Making Musical Improv Work Remotely
While improv has made huge efforts to get online during the global pandemic in either Zoom or podcast form, musical improv has extra barriers to overcome with the technology. And yet, musical improv classes and podcasts are still running. How?
Technical solutions and using the skills they have as musical improvisers have meant musical improv may be hampered by Covid 19, but it’s finding ways to adapt. This episode you will hear from a variety of musical improvisers who have made things work in one way or another online.
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This episode features:
Jessica McKenna and Zach Reno do a hilarious musical podcast!
Off Book: The Improvised Musical Podcast: https://www.earwolf.com/show/off-book/
Dan Moser does improv sketch comedy and freestyle rapping Alberta
Check out https://goodimprov.com/ for more and check them out on Facebook facebook.com/GoodImprov/
Pippa Evans from The Showstoppers / BBC Radio 4 can be found online here: http://www.pippaevans.com/
You can see the whole of the wonderful Alternative Eurovision that The Showstoppers produced here: https://youtu.be/vjij0W75Y2k - the show raised over £7500 for The Care Workers Charity - please consider watching their show and donating to this wonderful charity here: https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/the-showstoppers
Robin Rothman from The Magnet Theatre and New York Musical Improv Festival has announced that the festival may be moving online. You can keep up with developments here: nymif.com and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/nymif/
You can follow her character Trudy Charmichael and find details of her shows here: https://www.facebook.com/SongstressTrudyCarmichael/
Episode transcript:
This…. Is The Improv Chronicle Podcast. I’m Lloydie
It’s Tuesday 16th June - 2020
While improv has made huge efforts to get online during the global pandemic in either Zoom or podcast form, musical improv has extra barriers to overcome with the technology. And yet, musical improv classes and podcasts are still running. How?
Technical solutions and using the skills they have as musical improvisers have meant musical improv may be hampered by Covid 19, but it’s finding ways to adapt.
One musical improv podcast that’s continuing is fronted by Jessica McKenna and Zach Reno - who form the comedy duo The Zach and The Jess and who host a podcast that gives you a narrative musical based on an organic conversation
So what have been the technical limitations that Off Book has faced?
Any sort of delay which, the internet has a very slight delay but a delay none the less, means that if the pianist is not literally in the room with you then what you, what he does is slightly out of sync with what you do and it further complicated by the fact that Jess who is now in the third room is slightly out of sync with the other two things going on and it just makes it a full nightmare to do live so there are a couple work arounds for it. What we have been doing is having Scott and Brett, our pianist and guitarist, make tracks that we don't listen to in advance by themself, so they record them in advance and then we down load those tracks on our computers and then we play them and sing along with them from our end so they're sort of synced up. Another thing that a lot of groups are experimenting with right now is the pianist plays, the singer sings, it sounds in sync to the singer and then the pianist inserts an artificial delay on what they're doing and that lines everything back up before it goes out to broadcast but that is sort of a imperfect science but it is another possible workaround. Where everyone is sort like, it's it is kinda need to see musical improvisers and musicians in general banding together and sort of sharing their research to try to figure out how to do live music right now because it is very difficult over the internet.
Both Zach and I have both just been frank about, there's just a little, it's just a, I mean on the scale it's no big deal but it is sad. I think it just is it's a bummer yeah it's a bummer that we can't really play off each other. We're kind of just marching solo and taking turns and playing with each other in the in-between but the songs themselves are we've been, our workaround for Off Book has been to just sort of treat them as solo songs because of that, now Zach has been like proactive in trying to continue to solve this problem or make it better, make it easier but for whatever reason I like was having a hard time with Zack's internet and I basically would not know anything really that he had sung. I could get like every third word, so for us who want to play not just musically supportive but comedically aggressive I can't really yes and like a comedic premise that I 33% of the song and that's that so so the thing that I think Zach and I love the most and have like cultivated over years and years of performing and working together is the balance between us you know that really is more of our dynamic.
We were still doing it and I couldn't like put a finger on why it was so hard because technically like Jess and I can both sing full songs by ourselves it's harder - you have to, you have to carry the weight of the whole thing but we can do it but I would just, I would we would finish it and I'd be like "why is this such a bummer" and I I think what she's talking about is is the thing is that improvising a song is actually not my favorite part about this my favorite part about this is building something weird and stupid with her and and sort of building something that I couldn't do on my own in in a corner of a dark room just thinking to myself
And in Canada online improvised freestyle rap is still happening regularly.
Hi everyone my name is Dan Moser I'm living in Edmonton Alberta Canada right now and I love doing improv. I currently manage a group called Good Improv and we do weekly live streams of improvised sketch comedy and improvised freestyle raps and a little bit of kind of video game role playing in there too. I'm actually a big proponent of online improv. My group and I have been doing primarily online shows for the last kind of two and a half years even before the pandemic hit so to me this is a really exciting time to kind of show the rest of the world what online improv can bring to the table. There is something, obviously there's something to be said for live performance we have the audience there and everybody's jazzed up to watch but there's something kinda neat about doing it, doing it recorded and seeing that magic form after the fact when you're listening back to the file and saying oh my god you know even without the the audience there to feed you, you can still come up with some really great stuff.
So when coronavirus started then you, you were a step ahead of everybody else.
Totally yeah I mean basically what we've been doing before is doing a weekly recording session at my studio here and then I would try to edit the best bits down and that'd be our show for the week. Now what we're doing is instead of that we're doing a video live stream of our show so the safety net's off a little bit but we're already really prepared for this sort of thing. So we've been using a lot of rap is a little bit quote unquote easier in this regard I feel like rather than having a live accompanist since we're just playing a beat file we don't have to deal with another person like playing an instrument as well right?
Well now you you've got a background in this kind of thing as well haven't you.
Yes yes it's been a little easier for me because I'm a audio engineer by trade so I kind of have a little bit of an understanding of how this all goes down to begin with my main my main a problem I guess is some of the other people who I work with don't have necessarily that background so trying to explain the concept to them can sometimes get a little get a little tricky.
So what would you say to someone who is like missing musical improv, desperately wants to do it whether it be on Zoom or another platform um. what would be your best advice to them?
I guess just do it you know it even if you got a little bit of out-of-sync problems and stuff, if you're doing it just for the joy then just go ahead and do it. If you want to make a more polished product I guess then I would say you're gonna have to dedicate hours off internet to try to get it set up properly that would be my main thing because the last thing I want to do on my on my improv channel is put out something that is technically inferior. I mean improv is already such a such a touchy art form you know what I mean? It's all, already such a, it's so I don't I don't know how to describe it's already such a such a light thing like you could touch it it falls apart so having the tech issues in the way can easily throw that off.
What have been the successes that you've had there for putting stuff online.
I think our biggest successes have been what we did the first thing that I said when we make sure that we have a lot of fun with what we're doing because inevitably even though we kind of have everything feeling right now and we kind of have the set up that we want and we're in sync most of the time and all that there's still a lot of tech stuff that can go wrong, you know you can have the internet glitch that's completely out of your control, you can have just a spike in traffic, you can have somebody else on your network watching Netflix and and then it's all thrown off so I think it's important to remember that even if the tech is there for you and everything is working perfectly one second later it could not be. Well I guess that's what, it's a good job we're improvisers. No right exactly yes.
But the tech can be pretty daunting. What tech do we need? Robin Rothman is a musical improviser at the Magnet Theater in New York City and performs with Nightshade one of the house teams as well as performing as a Las Vegas lounge singing character Trudy Carmichael in a one woman improvised show.
And so for a little while while we were trying to figure out like Justin Torres and Frank Spitznagel who is our Musical Director the Magnet Theater, the two of them put their heads together and they really worked out they were like, because Justin is one of our improvisers he's on night shade with me and he does voiceover work so he has a really good like wealth of knowledge about audio set ups and everything so they ended up finding this server, this online streaming service called ListenTo on Audiomovers and Frank was able to plug his piano, like broadcast himself on line and then it was like a separate feed so it really improved the sound quality of the piano and slowly but surely we started to use that and integrate that into our Zoom performances and there is still you know a little bit of a delay when you're singing with the piano but it's so much improved and now it's like everybody's able to actually perform musical improv sets together. Singing together is still a little tricky but through you know through various like just -oh we'll share will split the verses, we'll sort of sing, you know sing softly doing backing vocals some people have done some trios but you know it's it's it was like a whole New World opened up to us when Justin and Frank work that out so so it's great because musical improv it's not the same at all but it is at least in some way back when we were able to do it to some degree again.
Dan in Alberta has some more tech ideas to for people who are perhaps moving on from Zoom.
I know a lot of people are using Zoom and Zoom is a good software for for beginners and all that and it's very easy to turn on and off the mic, on and off the off the camera and all that stuff so that's really great. I just I guess I find that it tends to be a little bit more hit and miss so I mean what we like to do is we like to use Skype we kind of call in all into we call into my computer here, like our main streaming computer and that way we have a greater control of what we're putting out there. You know with Zoom it's kind of just whatever the picture is that's where the picture is so um, using something like OBS or X-split to control your video feed I think is a really great idea.
Improvising on podcasts and live shows is one thing but how can we use the skills we have as musical improvisers in other ways?
I'm Pippa Evans. I'm an improviser and musical comedian and you might know me from some Radio Four shows and also Showstopper: The Improvised Musical.
Showstoppers in the U. K. created an entire Eurovision Song Contest alternative last month. The Eurovision Song Contest for those not familiar is one of the most camp, ridiculous, beloved TV contests in the world, broadcast live every year from the home country of the previous year's winner. So how did the Showstoppers Alternative Eurovision come about?
All of us delightful improvises have discovered you cannot improvise musically on Zoom unless it's just you and a piano, like, one person can do it, but you cannot live improvised with a group and as we are normally ten people on stage, like a three piece band then a chair, and then the six people in doing the acting - that's never gonna work online. So we were trying to find ways that we could still do exciting fun content that felt like it was showstoper-y whilst it wasn't improvised. So Philip Pellew, you may not know he's one of our wonderful team, he is a massive Eurovision fan, like crazy big and every year he sends an email to us all outlining his response to every Eurovision Song. He's done this for like the past however many years and we love it, we think it's so funny and so we'd already started talking about how sad it was this year we went to get Phil's email and then um, I think it was I Adam Megido and Andrew Pugsley who, who were sort of thinking about what we could do and what was a way that people could be responsible for their own content and ping, the idea came in let's do an alternative Eurovision where the links are live, because we wanted to keep the element of life, um so we'll do the links as is in a Eurovision but everyone is responsible for their own song.
I'm interested in how you recorded the songs um, how did you like, was there an improvisational process to doing it you know, obviously you write songs as well as improvised them um so what was the process?
The process was, er no there wasn't an improvised, no I would say well I dunno, depends how everyone wrote their songs. No one did their song instantaneously, Um but everybody in Showstopper obviously has song writing capabilities or lyric production capabilities. And I believe it's Stella Duffy who says writing is just improvising sitting down, so we were just er extemporising onto a piece of paper and then um, the person who had been given their country, it was kind of allocated like fantasy football kind of thing, and you got given your country then you go paired up with one of our musical directors and then you know batted to back and forth how you want your song to go, got a backing track made, recorded it, then you have to film yourself on your video singing the song but you had to learn your song you couldn't be reading it because we all know now that you can really see when someone's reading, and that's how it was done really yes so in many ways not to improvisational in a sense but definitely using all the skills that we learned through many years of improvising.
In an episode earlier this year you may have heard my journey in New York to attend the New York Musical Improv Festival, you may have heard me get off a subway train to the news that it had been postponed due to the pandemic. Well let's go back to Robin Rothman because she's one of the two producers of that festival, a festival that's now looking to go online.
Yes, that has been something that we've been you know, having in the back of our mind kind of on the back burner for a while um, because we've seen some other er, there have been some other online festivals um, and so now that we have the ability to do musical improv in some sense we wanted, we were like you know just thinking let's try and make this possible let's try and make this happen because so many people were stranded in New York, who came to perform from all over, you including, you included your your team included er you guys came all the way over from the U. K. and um, so we don't know when we're going to be able to resume operations in New York City. I think you know, all the theatres are stage or phase four for re opening so um, you know who knows when we'll be able to meet again in person, so in the meantime if we can do a virtual you know online festival that's something I think. So that's that's something we’re, we're working on um, formulating.
It looks like the festival may now go ahead in July and teams who were due to perform are in the process of being contacted. If you want to watch the festival or want more details check the show notes of the podcast for links. So what happens next for musical improv. Jess and Zach from the OffBook podcast.
Everybody will come out of this like raring to perform erm, and I think that that's great and it's really hard right now if you fell in love with improv er, to feel disconnected from the aspects of it that make you love it which is probably the friends that you're making and made and the joy that you have performing with them um, so I think like be kind to yourself and your teammates and don't worry that it's sad and hard. It's not forever. Whatever it like we're in a we're in a moment and it's a weird moment for a live comedy and it's a weird moment for musical improv especially and and yeah and it's gonna pass in one way or another it will become something else and er I truly think the technology will be there to help people soon but until it is just like go to go do your improv jam, work your fundamentals, you'll be fine you'll be great.
Robin Rothman is hopeful that musical improvisers get the chance to use their voices as much as they can.
You know I just think it's um, it's my hope that the musical improv continues and that people continue to want to do it online even though zoom fatigue is something that people are getting and for those of us who love to sing it's important to keep singing and keep having a reason to sing because it's really like something that we live for and something that is is much needed in our lives in order for us to keep from slipping into a really dark place so, yes I hope that we just continue making musical improv online and hopefully you know in a festival and then you know doing it until we can finally come together and do it on the stage again in real life I R. L. as they say.
Pippa Evans believes that taking the spirit of what you do and keeping alive in some way is really helpful.
You know the main thing has been about improv and it's not probably just related to this but I suppose it is inspired by this moment was don't feel you have to transfer exactly what you do into another medium to stay doing what you do if that make sense. and you can take your essence into something else and it doesn't have to be, so we didn't, we didn't need to find a way to do Showstopper the Improvised Musical exactly online, we needed to find a way that we could take the spirit of Showstopper the Improvised Musical online. I think that's a really helpful thing to take back out actually is don't get stuck in what you do just find the essence of what you do and apply that to every project.
Next time…… on the improv chronicle podcast
The first signs of live… you’ll hear from the improv venues that are tentatively opening up their doors again, the steps they are taking to keep people safe, and how it feels to be back in some form… are we seeing the beginnings of a return to how things were before in some parts of the world?
The improv chronicle podcast is produced and presented by me, Lloydie James Lloyd. YOU can help the podcast right now - Please subscribe and rate us on your favourite podcast app If you have an idea for a possible episode go to - www.improvchronicle.com