Being confined at home poses a particular challenge for some musicians—how do chamber musicians or bands get together to practice when they can't be in the same physical location?

Certain online apps, such as ZOOM, allow musicians to livestream their performance to a large audience. However, with many of these apps, you can only hear one audio source at a time—so musicians playing simultaneously may not be able to hear each other.

The JamKazam program supports real-time online collaboration with multiple audio and video sources. With a microphone and headphones, you can create a virtual rehearsal session, invite multiple musicians to join, and record the session.

Furthermore, you can also use it as a tool to teach music lessons. All you have to do is send an invite to your student via the software platform, and they can instantly join. Last week, using the JamKazam program, I had a practice session (playing on my piano in NYC) with a recorder player who lives in the Los Angeles area. For more information, please visit the official website at www.jamkazam.com.

Social distancing imposed by the coronavirus has disrupted the music and the performing arts industry and shut down concert venues worldwide. Many artists are already livestreaming concerts from their own home. This article showcases a few more features to enhance the viewer experience.

One way to enhance the experience is to feature previously filmed performances. You may have given a particularly memorable concert in the past that you would like to share with your audience – perhaps it was well-reviewed. This is important if you have managers or agents watching the live stream who wish to hire you for future gigs. It can also demonstrate your versatility, for example, playing different instruments, set lists, or with different group sizes.

A second way is to invite guests to your live stream via a secure link, allowing them to interact with you and provide commentary in real time.

Adding these features will turn a simple live performance into a video podcast, which is a great tool to market your brand and increase your popularity. I can create these live streams for you on my end, while you are the director. You can send me a link on Google Drive or DropBox to download all the video clips you want to showcase live to your audience and I can prepare them.

You can also accept donations. Viewers can pay a fee to watch the live stream, or they can watch for free and contribute an amount of their choosing. The donations can easily be done through your website using a simple-to-use, secure online credit card form. Once they submit the payment they will be redirected to the live stream show webpage.

An email blast can be sent to all of your colleagues, family members, managers and other artists to tune in to the live stream at a certain date and time. For those that cannot watch, it can be archived. I will send you a link to the live stream that you can forward via email to your viewers. The live stream can be seen on any computer or mobile device, and can even be cast to your big screen TV, making it look like a television broadcast.

With significantly limited platforms to showcase their creativity, artists are turning to social media.

One method to market your musical talent is to publish video clips of previously filmed concerts or recording sessions on YouTube. With approximately 1.3 billion users and more than 30 million visitors per day, YouTube can reach a global audience, particularly as we are all confined to our homes and watching videos on YouTube all day.

When you publish a new video on YouTube, your subscribers will receive an email saying a new video has been published. This can significantly increase your viewership over time and keep people interested in your work. The more videos you have on your YouTube channel, the greater the viewership.

The next question is, how do you publish video clips on YouTube? By using a video editor to create the edited content.

Traditionally, clients would come to my studio and work with me on video editing projects to achieve this task; however, I am now able, with free screen-sharing software, to work on your editing project securely where you can see my screen in real-time using your home computer.

This allows me to make camera angle changes, add titles, and any other editing-project requirement with your supervision. If you have a reliable internet connection on your end, you will enjoy smooth, real-time performance. You will also be able to hear the audio track played back on your computer. Files can be shared using Google Drive, Dropbox or other file sharing services as I have done in the past, as well as YouTube publishing, with very fast turnarounds due to my gigabit internet connection. It is also possible to create a physical disc master such as a DVD or Blu-ray, should that be desired.

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