So the Covid period has had some interesting side effects. One of which is that we’ve all got a bit more tech-savvy. Zoom has become more common that using land lines for most people and whilst our face-to-face contacts have gone down, paradoxically, we have had connection with folk that we probably wouldn’t have in pre-Covid times. My own birthday dinner was a meet-up with friends from Dubai, Yorkshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire which couldn’t have happened conventionally.

For musicians, the ability to livestream has been a lifeline for many. My good friends George Boomsma and Katherine Priddy have both found new and widespread audiences as have so many others.

For me, I have tried a couple of different routes into livestreaming. On balance, I have found Facebook to be the easiest and also the one that seems to most easily reach the audience that I’m interested in. I have particularly enjoyed working with Jim Byrne on the Songwriting Magic Facebook page. We have done a couple of live conversations on songwriting which seem to have gone really well – check out the page if you would like to view on replay.

The live conversations have made use of Zoom for the chat and then streamed the meeting to the FB page. This seems to me a great convergence of different apps to create something which is greater than the sum of the parts. I am also interested in making use of OBS which is able to create a much more sophisticated production but which has a bit of a learning curve. Tony O’Malley has done a great job here and I have watched as he has become more and more proficient over the weeks.

So the next step is to run a few more live events – I confess to having been a bit shy but I’m really gonna have a go in the next few weeks. If we can’t get to open mics, this has to be the best way of performing stuff for now.