Click to view in high definition on Vimeo

Live video of She’s So Dark from a gig at the Black Swan, York, earlier this year.

Make sure you hit the ‘HQ’ button to see it in better quality.

The Second Life grid was kind of crashy that night and logging people out all over the place, so it’s a shame there aren’t that many in the audience – but on the other hand it’s often much easier to take SL video without too many avatars slowing everything down…

View them on our Vimeo channel here: http://www.vimeo.com/pillowfish

Live performers in London also performed as avatars in Second Life, as well as some other SL performers.

There’s a write-up in the Metaverse Messenger, on page 19 of the Oct 28th issue.

The Ustream interface includes an interactive text chat feature. We’ve embedded the whole lot – video and chat – onto a page on our website, so you can either watch it at http://www.pillowfish.co.uk/live_video_ustream.html – our ‘live’ page, or on the UStream site at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/pillowfish-live-gig.

You can see the schedule for these gigs on our online gig list, and there is also a Facebook group that you can join if you want to receive news and updates about them: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=86224170455.

The next scheduled event is on Sunday 19th Oct at 9pm BST – hope you can make it!

You can download it by signing up to our email list on the downloads page…

The release party is being held tonight at 8pm BST at Therapy, on second life. Thanks to Raven Skall for hosting us!

You can hear our track, and all the others that will be included in the compilation, on their MySpace:

http://www.myspace.com/propermusic

In fact SL has been so much better for us that we’ve stopped taking the crappier gigs in RL, and as a result our RL gig list looks quite empty at the moment, but it’s just not worth our while doing rubbish RL gigs when we can do good ones in SL.

This is the first of a series of blog entries each outlining one way in which SL gigs are good and explaining why we no longer see SL as just promo, but actually an integral part of our music making.

Why we play on Second Life Part 1: The sound is better

Sound quality is important to us. The tone of the voices and instruments is a big part of our music, and we like it to be discernible to the audience. Clear sound to hear the lyrics is also important for our wordier songs, and of course, when we can hear ourselves properly, we play better.

We can get much better sound quality at a SL gig than at a typical RL gig. This is mostly because from a technical point of view a SL performance is much more like making a studio recording.

In SL we can use our best studio microphones and other equipment which are too expensive and fragile to take out to a gig at a outside venue, and we have total control over the mixing and signal processing, and can refine the settings over many performances. For RL gigs equipment has to be chosen for durability or avoiding feedback and the sound quality is much lower.

In SL the quality of the stream does limit the sound quality that can be achieved – even a 192k mp3 stream is not quite CD quality. However, it can still sound significantly better than any PA system we have ever used or heard at a RL gig.

Additionally most SL gigs have a sound engineer who is not familiar with our music (if they are even competent at all), and a sound system that is not optimised for it. Even when we put on our own gig with our own PA in RL, the sound quality is not as good as we can get in SL, for the other reasons above, although it does get quite a bit closer.

Both RL and SL have background noise, but in SL you can turn it off! We strongly encourage SL listeners to mute ambient sounds, or even all sounds except the music stream. Another advantage of SL is that people talking during the performance needn’t disturb those who want to listen since the talk is in text chat.

In actual practice the biggest limitation on the sound quality achievable in SL is the quality of the listeners playback system. Obviously listening on laptop speakers rather defeats all our efforts above. However, some of our listeners do use quite reasonably good systems. Watch out on Tom’s blog soon, for a post on the best ways to improve the sound from your computer.

The BIG exception to this whole SL vs RL sound quality issue is RL concerts where no amplification is required, the gig is in a room with pleasant acoustics, the audience is quiet, and there is minimal background noise. In other words – house concerts. House concerts (and well run small acoustic club guest nights) are the one type of gig we have found that give superior sound to SL. It’s one of the main reasons we keep banging on about house concerts.

So, come and listen on SL! or book us for a house concert!