The videos from the live stream are still available on my twitch. Its in 2 parts due to a computer crash after track 1. Watch these for the play by play.
Part 1: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/845174488
Part 2: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/845211230
A few months ago a discussion came up in the IMF discord about making an EP in a very short time frame as a personal challenge. Ayavaron (OK I Dunno , Girls With Depression) had been talking about the idea, and I remember at the time thinking how impossible it would be for me to do something like that for the following reasons:
One: most of my tracks take me about 20 hours to complete
Two: its rare for me to get a window of time long enough to even make the attempt.
Christmas week was coming up and I had some PTO to use up so I put in for Mon – Wednesday, my wife and son still have work and school, and thought about things I could do on those days that would take advantage of the isolated non-working daytime hours. This would be a perfect time to attempt the challenge.
I decided on doing the entire 3 hours live on twitch, while attempting the EP challenge would be a cool way to use the day on Monday. would be a fun thing to do. Friends could tune in and watch me struggle through. I liked the idea that a video of the whole thing would be available to watch back.
30 min per song, 5 songs, with 30 min of touch up / mix at the end
the original plan
I did some light prep the night before which consisted of prepping a twitch overlay, testing my equipment out with OBS, and setting up a 2nd camera in the room. I got my lighting stuff out and positioned in the room as well. At 11am on Monday I launched the stream and started in with a brief intro.
Out of the gate I was very nervous, you can see my hand shaking at times in track one in the VOD’s, legit nervous. It was causing me problems with getting a clean first piano take, the idea of messing that up also made me more nervous! haha the downward spiral of nervousness.
Once I started to get things going on track one I think the nervousness started to peel away and it felt more like I was hanging out with friends, than being on TV. I didn’t really expect anyone to hang through the whole thing, its kind of boring (in my opinion) to watch someone produce music. However a few people did stick around for the whole session, and I got regular comments throughout from friends in the IMF discord group.
Producing music repetitive, and often hard to understand what the producer is doing or focusing on, long periods of time are spent sometimes in the same sections of tracks. Its just not entertaining for anyone but a serious producer to watch live.
The format of this challenge felt like a good way for me to use twitch in a way that still shows of my own style and process and the time constraint avoids some of my concerns about just streaming every track I produce. I would be forced to move along as fast as possible, with a 30 minute per song budget. The chat room actually was helpful in moments of “oh shit what should I do now” (which def happened multiple times).