Zak Claxton Happy Fun Show (10.13.18)

Posted by Zak Claxton on Saturday, October 13, 2018

It was earlier this week that I had a realization that came in three parts.

1. I don't have another show scheduled until Monday 10/22.
2. It's been over six months since I last did one of my random live video shows that I call the Zak Claxton Happy Fun Show.
3. It felt like this would be a good time to do some tunes for people who don't typically get to see/hear my SL shows.

So that's what I did (and you can watch the archived video above). At noon today, I went live on Facebook for an hour, doing a show that's fairly similar to my SL shows except a) without being in SL and b) while a camera was streaming video of my performance. Most of my friends/fans know I've used a variety of platforms for live video streaming, but I've really narrowed down to just Facebook at this point for a couple of reasons. First, every one of the former platforms I was using became problematic with functionality, too many ad interruptions, or fee increases.

Second was my discovery of a little free app for MacOS called Livedesk for Facebook Live. The problem I'd had previously is that Facebook Live is really intended for people to livestream things from their phones, and for many purposes, that's just fine. But when I do a live music show, I don't want the limitation of my phone's built-in audio and video quality to be the way people perceive my music performance. What the Livedesk app does is allow my pro-quality audio and video interface systems from my Mac to be the source of the stream, making it equal in quality sound-wise to my SL shows, and looking pretty good in 1280x720 video from my Logitech web cam.

The show itself went really well. We had a good number of viewers, and since I had Christina here, I was able to glance over at her computer monitor and see who was chatting and therefore connect with the crowd a bit (rather than streaming into the ether with no idea who was out there, like a radio show).

ZCHFS set list...
One of These Things First (Nick Drake)
Blew the Dust Away (They Stole My Crayon)
Pretty Pimpin (Kurt Vile)
Airport Bar (Martin Courtney)
Falling Down (Zak Claxton)
So. Central Rain (R.E.M.)
Trouble Child (Joni Mitchell)
Among the Leaves (Sun Kil Moon)
Man of Constant Sorrow (Traditional)
Picked Up Off the Floor (They Stole My Crayon)
America (Simon & Garfunkel)
Say Goodbye (Beck)
Loser (Beck)

Huge thanks to all who saw the show! We had about 200 views of it during and afterwards, so hopefully that's a bunch of people who enjoyed what they were hearing.