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

Having started performing in SL as a publicity/promotional exercise, we found that actually there are a number of ways in which playing gigs on second life is superior to most real life gigs available to not-totally-famous-yet acts.

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!