Whilst performing online might be intimidating and technically challenging, for many artists it's a key way to retain their audience engagement during lockdown. Most artists focus on the visual aspect of their stream, neglecting their audio. Audio quality is paramount for artists when live streaming, and arguably the biggest part of the experience. We spoke to Abbey Road recordist George Oulton to see how he's been helping singer-songwriter Emily Burns capture and record her live streams.

With the current social situation we’re all in, it’s causing everyone to adapt the way they work. How we record and consume live music is evolving and sometimes it moves us from our comfort zone and helps us to learn new things. Recently I was asked if I could help Island Records artist, Emily Burns, with the technical setup of putting on a live streamed YouTube gig. Fortunately Emily is my housemate so no rules were broken in the making of the gig.

It was our priority to create something a bit more special than using the microphone built into a phone and give it a more formal setting. The equipment we already had in our flat was a MacBook Pro (2.7 GHz i5, 8GB Memory), a Mac mini (2.6 GHz i5, 16GB Memory), two Focusrite Pro 26 interfaces, an Aston Spirit mic, an assortment of headphones/cables and some smart lights. Emily decided to do this gig just with vocals and an acoustic guitar.

Being a sound engineer, my first thought went to how can we make the gig sound good? We decided to use Logic as a mixer to balance the level between the vocals and the guitar, as well as add some reverb, compression and EQ. With only one condenser microphone available to us, plugging the guitar directly into one of the instrument inputs on the interface, allowed us to get a good quality close sound on the vocals and process the guitar with a fair degree of separation. Normally I would prefer to mic an acoustic guitar as opposed to use a DI, but in this situation it worked better and allowed more flexibility. A little bit of subtle EQ can go a long way and in most live gig situations you would see an acoustic plugged in anyway.

Monitoring through headphones from the interface we got it sounding how we wanted it to. Emily was using her in-ear monitors (IEMs) to provide her with the kind of feeling she would be used to on stage. The next question was how to get the sound to YouTube. Using a software called Soundflower, which acts as an internal sound card to allow you to route audio from one place on your computer to another, I created a Multi Output Device in the Audio Midi Setup application from both the Focusrite interface and Soundflower. By setting Logic's output to the multi output device and YouTube's audio input to Soundflower, the sound would get to both Emily's IEMs and the live stream. There are other alternatives to Soundflower such as Source Nexus, or many interfaces offer a loop through capability.

Unfortunately at this point we ran into issues with processing power on the laptop. We could alter the buffer size within Logic, but this added too much latency to the IEMs. To get around this we set up a Mac Mini to handle the streaming side. By connecting two balanced jack cables out of the interface connected to Logic, to two line inputs on another interface adjoined to the Mac mini, we got the sound to YouTube. The mix going to YouTube was the same as the monitor mix; however a second mix could have been made on auxiliary busses in Logic had it been needed. This setup worked well; however with a more powerful computer, the second machine would not be necessary.

Moving the streaming to the Mac Mini created some issues and some quite convenient points. The Mac Mini doesn’t have a built in camera, and we unfortunately didn’t have a webcam available. Whilst I am not a camera person, I found a great software called EpocCam, which allows you to use your phone camera as a webcam. It took about 30 seconds to set up and is free - although there is a paid version that allows you to connect your phone via a cable rather than WiFi, get higher resolutions and remove advertising.

The laptop had to be fairly close to Emily as the cable on the IEMs wasn’t too long. With no extender to hand, it wouldn’t have been the ideal camera angle anyway. What also became useful was being able to have a larger screen in front of Emily by positioning the Mac Mini there. This meant she could read the comments of viewers to gain some audience feedback and interaction.

Once we had got all of the technical setup completed, we worked on how we could make it feel more like a gig. Without a crowd on the other side of the camera, I’m sure it was quite a bizarre feeling. Setting up the screen with comments definitely helped, but we also thought we could dress the room. Firstly we put Emily’s logo on a USB stick and displayed it on the TV from our living room to create a kind of backdrop. As well as the TV we added some Philips Hue smart lighting and gave each song a colour theme. During the set I hid out of camera shot and changed the lighting at key points using the mobile phone app. This really added to the feel of being on stage and being as close to a gig as possible right now.