Earlier this week I did my first public live stream on YouTube using OBS software. I prepared and felt good. I had around 30 people join in and watch me start working on a song from scratch. The live stream started off with technical issues but I battled through. My viewers were awesome and gave me the courage to do it again.
The planning
I created and scheduled the YouTube event 24 hours ahead of time, prepped all my gear, my mixer, my mic, my audio interfaces, created all my scenes in OBS, assigned shortcuts, tuned my guitars made sure my virtual instruments we ready to go. I felt pretty good. I started my live stream about five (5) minutes before the live time and when I checked the stream event, YouTube was not receiving my stream. I started OBS half a dozen times, I tried the secondary YouTube ingest server, nothing worked. I finally created a custom stream setting in OBS and it connected. Everything was good until I realized, YouTube created a new live stream event and all my viewers where on the event I scheduled.
When the technical issues started, I updated all the viewers in the chat. When I discovered the second event was working, I put the new URL in the chat window and by some miracle, all the users clicked on the new URL and watched me stream how to make a song from scratch.
Now mind you, I practiced live streaming a week before privately with a small group to make sure all my settings were right, my gear was correct. I went on with my stream for about an hour and half. I signed off, I was pretty happy with what I did. Then I found out my audio levels where way off. I mean it was absurd. Total amateur hour.
Lastly, when I went back to the edit the event with end screens and the like, I realized YouTube copied all the data from my previous live stream and used that data for the default settings for the new it event it created automatically.
In spite of all that crazy, I feel like it went pretty well. If I want to live stream, I have to take the good and the bad and prepare for both and hope for the best.
Doing a live stream was still worth it
I sent texts to around 10 people and one of my recipients notified all their friends and another 20 people showed up for a while. So thank you, you know who you are. I got a better showing than I expected. So, Yeah! With that, I look forward to live streaming with you again, please click the subscribe, give me a thumbs up and activate that notification bell.
