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Laura Marling - Union Chapel Live stream concert last Saturday

thecolourboxthecolourbox Frets: 9824
in Music
I'd been gutted to miss out on tickets to her planned tour of the UK, as she was intending to play at a small church in Birmingham at the end of May. Obviously that got cancelled, and whilst at least that meant I wasn't missing anything, I was still disappointed for those that had tickets and for the artist herself as it would have been a marvelous event and culturally a big loss.

But, I saw she was intending to do a live stream concert instead, solo from Union Chapel in London so I was suitably excited. £12 plus a charity donation of your choice (optional), tickets via an app called Dice who then provided you with a link and code to the stream on Youtube 15 minutes before the start.

The tech worked well to be honest, Chromecasted it to the telly to get better playback and sound than the laptop would have offered. No  issues, started on time, camera quality was excellent and the sound was lovely. Not the crappy "webcam in the living room" of other lockdown musical performances. Proper lighting, two mic stands in different positions, brilliant miced sound with the reverb you can only get in a church type building. Was more like a DVD type production than how you'd normally experience a gig, but for her type of music it worked much better - no issues with people chatting in your ear, or being tall in front of you etc.

The gig itself, I thought, was wonderful. It was only about an hour, but to pull that off by yourself in an empty church with just you and a guitar (well, several guitars because of her alternative tunings) is no mean feat. A lovely mix of older stuff and songs off the new album. Her voice and guitar combination worked beautifully and her guitar playing is so musical and certainly serves the songs. Clearly that's how all the songs are written and then the full band versions are almost a cover version of that. 

She played a mixture of acoustics all tuned to the different open tunings (I found myself explaining that concept to the Mrs halfway through, which was interesting), with a face-masked tech handing her instruments from as much distance as he could muster. The guitars went through microphones, not pickups - seemed to be some sort of array mic maybe to pick up both vocals and guitar?

Had a really stressful and upsetting week and weekend, so this was a lovely 60 minutes out. Would definitely "attend" one of these again depending on the artist of course.




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