General Live Stream Suggestions! (Megathread)
Hi everyone-
This is Mircea, head of live content at tonebase!
Let's use this thread as a place for any general live stream suggestions you might have that don't warrant an entirely new thread.
Examples may include:
- topics we should cover in future live streams
- new live stream format ideas
- people we should try to bring on as guests
- anything else you would like to see on tonebase LIVE!
If you'd rather start a new thread for an individual person or topic suggestion, feel free to do that too!
We will use this thread as a place to centralize suggestions, but feel free to suggested these in individual threads, if you prefer.
Happy posting!
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Mircea How about a live stream on "El Decamerón Negro"?
I seem to remember you saying on the live stream with Steve Goss that it's one of those pieces you can play at any stage of the party no matter how drunk you are...
I could imagine a few of us would be interested, Jaime probably. Your maestro's lesson on Tonebase is nice, but I'd like to go into a bit more detail.
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Roni Glaser great idea, I’d definitely be interested!
I think it was Steve who mentioned a piece he can always play at parties no matter how drunk he is but I don’t remember which piece it was!
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Roni Glaser no worries Roni!
I wasn't upset in any way - just wanted to clarify that it wasn't me, haha! I do remember the discussion you mention in the Stagecraft livestream, it was fun! I might have said that it was Danza del Altiplano for me, another Brouwer piece... that would definitely fit my own repertoire, haha! I would love to get Joaquin on board to talk about the Decameron (or anything else, for that matter! It would be great to have him on as a guest), however, scheduling a livestream with him is currently out of my hands. I hope it happens though! Sharon Isbin and Leo himself are great ideas. I can't promise anything other than to try - that being said, who knows what the future might bring!
I'll do my best to deliver a livestream on this topic sometime soon.
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Not sure if this has already been suggested, since I admit to not reading all the input thus far... But an area I would love to learn more about is right hand fingering choices for e.g. Bach's music. Or any music arranged for the guitar that involves lots of "special fingering choices". Specific examples:
- Do the pros memorize the right hand or do they make choices at the moment, and hence possibly different choices at other times?
- How hard should one try to avoid "awkward string crossings" by judicious use of i,m, and a choices? Or should one just forget about it and learn string crossings so well that there are no awkward crossings?
- Are there principles one could adopt, e.g. when to add the occasional "a" finger and when not? When to include the thumb (which is also needed all the time to dampen the basses)?
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Rene Hi Rene! Thanks for these suggestions, they are great! If I may offer some quick (and very oversimplified!) answers:
- Yes, most high-level players memorize all fingerings for both left and right hand, and even much more (the exact moments for damping the strings, preparing notes before their time comes, etc.) While I am aware that some don't, especially those who include improvisation as a frequent tool for their artistic expression, the great majority of classically trained professional players do generally tend to find solutions for every fingering and usually subsequently memorize it (myself included.) Occasionally, I will have 2 or 3 fingerings that all work, however, I tend to decide on a final version at least some time before performance, to achieve the "muscle memory" security that is so necessary on stage.
- Answers will differ quite a bit here depending on who you ask. I personally make extremely judicious use of i,m - and so do most people that have studied in the style of "Cuban guitar school" that I happen to belong to. However, other players tend to dedicate a lot more work to the ability to make any kind of string crossings work, no matter how awkward. This is a spectrum, and although most people are somewhere in the middle, there are plenty of great musicians at both ends.
- There are lots of principles, absolutely! I go over quite a few of these in my four-part right-hand technique workshop (session 1, session 2, session 3, session 4) and my scale workshop (session 1, session 2).
Just realized the scale workshop says "session 1 of 4", that's actually wrong, there were only ever supposed to be 2 sessions in that particular workshop - it's a leftover from back in the day when I couldn't add my own events, so I had to communicate to the rest of the tonebase team what it was that I wanted to do. I will update that title sometime soon, sorry about that!
The Baroque idea is wonderful! We haven't done nearly enough workshops on Baroque music yet. For a start, do check out Brandon Acker's introduction to a variety of early plucked instruments, but rest assured, we will certainly go much more in depth into aspects of more standard Baroque repertoire, such as Bach.
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Mircea Thanks Mircea, I'll have a look at those sessions.
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Mircea,
How about getting Pepe Romero for a workshop?
Have you read his method book? La Guitarra - A Comprehensive Study Of Classical Guitar Technique And Guide To Performing. When I was first studying classical guitar this method book was out of print and a mysterious thing that no one knew anything about. It's amazing how in the dark we were before the internet existed. When it became re-printed I bought it. It has some interesting advice I had not heard about playing tirando by using a bicycling or orbital movement. It surprised me when I first read this because I also owned the methods/videos by his students (Bill and Scott) and those methods described/demonstrated a movement more analogous to a pendulum. I'd be curious to hear his thoughts about the two approaches. Does he consider them both valid and why or why not?
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Dean Ooh yes, I'd love to see Pepe Romero in a live stream! From the interviews I've seen with him I got the feeling he has a profound understanding of music and guitar, almost spiritual, but very normal and down to earth, and a very big heart.
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Roni Glaser Yes, he's one of the great elder statesmen of the guitar and it would be amazing to ask him questions. I like his method book a lot, but sometimes it's unclear what he means and one piece of advice can seem to contradict another. At any rate, he's always a fascinating teacher in master classes I've watched. There's one class online that I found interesting where he told the student to change the tension of the tip joints to get a softer or harder sound in contrasting movements.
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Dean Roni Glaser Hi Dean and Roni! This is a great suggestion, and I would absolutely love to have maestro Pepe on board! This has been in the works for a while now. At this point, the actual scheduling is out of my hands, however, I do personally hope it will happen soon. He is, after all, a visiting professor here at USC Thornton, where I'm currently studying for my doctorate, and has been a consistent source of inspiration for me and many others for so many years.
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Hi, there is an issue with live-streaming where the sound and the vision are not synced especially where the receiver is using wireless links. You can do clap video testing and then come live streaming it can be out by as much as 4-5 seconds. It gets worse if you use different cameras where the lag can be different. Using SLOBS as a broadcast system on a MAC you can allow for these issues but not the variable time lag. I do live streaming for a church and the variation is horrendous. Any suggestions?
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Bill Dodd Hi Bill! Funny you should ask, I was just talking about this to martin yesterday, our resident livestream technology wiz. I've personally never used wireless links, but I've had to deal with this problem a lot - see TY Zhang's livestream from tonebase HQ yesterday, where the sync kept on bouncing back and forth, despite my constant attempts to fix it.
There could be many reasons for this, and it could be either hardware, software, or both. Due to a number of different bugs, I've stopped using SLOBS after a while and switched to regular old OBS. This being said, the OBS software itself could be causing the problem or making it worse. Some things you could try are:
- Setting a manual value for video buffering on each video source
- Recording the stream using SLOBS and comparing - is it going out of sync in both recording and livestream, and is it happening in the same places?
- If it turns out it's not software, using the same make of cameras going into one central SDI or HDMI switcher might help. Otherwise, you might have to separate each camera into a different feed and adjust manually, though this is an extremely time-consuming solution.
Not to be too strict about this, but this is not the best place for this question, since this is specifically for suggestions regarding our own tonebase Live events: people we should invite, topics we should cover, etc. For more general livestreaming questions, it would be better to start a thread in the General Discussion forum above.
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How about a discussion on speed in practice? I've been noticing that guitarists are vary an awful lot in the way they use slow or fast practice. Some examples from other artists on Tonebase:
- Jiji Kim demonstrated how she learns and practises pretty much everything a tempo;
- Marco Tamayo said it's important to practise (I seem to remember the figure was) 50% of your time a tempo because if you don't you're not living at the right speed (or something along those lines!);
- Irina Kulikova said she practises almost everything slowly, and only in the run up to concerts does she practise things at speed;
- You, Mircea, have described how you practise slow then faster alternately;
My teacher in Córdoba (now in Seville), Jesús Pineda, taught me to practise extremely slowly and mindfully, and then test at speed - an approach I like a lot. He also said he suspected that not practising slowly and mindfully could be a cause for dystonia. That was 10 years ago though! I don't know what he thinks nowadays.
Then there's use of metronome...
It would be cool to have more than one guest to discuss this, we could even have a heated debate!
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Roni Glaser Hi Roni, this sounds great!
Just a quick note: I wouldn't necessarily describe my practice as "slow then faster alternatively", I was mostly just talking about not always going in a single direction ("up") with tempo when doing metronome practice. Outside of metronome practice, I tend to do some slow and very focused work, but usually end up practicing between 70%-110% of my final tempo more than anything else.
This is a great topic that I'd love to tackle in an upcoming livestream! I would say it's not quite meaty enough to warrant a full dedicated stream on its own, but perhaps we can integrate into related upcoming discussion on our livestreams! Thank you for reminding me of it and making it fresh in my attention when planning upcoming streams!
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Mircea yes, that's what I meant, but didn't describe it as well as you
. (Just a quick note: "slow then faster alternat
ively") I think speed in practice is essentially a form of varying the level of focus, zooming in and out of details, and I find both faster and slower tempi can strengthen concentration in different ways, allowing what is already automated to come out to different degrees. If speed in practice as a topic is too vegetarian for you, then perhaps "focus" (or whatever you might call it) might be. This could include:
- all the things that are conducive to good focus: good practice environment
- what kind of focus is helps when
- where attention is best placed in which situations
- other practices that improve concentration/focus/awareness such as meditation (without or with guitar),
- diet
- exercise
Some other possible artists: Benjamin Verdery (meditation), Bill Kanengiser (also meditation? I think you mentioned him in a live stream), David Russell (has described concentration with the guitar, e.g.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwQBv2sATuE&t=33s)
There are some more ideas for you! I'll leave it to you to figure out what to do with them
.
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Hello Mircea, This is very concrete suggestion, also because I have not found the topic in the classes of tonebase. A technical lesson on slides in their multiple variations so they sound always beautiful
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Emma Hi Emma! This sounds like a wonderful idea. Let me see what I can put together! There are a couple of special cases I can think of. This sounds just specific enough that it might work! Thank you for suggesting it.
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Hi Mircea, I also would like to be able shown how to analyse a piece of music , also
a suggestion for a piece to learn together, is Serenata Española
[Impresiones de España, Suite de Orquesta – No 2: Serenata]
Joaquín Malats (1872 – 1912), it is such a wonderful piece, it seems expressive , emotive and taxing to me.cheers Deb
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Deb Covell Hi Deb! Serenata is such a masterpiece, I enjoy playing it a lot! We are doing a series of 3 livestreams on the topic of music analysis with Steve Goss, our first edition took place last month (click this link to watch it) and will be followed by one tackling topics of rhythm (Mar 20th) and using improvisation in practice (date TBA).
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H Mircea
The concept of visualization is very useful in studying pieces. I think that would be a useful topic for everybody.
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Mariano Kramer Great suggestion, Mariano! I'll see if I can get an expert on board to talk about this
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I get the feeling this might have been done somewhere before, but I want to be able to do a foolproof warmup, to have a list of things I can do, after which I will be ready to practise or perform. I know Martin's done a practice regime stream, so I don't know if this would be too superfluous.
For me, I recognise the feeling in my hands of being warmed up, but the route there is not so clear. So! It would be cool if we could do a live stream in which we all come in cold, and then do a bunch of stuff and then we're magically ready for anything guitaristical.
Obviously each of us have different hands and abilities, so our warmup needs will be different, but it would be good to have some basic principles, then some "if you're still warmed up in this area, do X, Y and Z". And so, by the end of the time, we'd all be warmed up and ready. Yay!
Hey, maybe you could even include this to start your piece-learning live streams???
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Roni Glaser Hmm, this is sounding great, but almost too good to be true. I'm not sure such a warmup exists, since we not only have different hands, but also have been working for different amounts and on different issues recently.
(My warmup for when I haven't practiced in a week is very different from my warmup at the end of a month of intense preparation anticipating a competition.)
I'll float the idea by some warmup experts (first to come to mind is Scott Tennant) and see if they have any thoughts, let's see what they say! Thank you for the suggestion Roni!
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Mircea I am wondering if a "Calendar" function could be added to the forum to help us keep track of all events? I really love participating but I tend to get lost in the forums. Thank you for considering it! Maybe some google calendar type of integration?
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David Chidsey Hi David! Wow, lots of thumbs up on this feature request!
The forum software we are using actually does have an event feature, however, there are a few problems preventing us from automatizing this process. I am in contact with the tonebase developer team to see if we can automatize its integration somehow. We might have news for you here soon.
In the meantime, remember you can use "upcoming events" tab on the Live page to see all the events currently planned, and you can add them to your calendar individually! Perhaps this could be helpful for now?
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Mircea yep! I noticed that page after I posted this it’s very helpful!
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