First UStream gig, featuring the 'amazing Roland VR3 audio/video mixer'

Katie Marie enjoys her first UStream gig with the help of the Roland VR3

By Katie Marie, on Thursday, February 7, 2013

Katie Marie Photo taken by Lisa (Indigo Blue Photography) and edited by Sandra (Soul Photography)

Last Friday was our very first online show via UStream featuring the amazing Roland VR3 audio/video mixer… here’s what happened.

We decided to host the gig in our lounge (we being me and Camera Lady Lisa). Now before I go any further I need to point out that Lisa is very shy and doesn’t like having her photo taken, so for the purposes of this article I am using Lego Gandalf to represent her.

The VR3 was very kindly sent to me from Roland to have a good old play with. It has so many brilliant features and even though it arrived with us before Christmas we’re still learning about all the different things you can do.

I think one of the bestest things about the VR3 is it’s size and we’ve managed to fit it along with all the relevant cables and camcorders into this case:

For this show we used two camcorders and a laptop (for text and images). The VR3 can have either three camcorders and a laptop plugged in or four camcorders.

Here’s ‘Lisa’ manning one of the camera angles:

There’s a screen on the VR3 where you can select between each camcorder/laptop. We had camera 1 as the main angle, camera 2 as a close up shot pointing at my guitar strings and the laptop in input 4.

Also plugged into the VR3 is my vocal mic and Tara (My Takamine TAN16c). The VR3 has four inputs (which are jack and XLR) and each of these has separate gain and EQ settings.

So with everything set up it’s show time!

I have to say I absolutely love doing online gigs. I find it so incredible that I can sit in my lounge and peeps can log on and watch from anywhere in the world. Very cool.

This being our first proper UStream show I didn’t want to get my hopes up too much and expect oodles of people to log on. But when we signed into my channel 30 minutes ahead of show time I was blown away to see 67 people already there waiting.

Another thing I like about the VR3 is that is has loads of outputs where you can record all the audio/video from your show. And if you fancy taking a listen to the audio quality of the VR3 I’ve uploaded one of the songs I played last Friday to my Soundcloud account: