Tuesday, April 28, 2020

My Notes on Configuring OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) For Live Facebook Streaming (notes, not exactly a tutorial, but yeah it's kind of a tutorial):

Like other musicians looking to do mini-concerts on Facebook, I wandered down the path of looking at OBS. There are dozens of videos and articles about it, and I found that none of them really told me what I needed to know in the way that I needed to absorb it. We all process information in different ways. This is the info that would've saved me hours:
  • I wound up looking at OBS because doing Facebook Live from my iPhone was trivially easy and worked pretty well and sounded pretty good, but I wanted it to sound better, and that meant using an external microphone.
  • I bought an open-box Fifine 669B USB condenser mic (another story), but to use it, I needed to plug it into not the phone but my computer, and THAT lead me to using Facebook Live not on my phone but on my PC.
  • For a number of reasons, I found that, whether I used the new USB mic or the one on the laptop, the sound in FB Live was horrible. Many folks report that FB's compression algorithm does strange things, but in my case, the audio was so inconsistent that it was completelyunusable. I switched mics, I switched laptops, I hard-wired the laptop to the router instead of using wireless, it didn't matter. In addition, my FB live video stream from my laptop's webcam was horribly jittery. Friends of mine said that they did not have this experience with either the audio or the video, that FB Live worked okay on their laptop, and that they gravitated to OBS to get a more consistent audio and video stream, but that it was a more subtle issue of data quality than a binary works / doesn't work issue. Whatever the reason, FB Live on my laptop without an external stream source was out of the question for me, and THAT lead me to OBS.
  • You need to understand that OBS is a very flexible piece of software that allows you to do things like capture multiple video and audio sources and send them to different places. You can use multiple cameras, capture your computer screen, do split screens with you narrating a PowerPoint presentation if you like. So simply grabbing the laptop's webcam and microphone input (or an external mic) and streaming them to FB Live is just scratching the surface of what it can do. But what it means is that there's configuration and a learning curve involved. It's much more involved than just grabbing your phone, hitting the "Live" option in Facebook, and going. So you need to allocate some time to it.
  • Jim Henry's OBS tutorial on Youtube is a pretty good starting point (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz0p0Usr8X4), but a quick blow-by-blow is:
  • Download OBS for your OS and install it, selecting "autoconfigure."
  • Under "Sources" at the bottom of the screen, click on the "+" and select "Audio Input Capture" and select a microphone. Note that, with the PC's mic, an external USB mic, and the one in the webcam, you may have several.
  • Then select "Video Capture Device" and select a camera.
  • In the "Audio Mixer" panel at the bottom of the screen, the blue sliders are the input levels of the microphone(s). If you're plugging in an external mic, it's important to slide the levels of any other mics (like the one in the computer) down to zero, or strange things may happen. You can then hide them by clicking on the little wheel and selecting "hide." You can also disable them in Settings | Audio | Devices.
  • If you've set up a camera and a mic, should see the image from the camera in the OBS screen in the black "canvas." I found that the webcam in my laptop was horrible. I remembered that I had an old Logitec 720p external webcam, and connected it. I selected it and it looked much better, but this kicked off a two-hour-long process to figure out how to get it and the "canvas" the same size so the stream into FB Live didn't have black bars on the side. All the jiggering I did of camera resolution and output stream resolution didn't fix it. Right-clicking on the image and selecting, I think, "Preview Scaling | Scale To Window" finally did.
  • This is crucial: You can then play around for hours with camera and mic placement WITHOUT DOING ANY LIVE STREAMING INTO FB by hitting the "Start Recording" button on the right, and just watching and listening to the recorded video in Windows (it dumps the output into the "video" folder, at least it did with me, from where you can quickly click on them and view and listen to them). This saved a lot of time, as it took FB live-and-playback out of the iterative loop. I found that my $27 open-box Fifine condenser mic really wanted to be fairly close to my face but needed to be a little above my head in order to hear the vocal over the guitar.
  • If there is a delay between video and vocal. you can sync them up by, in the audio mixer panel, right-clicking on the cog for "Audio Input Capture," selecting "Advanced Audio Properties," and adding a sync offset. Many people report that a 200ms delay in the audio is needed to make it sync up with the video.
  • Once you have the sound and video configured so that you like the way it sounds in the recording, THEN you can stream it into FB Live.
  • How laptop FB (as opposed to the phone app) does live streaming has changed recently. Under "Create Post," click "Live Video." This takes you to "Live Producer" who, like any live producer, first forces you to do a porno. Just kidding.
  • Click "Use Stream Key." Under "Setup Options," click "Use a persistent stream key" so you don't have to keep re-entering it in OBS. On the right, under "Stream Key," click "Copy." Facebook should say "Waiting for live video."
  • Then go to OBS, click "Settings," click "Stream," under "Service" select "Facebook live," and copy in the stream key.
  • In the OBS main window, click "Start Streaming." In about 10 seconds, you should see the stream appear in Facebook.
  • In FB, on the left side of the screen, to test this out, under "Privacy," select "only me." Then click "Go Live." You should then see the live feed. When you close it, you have the option to save it. You can then listen to it and tweak things accordingly, but as I said, the tweaking cycle is much faster if you simply record in OBS and listen without going through FB.
  • As I posted in my question last night and many answered, the delay in the FB live stream as compared to what's coming into OBS is much longer than one would like. I'm seeing about ten seconds. I'm told, basically, get over it. Look at the OBS window not the FB Live window, and let go of the idea that you can interact with comments from viewers in real time.
This should get you up and running. You then can google "OBS settings for Facebook live," play around with the six or so other video and audio parameters folks tell you you need to change, and see if they matter. For me, the issues of mic placement and getting the OBS canvas to match the webcam size were far more important.
Good luck!

Monday, April 20, 2020

Why John Prine Matters


When John Prine passed away of Covid-19 in early April, I wrote on Facebook:

"For 45 years, my songwriting method has been:

--Write enough of the lyrics to frame out the song.
--Sit down with the guitar, accept the first thing that comes out, and hang the lyrics on it.
--Then alter it so it doesn't sound so obviously like my songwriting hero, John Prine."

When Maire Anne read it, she said that while she loved John Prine too, she was surprised at what I'd written. After all, she said, she rarely hears me play John Prine cover tunes, we don't often listen to his music in the house, and we'd never gone to see him live.

It was a completely valid observation.

I had to think about it.

Let me give you the pre-listen argument (that is, before I went back and listened to the entire JP catalog). If you're a singer-songwriter, the reason why John Prine matters is that he is the physical manifestation of the argument that songwriting not only matters, but that it can be everything—that even if your voice isn't great and your guitar playing and chordal skills are nothing out of the ordinary and you don't have a Justin Bieber face, if you diligently craft memorable songs and sing and play them without compromise or a hint of artifice, you can find your audience, move people with your material, develop a following, and maybe even have a career.

There. I said it, and I find tears welling up as I type it. Really, I probably don't need to say another word.

Prine wasn't part of that big first wave of my exposure to singer-songwriters—Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, CSN, and Neil Young—that washed over me in junior high, augmented by Jackson Browne and Dan Fogelberg in high school. I believe I came to Prine sometime in my first few years at UMass. I'd been writing songs since I was about 13, most of them centered on love and heartbreak, most of them flowery and not very good. Hearing Prine's first album when I was about 20, I was so blown away by the sparse lyrics and simple fingerpicking in the songs "Sam Stone" and "Hello In There" that my writing style shifted instantly in that direction. To this date, there's still no greater single influence on my writing. In the late 1970s, I wrote a song called "My Grandpa" that wears this right out on its sleeve.

But not long after that, I hung a right into rock and roll where I remained for nearly 20 years. I didn't pay much attention to singer-songwriter music, and became more enamored by things like Elvis Costello's wordplay. If Prine had a new song that recieved airplay, I heard it, but other than that, he sunk below the radar for me. I thought about him in the way that Sam Elliott describes "The Dude" at the end of "The Big Lebowski." It was good knowing he was out there, The Prine, takin' her easy for all us songwriters. Sheesh. I sure hope he makes the finals. Something like that.

When I returned to doing singer-songwriter music in the mid-1990s, I regularly went to the open mic at Passim in Cambridge. One of the regulars was Mary Gauthier, who began playing a song of hers called "I Drink" ("Fish swim / birds fly / lovers yell / mamas cry / old men /sit and think / I drink"). The simple lyrics, fingerpicking, and three-cord structure, combined with Mary's twangy singing and speaking voice, were so reminiscent of John Prine, at least to me, that I wondered how she could get away with it. Of course, she wasn't "getting away" with anything; it was the first of many great songs of Mary's that resulted in her having a career. Ten years later, former Passim director Betsy Siggins put together a benefit concert with John Prine, Mary Gauthier, and my departed friend, Fall River singer-songwriter Michael Troy, a triple-triumph of voice, craft, and authenticity. 'Till the day I die I will regret missing this show.

_____________________________________________

At the start of this post, I made it sound like I actively ape John Prine in my songwriting. I don't. It's more that there are two modes I slip into when I'm lazy. One is "sounds like Prine" mode. The other is "sounds like Neil Young's 'In The Field of Opportunity It's Plowin' Time Again' " mode. When I find that I'm writing something in "Prine mode," I WILL add a bridge or a refrain that's more chordally complex than what he'd do to set it off. When I find myself in the "Field of Opportunity" mode, I simply junk the song.

But there's no denying the influence of Prine's rhyming and economy of language on my writing. In "Hello In There," Prine wrote:

"It'd been years
Since the kids had grown
A life of their own
Left us alone"

It takes a while to appreciate what's novel about this. There's nothing inventive about rhyming "grown," "own," and "alone." What makes it quintessentially Prine is that none of these rhyming words have the accent. The accents are two syllables before:

"It'd been years
Since the KIDS had grown
A life OF their own
Left US alone"

This makes the song incredibly conversational and intimate, hiding its craft in plain sight. It's one of the things that fell on my ears when I first heard it and made me think "holy crap, this is something new."

There's a direct line between this and a verse in a recent song of mine, where the accent on the third line is on the word "third," not on the final rhyming word:

"It's the vote that's been hacked
It's the deck that's been stacked
I might have a third act
But I doubt a fourth"

I smile to myself when ever I sing "third act," knowing full well where it comes from.

Content-wise, most songs are ABOUT something. They may even be linear enough that they tell stories. Not all of them, of course; some songs are evocative instead, leaving YOU to try to figure out what they're about. I think of Jackson Browne's "Something Fine" and Neil Young's "Harvest" as evocative songs. Their beauty is in their mystery. You could, in fact, argue that Prine's best-known song, "Angel From Montgomery," almost falls into the evocative category. But regardless, it's the combination of Prine's authentic-as-hard-work voice, along with simple words, simple chords, and a great melody, put together in a way that creates a Mondrain painting, its genius cloaked in its simplicity.

Melody is the most underrated part of singer-songwriter music. Yes, the major currency of the artist-audience transaction is intimacy and connection via the writer singing his or her own material, and no it doesn't melodically need to be Cole Porter, but songs with good melodies are more likely to be memorable than songs with bad ones, and Prine was astonishingly good at this. He could wring a memorable melody over three chords like no one's business. When you hear Prine start to sing a three-chord song you've never heard, you think "Oh here's another one that sounds like 'Paradise,' " and by the end of the song, he's got you and you want to hear it again. It almost isn't fair.

Structurally, most of Prine's songs are exceedingly simple. Most eschew the ubiquitous ABABCAB (verse-refrain-verse-refrain-bridge-verse-refrain) format and run without a bridge, consisting simply of verses and a refrain. (Interestingly, most of Bob Dylan's best-known songs are bridge-less as well.) Chordally, most Prine songs actually ARE three-chord songs, maybe with a 4th passing chord. There are never "jazz chords," not even a major 7th. Prine typically either strums or uses a standard Travis pick with the thumb doing an alternating bass. However, in the intros to many of the Travis-picked songs, he fingers some of the high strings on the off-beats, between the thumb-picked bass notes. Sometimes he's playing the melody, as he does in "Souvenirs," sometimes he's implying the melody or containing part of it, as it does in "Hello In There," but in either case, I think it's an identifiable part of the sound of some of his best songs.

Few songwriters have the sense of aplomb (self-assurance, confidence with style) that Prine has with his lyrics. In the opening verse of the brilliant "Speed of the Sound of Loneliness," he says:

"You come home late and you come home early
You come on big when you're feeling small
You come home straight and you come home curly
Sometimes you don't come home at all"

That's a great bit of songwriting, both the playful "early/curly" rhyme and the less-obvious interior "late/straight" rhyme. But then to drop the refrain:

"So what in the world's come over you
And what in heaven's name have you done
You've broken the speed of the sound of loneliness
You're out there running just to be on the run"

It's just jaw-droppingly good, and so accessible. Who hasn't felt that they've been out there running just to be on the run? And that's the thing about Prine. There are just so damned many of these lines that you hear and think both "damn that's a great turn of the phrase" as well as "damn that's great observation."

Let's talk about "Angel From Montgomery" again for a minute. Folks have written about the rule-breaking nature of this written-by-a-man-in-a-woman's-interior-voice song, about how its appeal is its universal sense of existential dread, and about how it's the poster child for the "songwriting is everything" argument. Regarding that last point, I actually think the opposite. I think that, unlike nearly every other great John Prine song, the song never would've gotten legs without Bonnie Raitt not only singing it, but doing a changed version of it. She sings a proper major 3rd in the verse, on the "I AM an old woman" note (instead of Prine's bluesy flatting of the 3rd). And, crucially, her version removes those odd annoying eighth-note rhythmic drops in the verse and refrain to make the song more accessible, leaving only a half-measure drop at the end of the refrains. It drives me crazy whenever I hear a coffeehouse performer play it and get the rhythmic stutter-steps wrong. This was never Prine's go-to song for me, but if it was his meal ticket that paid his rent (and it probably was), then I thank the universe for providing it. That having been said, it is moving beyond words to see recent videos of now-70-year-old Bonnie sing it, as the "I am an old woman" opening line has taken on an almost cosmic resonance.

The other thing about Prine's songwriting is that he is very funny without being pegged as a "funny songwriter." This is something that most singer-songwriters would kill for—to be taken seriously, but not so seriously that your humor is rejected as being out of character, nor to have your serious songs rejected because people expect you to be funny. And it's satisfying that, since funny songs are funniest when there's an audience laughing, on Prine's 3rd album "Revenge," the song "Dear Abby" is a live recording with just Prine and his guitar in front of a large audience.

Lastly, if I'm going to talk more about Prine's influence on me (and I guess I am), I'd have to add how he handles his vocals. He doesn't have a great voice, but it's HIS voice, and it needs to only be good enough to not distract from those exceptional lyrics. The folksy twang in both his speaking and singing voice I assume came from his parents being from Kentucky even though he was born and raised in suburban Chicago. As a guy born on Long Island and living most of my life in Massachusetts, I've often longed for a nasal Americana twang that seems to give one a leg up toward rootsy-sounding authenticity. I don't have one and I won't fake one, but I HAVE picked up two habits from listening to John Prine songs. One is enunciating syllabic transitions sharply so there's some rhythmic effect to them. The other is clipping the ends off notes, which serves two purposes. The first is that, if you don't have a great voice, why hold a note? The second is that it naturally draws attention back toward the lyric. There. Now you'll never be able to listen to me sing without doing an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-like point-and-shriek.

_____________________________________________

I spend a lot of time in the garage doing automotive work. There's a laptop connected to a sound system in there. Usually I'll just leave an internet radio station on, but sometimes I'll select an artist and do a deep dive. Not long ago I stepped through the Steve Earle discography, and found that I liked just about every album, returning to several of them for repeated listenings. Before that, I stepped through Townes Van Zandt, unearthing some gems that made me put down the tools and just listen. This week I did the same with John Prine, starting at the beginning and methodically working my way through to the present.

And...

When listened to this way, it's really not very good. I was actively disappointed.

Hear me out.

The first album is, of course, legendary. It has the almost criminally good combination of "Illegal Smile," Hello In There," "Sam Stone," "Paradise," "Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore," and of course "Angel From Montgomery." It deserves every bit of the legend, even if the recording is reverb-heavy, as a lot of stuff was back then. The story that Kris Kristofferson heard him in 1970 and helped get him signed to Atlantic Records is completely believable, and if John Prine wrote nothing else new for decades, those six songs alone would make him deserving of accolades. And as great as that first record was, Prine put out a lot of great material after it, so I don't think it's like, say, Jackson Browne's or James Taylor's first records, where you can argue that they never equaled it.

And you can't help but like the final album, "Tree of Forgiveness." I mean, it's the last one, and you have to love that great—and prophetic—final song "When I Get To Heaven" ("Gonna have a cocktail / vodka and ginger ale / gonna smoke a cigarette that's niiiiine miiiiiiles long / gonna kiss that pretty girl / on the tilt-a whirl / 'cause this old man is goin to town"). And, in these Trumpster-riddled times, you have to appreciate "Caravan of Fools."

But overall, making records in a studio isn't what a singer-songwriter naturally does, and taking one guitar and one vocal like a singer-songwriter does live and recording it isn't what a record label naturally does. In fact, I'd argue that the difference between a singer-songwriter and a recording artist is that the singer-songwriter struggles to make records that convey the same sense of intimacy that they convey live, whereas the recording artist tries to do live shows that convey what's on the record. I haven't read Prine's biography, nor the online articles about his recording history, but to me, listening to the first 30 years of John Prine albums, they sound haphazard; clearly the labels were trying to get him to wear suits of sounds that didn't fit him. The earlier records are twangy and kind of shit-kicky, some of which works, much of which doesn't. Much of the late 70s through 90s stuff sounds like someone is spinning a Twister dial for sounds. The bluesy slow-burn of "I Ain't Hurtin' Nobody" works fine, but many things don't, at least not for me. Even songs I love like "It's a Big Old Goofy World" and "Some Humans Aren't Human," are tough to listen to in their original synthesizer-drenched versions. It's ironic that the album "The Missing Years" waits until the final spectacular track ("Jesus: The Missing Years") to give you something that's just Prine and his gutar, at which point I wanted to hug the computer. It's not until you reach the 2000 album "Souvenirs" (new versions of his classic songs) where they're handled with the light touch you'd expect of a contemporary singer-songwriter album, and the album has a fairly uniform sound.

And it's not only the production of much of the material that's problematic. It may be heresy to say, but many of the songs themselves really aren't all that memorable. You know a great John Prine song when you hear it, and it's not that EVERY great John Prine song has to have that mid-tempo Travis-picked feel you hear and instantly identify, but, well, let's just all agree that most of them do, and there were fewer unheard ones than I'd hoped. I did put my tools down when I heard the song "Souvenirs" off the second album "Diamond in the Rough" (amazingly, I'd never heard it), but I was surprised and disappointed that this didn't happen more often, and it never really happened with any whole album the way it did for me with Steve Earle.

Ouch.

But you know what? It doesn't matter. And here's why.

When I was listening to the albums on Youtube in the garage, when each one finished, Youtube would link to a live John Prine performance. Initially I found this annoying; if anything, I thought, in this age of algorithms, it should figure out what I was doing and simply link to the next album. But it made me discover "John Prine Live From Sessions at West 54th" recorded in 2001. This is a remarkable live show—prime Prine, if you will. The instrumentation is flawless, with just him, a bass player, and another guitarist. And the live small studio setting is as intimate as it gets. In this and many other videos of his live shows, you get to hear the seamless combination of Prine's speaking voice, his stage patter, and his singing voice that, together with the brilliant lyrics, the simple chord structures, and the earworm melodies, form the core of what he was, unencumbered by mediocre selections and inappropriate production. Maybe it's unfortunate that 50 years of studio albums aren't really the best way to experience Prine (at least it wasn't for me), but so what?

Look. Every singer-songwriter I know sounds better live than they do on studio recordings, and every artist has wheat to be separated from chaff. With his passing, John Prine leaves a body of material much of which is astonishingly good. And the best of it is certainly shoulder-to-shoulder with the best of anyone who wears the badge of singer-songwriter.

Perhaps the most satisfying thing to me about Prine's career is that the long arc of recognition bent toward him, and that the awards and accolades came his way before his decline and death, including a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in January. Not surprisingly, the praise went into overdrive with his passing. The headline of the obit in the New York Times called him "Chronicler of the Human Condition." I think that's overly academic. Certainly no one listens to John Prine and thinks "man, that guy really nails the shit out of chronicling the human condition." It's certainly not the combination of craft and heart that attracted me.

But in the spirit of The Big Lebowski, I'm glad that "The Prine" not only made it to the finals, he won the goddamn tournament.


Wednesday, April 8, 2020

Passover, One Year Later

My mother, last Passover, in the hospital
Although I've spent my life as a non-observant jew, Passover has always been a big thing in my family. I don't recall exactly when my mother and sister inherited the holiday from my cousin Anne and began doing it in the house in Brighton, but it swelled in size, at times approaching 40 family members and friends. NO ONE did Passover like my mother and sister.
Last year, shortly before Passover, my mother fell ill, with what appeared to be a recurrence of the pneumonia she'd had in the fall. She was admitted to the hospital, but kept getting worse and worse. She and my sister Amy made the decision to have a slightly scaled-down Seder at the house anyway. At the last moment, I decided to skip it and spend the evening with my mother in the hospital. I drove in, bringing a guitar in the car, thinking that if she was dying, I'd sing to her. Realizing that this was what I was doing, I burst into tears as I put the guitar on the back seat of the car.
Instead, I found that they'd drained the fluid that had been building up around her heart and lungs, and she was suddenly and clearly a step-change better than she'd been in a week. She was surprised to see me, asking "Why aren't you at Passover with everyone else?" Typical; the fact that she'd otherwise be alone when her entire family was at HER HOUSE for Seder meant nothing to her. But she had a haggadah in her hospital room because she thought she'd work on it to trim the length of the service down for Amy. Again, typical, thinking about us, not herself. And the haggadah itself was a microcosm of my mother. She'd written it herself and had been refining it and tweaking it for years, folding in current issues of freedom and Palestinian rights.
So, neither my mother nor I had planned to "do Passover" in her hospital room—I hadn't brought a roasted shank bone or charoset or anything like that, not even a piece of matzoh—but that's what happened. I went out to the car and brought in the guitar. We did the entire service front to back. We sang all the songs (within my family, I do a legendary rendition of Chad Gad Ya). Then we just talked, the first of many long substantive conversations about our lives and her mortality.
You probably think she looks like hell in the photo below (which I took because family members at Passover kept texting me asking "How's Bim?"), and she does, but I see the opposite. This was in fact the start of a temporary rebound. She recovered from this bout, went back home, and for a time was doing pretty well. She lived for another three months before the underlying cause of the fluid buildup (amyloidosis) took her.
I look at this photo and see what was possibly the single most meaningful evening of my life.
So, this year, it's Passover via Zoom with the family. It is what it is. My sister Amy understandably had a lot of emotion surrounding the idea of doing it in the house without her anyway. And, the virus notwithstanding, it's perhaps appropriate in response to the tectonic shift of a world without my mother in it. But if she were still around, I'm sure she would've been working tirelessly to tailor an online Seder and the haggadah specifically for these new times.