On Thursday I restarted my livestream series, now continuing weekly until further notice – hopefully when I’m doing so well from a resuscitated offline and recording music industry I feel I don’t need to play online for tips. Ha ha ha.
Anyway, they are back under way. And while I like to not give away everything I’m planning to play in advance, I have no problem giving it away in retrospect. So here’s what those who tuned in got:
The Tenpenny Bit / Life is All Chequered (Irish jigs)
The Gravel Walk (Irish reel)
The Road to Lisdoonvarna / The Battle of Aughrim (Irish tunes)
Speed the Plough / The Mason’s Apron / Devil’s Dream (English and Irish reels)
Telemann, Fantasia for solo violin #4 (transposed for viola)
O Kirree t’ou goll dy faagail mee (Manx song tune, reworked by me)
Hoffmeister, Etude for solo viola #2
The Sally Gardens (song, words by WB Yeats, paired with a traditional tune)
The Dashing White Sergeant / Petronella (English tunes)
Whiskey in the Jar
(and now you can see what most of the blog title refers to)
They had more options than ever before on where to tune in! After trialling a few platforms and considering a few more, I decided to have my cake and eat it by simulcasting to three: Facebook, Twitch and YouTube. And the tool I found (after consulting a friend when my first go turned out not to enable what I thought it had been recommended for!), restream.io, does an excellent job of taking the video feed to all three without needing triple the upload bandwidth, and of combining their respective chat functions into one window I can glance at between numbers without lots of swapping between tabs/windows. Unfortunately, I didn’t pay quite enough attention when first configuring it, and so Thursday’s stream went on default Facebook settings to my personal profile, visible only to my ‘friends’ in the technical sense, rather than to my ‘page’ for musical business purposes publicly visible. I have fixed that for next time, and also reposted the archived version of the stream video to the page with public visibility, so hopefully anyone who was regrettably forced to miss the live broadcast (narrowcast?) can catch up with the performance.
As indeed can you, if you didn’t see it at the time! The full video will remain permanently (as far as I’m aware) on my Facebook page and YouTube channel; it will also be up in my Twitch videos for a fortnight from when it was streamed (so that’s until a week Thursday). And just because you’re watching on catchup doesn’t mean I’ve stopped appealing for tips: if you enjoy anything you hear, paypal.me/martinashmusic is always open …
If, on the other hand, there is anything you specifically want to hear, I’m very happy to take advance requests so contact me with them (and then I’ll consider you obliged to watch the next stream to see me play it … ).
As I said, I don’t like to give away all the details in advance, and of course I might be forced to change most of my plans by a deluge of requests (ha … ha … ha). However, I can definitely say I will be premiering a new classical composition of mine this Thursday; and, barring other events, expanding my core folk base of Irish and some English material westwards, northwards and I suppose eastwards. Intrigued? Excited? Worried? Just want to hear more live music? Join me at 8pm on Thursday – this Thursday and indeed any following Thursday!