#13 - #17
STREAMCYCLE #13
Toby Mottershead &
Rossco Galloway
After our StreamCycle PRO summer programme 2020, I needed a break. I'd been working every day, all day, for 6 months and decided to take the month off and visit family. Just before I headed off we managed to fit this one in. And although we were integrating 6 live musicians at once, it was far from a success. Due to connectivity issues and a simple broken string, we were forced to abandon the show before we could get our second guest off the ground. This was another big disappointment, but it highlighted what, in hindsight, was the biggest flaw of Mark I - the incredibly limited player communication. If not for this gig, I may not have figured out the work around for Mark II...
STREAMCYCLE #14
Paul Simon Special
Then came our Paul Simon Special. This was incredibly ambitious from the outset. We wanted to integrate 7 live musicians, simply to see if it was even possible. We brought in Stu Goodall(Penicuik) and Andy Chisholm(London) from The Paul Simon Treatment, and brought back Paddy Darley(Edinburgh), Dougie Coulter(Falkirk), Kevin Barrett(Toronto) and Calum McIntyre(Perthshire) for this mammoth task.
After a superb amount of work from all involved, we pulled it off, achieving StreamCycle's highest viewer count to date and reaching farther than any gig we've yet produced. As far as Mark I goes, this was it's crowning moment.
STREAMCYCLE #15
RubyCycle
Next I started thinking outside the box again. What if we could have 8 different singer songwriters joining the StreamCycle cyberband for a single Ruby's style showcase? But the integration and swapping around of the various live streams would be too much too handle and too risky with a live audience involved. So here's what we did... All 8 performers went live into our private group 30 minutes before the actual show. Then we captured the videos as usual, except this time, all performers could watch in real-time and connect with each other in the comments whilst being able to watch the full band perform their songs just minutes later. It worked a treat!
STREAMCYCLE #16
Mike Kearney
I was back in first position again, but I didn't want to do it without the addition of my favourite trumpeter, Chuck Dearness. Of course, Paddy Darley came back to join us and I had my old brass section back together. This was a great gig, but tough to get the mix of the horns just right, a problem we solved with Mark II.
STREAMCYCLE #17
Nicole Smit &
Charlie Wild
This was our final show of 2020, and the last using Mark I. Of course, I didn't know this at the time. I thought I would just be taking another break for a month and we'd all be getting back to gigging as normal in no time. Sadly, that was not the case. But we did get festive with Nicole and Charlie again. This time, restrictions allowed them to be in the same room. We also integrated our new keyboard player, Lewis Forbes. By now StreamCycle had managed to integrate over 27 musicians into 18 live shows, and paid them all. We now had a solid roster from which to form our Mark II 'cyberbands'.