Shh. I’m enjoying a quiet morning. I slept with earplugs in. I haven’t turned the air conditioner on. The cat didn’t miaow for food. It’s just me and the fans pushing air slowly. The soft tap of my keyboard.
In a little bit I’ll have to get up and start shuffling things around. Sharif’ll be over and I’ve rethought how we’ve got his personal mix wired to give him a better monitor mix and ME a better stereo signal. I’ve been experimenting with a wireless camera rig and want to see if latency is really that much of an issue. But all that’s for the future.
Right now I’m just sitting in the quiet. Plus… or minus… all this damned sneezing.
This week I ran my first open mic in 16 months, or however long it’s been. It did something beautifully different from the VOM – but the Virtual Open Mic has been pretty valuable too.
The VOM is… it’s own creature. I had a regular recently ask me to try to cut down on the background chat that runs in Zoom during the open mic. And… I agree that sometimes it’s distracting but he’s comparing it to going and playing a show and having people chatting in the background… and yep, it means they’re not listening at that moment – but they are THERE, and you can shut off the chat, it’s invisible to the audience – and most importantly, the VOM has a very, very different context from anything else : it’s an artifact of COVID.
Yes, in concept it was sort of a way to keep the Monday night Teavolve open mic running, but not simply because people needed to play music FOR one another, and it certainly didn’t allow us to play music WITH one another – it was a way to BE together. I chose a format specifically based around the idea of allowing 20 or so people be in a virtual room together – not because they needed to sit and listen politely, but because it was SO VALUABLE for them to be in one another’s presence – and to communicate – and to know they’re there.
And so I DID chat with Rowan and Chris to sort of brainstorm a little about cutting the chatter down a little bit, or at least to not be the SOURCE of the problem, when I thought about it further, I remembered that people were coming for kind of a different reason, during a very different time – than for Teavolve. What people valued here was different. Certainly we’d been brought together by music, but we were here… to be… here, and to be together. And that’s more important than “shutting up and learning something” every Monday night. For the last year and a half we’ve just NEEDED one another. And that’s got to be more than just a little square on a screen.
That being said – running a “real” open mic felt good. I was clumsy and out of practice, but damn it was good to sort of stretch and be in control and not ONCE worry about headphones, echo cancellation, or enabling original sound.
July 20th… I let these things steep too long. Last night there was waaay to much chatter. Or maybe I’m just old and grumpy!