Last Friday (April 17th) Lobelia and I played our first house concert in a couple of months in Leith, Edinburgh.
It was a great demonstration of everything that’s cool about house concerts:
- It was organised very much at the last minute (wasn’t even advertised at all until 2 weeks before the gig),
- It was booked by someone who’d seen me give a masterclass a few years ago and couldn’t be bothered to wait for a ‘proper’ venue to get round to booking Lo and I, so got on and did it himself.
- It was populated by friends and family of Paddy who booked it, most of whom had little idea who we were beyond Paddy raving about it.
- It was marvellous.
We hadn’t planned to live stream the gig, but a request came in from Twitter, and Paddy being the enterprising chap that he is, signed up for Ustream, set his laptop up in front of the ‘stage’ (read: ‘end of the living room with instruments in it’) and we were able to play to an over-capacity room (we’d suggested a size-limit when we organised the gig, Paddy went over it, filled the room, and it was even cooler as a result 🙂
It was also the first outing for our new Mark Audio PA system, which sounded SO good. Scarily good. It’s a big part of why the live stream worked so well as that the laptop was sat in front of one of the speakers. Lo was sat in front of the other, and this video was filmed on the N95, with the built in mic.
All in, we had just under 200 people watching the stream, which, at 15 minutes notice is pretty damn good! We’ll hopefully have more live streamed house concerts before too long.
So, we played to a room full of lovely people, had 200 watching online, ate Paddy’s lovely cooking, went for a curry after with his family, sold a fistfull of CDs, got paid… the perfect Edinburgh evening 🙂
Time to book some more house concerts – email me if you’re interested in hosting one. It’s easier than you’d think 😉
Experiencing this house concert made a thoroughly enjoyable evening Steve. I watched on the stream as you know, with all the other ‘virtual’ audience on my headphones. Audio quality was fantastic and visuals were sufficient seeing as it was a dark room! My wife Jayne was sitting across from me and had to put up with my shouts of joy, and exclamations of, “This is such a brilliant thing to be part of!” I passed her the headphones at certain points so she could hear was I was hearing! All the interaction between us lot in the chatroom was great fun and the music yourself and Lobelia created was just beautiful. Great to see the Edinburgh police siren was captured on video and your reaction to it!
Fun, fun, fun!
Russ
haha its so cool seeing a vid form my room, i’m really glad there’s a recording from the gig as a little birthday momento for me!
my sister was saying that a load of her friends would have really loved to have seen you guys too, so she might be looking to get you guys round to hers next time you’re up this way 🙂
A wonderful gig – love house concerts. Are you doing any in London soon mate??
I’m glad you enjoyed it as much as we did! It was great to hear both of you, and the intimate setting is just how I like to enjoy live music; sadly it is rare to get that close to the performers. The relaxed vibe was very cool too.
I also videoed with my camera, sadly only the second half. If you are at all interested in a different camera angle (hey, you could spend hours cutting from one to the other) send me (or Paddy) a snail mail address to send it on DVD (all 4 Gb of it!)
I want to see more home gigs!
Hi Steve,
I like your blog and I’m thrilled to find another musician taking blogging seriously. There are not many of us.
Its funny that you are writing about house concerts. I was just showing my wife how we could throw a house concert here in Harlem. And this site (concerntsinyourhome.com) can help you find an audience.
-Hakim