted more people, but 15-20-ish was a good number, and it made the show cozy and intimate without feeling crowded.
Dinner together was a fabulous choice. It allowed us all to hang out while coming down from the performance (and recharging with calories). I was so happy to be able to spend quality time with attendees…usually at a show, you try and greet each of your friends who come, but it’s just not possible. You’re too busy setting up, getting a drink and taking a leak during the 15-minute set break, and then tearing down before the next band starts or the venue kicks you out or whatever.
The group jam after dinner was better than I imagined it would be. It was loose and loud. We swapped instruments, playing ones we don’t usually play. Some folks brought their own. We took turns goading our pals into singing their own songs. People made new friends and rekindled old connections.
And the kids joined in! Yes, the kids. This may not be for everyone, but: I loved having kids there. They were all a bit older—late elementary and middle school—which meant they could dip in to the show, or disappear upstairs and run around with the other kids, or whatever. They didn’t need supervision per se, and there were no interruptions from whining or crying little ones.
And they made the jam session so rich and enjoyable. Most of them could play an instrument somewhat, and we all but forced them to play with us. The adults showed them little tips and tricks for jumping into an improv and encouraged them to hang with it. It was honestly so so so cool to see them “get it” and realize how easy and fun it is to play music with a group of people.
So. There’s your behind-the-scenes look at the trials, travails, and triumphs of how we put on our first livestream-and-house-show (and dinner-and-jam-session) combo platter. It was delicious. We’ll have to do it again sometime.