Three creators, one stage, and a clip desk at the back of the room

Tidewell Audio hosted a live night in April and asked three of our creators to fill it. VOIDLIGHT opened. RAINPATCH played an hour of rhythm games with the room shouting song choices at her. BLUEHOUR closed with a karaoke set that ran twenty minutes long because nobody wanted it to stop.

Nine hundred tickets, gone in a day. That surprised the venue more than it surprised us.

The desk at the back

We took four editors and set up in a back room with a monitor feed and a cable run from front of house. That is the whole trick. Clips get cut while the thing is still happening, so the official version is up before the audience has finished walking out.

• 47 clips cut on site across the night
• First post live nineteen minutes after the encore
• 14 of those came from the last twenty minutes of the karaoke set alone
• Two editors stayed until two in the morning on the long-form recap

What it sounded like in the room

“I have played karaoke night on stream for two years to a chat box. Hearing nine hundred people finish the line for me is a completely different job. I forgot the second verse and it is the best clip of the night.”

Iris Lund, BLUEHOUR

That clip has outperformed the professionally shot opener by a wide margin, which is the usual outcome and still catches people off guard.

What we got wrong

Audio. We ran the clip feed off the house board, which was mixed for a room and not for a phone speaker. Half the early cuts had to be redone the next morning against the backup recording. Next time we take our own split off the desk, and we bring somebody whose only job is listening to it.

The other lesson was cheaper to learn. Nine hundred people is the right size. A room that size sells out, sounds full on camera, and lets three creators talk to individual people afterwards instead of waving at them from behind a barrier. Tidewell wanted two thousand and we talked them down to this. We would do that again.

Two more nights are penciled in for the fall, same room, same split of who opens and who closes.