‘A Hope for the Future’ featured over 30 of the world’s most celebrated trumpet players who filmed and recorded themselves in isolation, and then mixed/edited by Robert DiVito at Society of Sound.

About the Event

Ka-boom!! The audio industry is dead.  RIP engineers and producers.

Not so fast, we say! 

We’ve had a month now to deal with the shock of the most dramatic shutdown ever of the entire global economy, unprecedented in history. 

One little malicious protein bug can certainly wreck havoc on how we have been accustomed to conducting commerce, but there are tools out there that perhaps just need some innovative implementations, and we can find ways to carry on creating and enabling musicians to reach their audiences.

Several recent cases in point:  Andrea Bocelli’s YouTube funded Easter performance Music for Hope racked up 22 millions views within the first 8 hours of its live broadcast.  Closer to home, our own Robert DiVito‘s “A Hope for the Future” featuring a 32 top trumpeters from around the world amassed 120,000 views (and climbing) within 8 days.  Side Door transformed itself into an online pay-for-view concert portal, and artists like Danny Michel and Sarah Slean have attracted paying audiences averaging 400 – 700 viewers on that platform. The National Arts Centre has been streaming in collaboration with Facebook as part of its #CanadaPerforms $700,000 relief fund that pays Canadian artists for their online performances.

Some, but not all, of these had a hallmark in common:  the production values were good, and there is an awareness and hunger by performers to up their game in live streaming, all from the safety of their homes.

At the same time, the recording industry has all but ground to a halt, but with a number of engineers and studios exploring ways to coordinate existing technologies and develop new ones to allow remote recording collaborations with video, and possibly even performances…

To that end, the Toronto AES has assembled a forum of bright, motivated minds, and we are presenting an opportunity to share solutions some of us have been banging away at, and discuss the challenges we are facing. 

No one (that we know of) has discovered subspace communications yet, but there are ways to potentially collaborate and create using near instantaneous technologies already in existence, paired with video conferencing and webcasting technologies.

We’ll focus on

• technical constraints,
• solutions to work within or overcome them, best practices,
• workflows,
• communication,
• best distribution platforms,
• marketing, etc.

Let’s talk, let’s share.  We’re all in this together, and we are going to be here for quite a while. And when we emerge, the audio industry landscape is going to look quite different than it did only a month ago, in a good way.

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Hosts

Participants

Side Door is a platform that matches artists with hosts, builds direct connections, and simplifies the show-booking process with easy and transparent digital tools.

With the onslaught of COVID-19, it rapidly transformed itself into a live webcasting platform and is taking the Internet by storm, attracting such artists as Danny Michel, Sarah Slean and Bare Naked Ladies former-front man Steven Page… and drawing a growing audience who experience an interactive live-concert experience, and happily pay for it.

Two-time JUNO award winning & two-time Polaris Music Prize listed musician and songwriter Side Door co-founder/creator Dan Mangan will join us to bring his cutting-edge perspective on the challenges and successes of on-line live streaming technologies.

Stream Tuneup provides one on one online assistance by an engineer/musician/teacher to get their show sounding as good as it can.

Performers are having to gain experience in a completely new field, and are left having to become engineers, lighting technicians, IT support and perform.

Owner/engineer Guillermo Subauste takes that stress out of the way by guiding performers through different solutions that will help their audience get a great sounding experience.

Michael Phillip Wojewoda

35 year veteran music producer Michael Phillip Wojewoda has been a fixture of the Canadian music industry producing over 140 albums. Michael’s work in 2017/18 for Nunavut’s The Jerry Cans received 2 JUNO nominations.  The Wojewoda directed video for the lead single has garnered over 400,000 hits.

Recent albums include the legendary Buffy Sainte-Marie whose Power in the Blood album was short listed for a Polaris Prize, International opera star Measha Brueggergosman pop cross over album for Warner Canada and the 2015 Juno nominated Amelia Curran album, They Promised You Mercy.

A prolific user of Steinberg’s VST Connect, he will share a few thoughts and insights into moving forward in the pandemic centric new order.

This evening’s event is brought to you by