Failing system

On the latest Singalong Sunday things were looking much better, or more like ‘listening better’, than the week before that. So, loaded with optimism we made the preparations for last Sunday’s Singalong live session. To run into a totally failing system! Aaaaargh… what was going on???

What happened?

Maurice can get very upset (understatement!!!) when computers, programs, plugins or applications don’t do what they ought to do. In this particular case I could nearly see steam coming from his ears. He was mad as hell!

The sound settings (in his computer) he had prepared so meticulously, were gone! Again there was this timing difference between my two microphones, making it sound like I was in some huge hall where every sound echoes. How on earth…???

To make things even worse, it was about fifteen minutes before we would go live! Holy crap… now what????

Where’s plan B when you need one?

There was no way he could fix things in just fifteen minutes. So we had to switch to plan B. Euhm… yeah, plan B… what the heck do we have as a back up that can be called a plan B? I couldn’t think of any solution. So I figured the best thing to do was to cancel the whole event. “Sorry guys, no Singalong Sunday today”…

In fact I was already typing a message of that sort, when I just thought of my friends expecting me to come online and sing some songs live for them. I don’t have a large following base, but there are a couple of people that have been there nearly every week since I started in March.

If you’re a regular viewer of my shows (can I call them ‘shows’? Ah yeah, I think I can 😛 ), you’ve often heard me mentioning the names of Henny, Dienke, Marcel, Netty, Ingrid, Rink, Henk, Ton, Esther, Dominique, Vicki and my sister Naomi, to name but a few. It felt awful to think of having to disappoint them.

The solution, sort of…

Sooo, I deleted my message and decided to do it the way I started this whole ‘going live’ thing: just streaming from my phone. Nothing fancy, no amplified sound, just me and my guitar. And there it was: Plan B. At that moment I had about three minutes left to set up my phone and to open Facebook.

Stress all over, but at least I knew what I was going to do, and I was again in control of the situation. Phew…!

If you haven’t seen it yet, and you wanna know how I did, go and watch the replay right below 😉

Song list (in alphabetical order, as usual)

• American pie – Don McLean (requested)
• Baby try (come what may) – Tabby may
• Blanket on the ground – Billie Jo Spears
• Dirty old town – Ewan MacColl/Dubliners
• Help – The Beatles (requested)
• Home on Monday – Little River Band
• Last to know – Screaming Bluecats
• One horse town – Blackberry Smoke (requested)
• People help the people – Cherry Ghost/Birdy
• Perfect – Ed Sheeran (requested)
• Sacrifice – Anouk (requested)
• Stuck – Caro Emerald
• Super Trouper – ABBA (requested)

Greetz,