Tell me the truth

Recently an open mic regular, Steve, had a word to me that was long overdue. He spoke the truth to me!

Getting a decent demo of your live performance online so opinionated venue managers can get an idea of what you sound like without need to come hear you in person. So we all do this ridiculous dance and pretend that we can present how we sound live in a video. I don’t know about you, but my skills evolve constantly, so as soon as I’ve made a video it’s out of date anyway. That’s why I’d taken footage of me from solo gigs collated randomly and overdubbed a recording of myself in a bedroom studio. There’s nothing wrong with that on paper, but I’d really buried my head in the sand on this.

So there it was… an old video I’d made years ago; sitting proudly pinned to the top of my Facebook music page. Apparently it had popped up in Steve’s feed and someone else’s too. I hadn’t seen it in years and was honestly a bit cringy about it in the first place. Nothing worse than having to listen to yourself, right?

Out of the blue, this shitty old video had started being pumped into people’s feeds for reasons only known to the gods of algorithm. Steve mentioned that it wasn’t really reflective of how I sound live now. He literally said ‘that video isn’t doing you any favours, you sound much better than that’.

So I guess the silver lining is that I’ve improved, but man, how terrible to wonder how many people had seen this recently. This business of demo videos is fraut with angst. I still don’t have a demo video! Even though it was the only one I had to share, I took it down immediately.

I was super impressed that Steve told me the truth about it. I think we’re used saying ‘that was great’ to performers so often that we’ve forgotten that it’s ok to say something negative. A negative comment isn’t hurtful. If the person giving it has knowledge, then the comment is helpful.

Thanks for telling me the truth Steve! I’m getting onto making a new demo video now.