Nick and I are (part-time) musicians, who have been writing songs and playing together since our 4th date, so it’s something we’ve always done with one another. I don’t talk about this very much here because I really don’t want this blog to have the undercurrent of trying to persuade anyone to listen to our music. But since this is a space where I talk about what I do, it’s relevant to bring it up with this post because we just did two live on-line shows in the past week. These were both within the social networking game called Second Life. In a very small nutshell, we are on-line live entertainers within this gaming platform, which is essentially a web of chat-rooms with avatar representations for each person there. (It’s hard to explain actually, but I think most people have heard of Second Life by now … there’s a ton on-line about it if you’re curious to know more).
For these two particular shows we were invited to perform at parties being held by other SecondLife residents, whose guests mostly live in Europe so for both shows we went on from 5 to 6pm our time, which is around 10pm their time, give or take an hour depending on where they live. The Wednesday show was to celebrate the 4th Year Anniversary of a nightclub called The Notes Shack Pub, and the second show on Saturday was to celebrate the real-life birthday of one of the hosts, with donations being given to Doctors Without Borders, in lieu of gifts. Both were a lot of fun and had excellent turn-outs.
Here are some pictures of our avatars I took after our second show. The venue, called Fride Club, was set-up like Super Mario Brothers. I couldn’t get any shots while we were playing but to give you an idea, our avatars were up on a stage, dancing around and mimicking a real-life concert, with mine playing a little model of the exact keyboard I have in real life, and Nick shredding his tiny red guitar!
We were dancing in that last one and my dress was swishy!
As musicians who choose not to hit the road and tour our band (called The Rails), this on-line scenario is ideal for us. Most times our friend and drummer, Chops Niall Mellors, joins us for our shows. We all love it! One thing would make it better though, and that would be to by-pass the whole avatar part and have a live visual stream to go with the live music. We are working on achieving this and have done a few tests in recent months, but technically, it’s very challenging, so we have more to do on that.
These pictures were taken after the hour-long show which is why I’m looking a little flushed!
Thanks for visiting. Hope you’re having a great Tuesday.
xo loulou
