Kyla's Blog

New Years Goals Part 2 Solo Acoustic Videos of all my Songs February 05, 2024

Last year I wanted to post a weekly solo acoustic video of all my unrecorded songs. My idea is that when people hear me live, there are often songs they like, but there’s no way to hear them again without seeing me live. My plan for this last year was to simply do one each week. Like my clothing goal, that wasn’t a good enough plan.

The second fly in the ointment was that as soon as I posted the first video, someone pointed out the vocals weren’t clear enough. Fair point. So I then spent a bunch of time trying to improve the mic set up, was never quite sure about it, and then never got back to making the videos. (Though I did start live streaming on Youtube weekly.)

I also tended not to want to record video when I found myself wearing the same clothes frequently, and in all my time posting, I never liked putting two videos up in a row where I’m wearing the same outfit. (Apart from when I started and put up one video for the song, and one video of me talking about the song.)

This year I’m giving it another shot. I’ve attached it to my live performance goals and my fashion goals. I am perhaps not super happy with the sound I’m getting, but I’ve decided to keep posting as I experiment. I am embracing the idea that they don’t all have to have the same layout. My first solo acoustic videos had different guitars, some I was standing, some sitting. I’m going to try some with my PA and see how those turn out. Instead of thinking I need to have a fully formed idea and pattern that I follow (because social media advice is that all of you are too dumb to recognize anything that goes off pattern) I’m going to remember that none of you are that dumb, and you just want to hear and share your favourite songs, so I’m going to work on making entertaining videos that will get better as I do them.

To solve the problem of not wanting to wear the same outfit in consecutive videos, I’m going to simply decide that that’s okay. I can record 3 videos on the same day and put them up. None of you are going to say: I can’t believe she’s wearing the same thing she wore in the last video. (although….I might get annoyed by looking at my Youtube homepage and seeing 3 identical looking videos in a row, so maybe I’ll stagger the uploads.)

As for choosing the songs, I made a year long live performance practice board in Milanote. I have a weekly template to follow for learning and memorizing my songs, that includes performing them live online, and recording video of them. (Reviewing live video is a very important aspect of practising for the stage.) The songs, like my outfits, get chosen during my weekly review, and will often be songs that I want to perform at an upcoming show, or plan to record soon.

So far I’m getting really good first takes performance wise, but there is still some sound tinkering to do. We’ll get there.