September 22, 2026September 22, 2026

How I Moved from PC Music to My First Live Stream

Over the summer 2026 I did my first live music stream (thanks again to Sam (@ethicalrevolution) & @sknob at NHAM for asking me) and someone later asked if I’d share how I went from my usual process of doing everything on my PC and phone to a live set up. So here we go…

I’d bought a Roland SH4D desktop hardware synth back in 2025, and even though I’d not used it much, I’d been considering using it for some kind of live jam – not sure how I was going to use it initially, but I bought it because it was a sequencer, could play 4 synth parts and a drum part simultaneously, had a lot of hands-on dials and sliders I could twiddle with.

The sequencer allows users to create up to 8 banks of 16 song patterns. And the way it’s laid out physically you can quickly swap between patterns in a bank. So I decided to create 8 tracks/songs – 1 for each bank. I didn’t know if I was going to use all 16 patterns in a bank, but I wanted an easy setup up that I’d know, for example, bank 4 was the Midnight Detective Club song So Long Gone, and not confuse myself.

Disclaimer: I am not a live musician, and when making music on PC (Cubase) and phone (Caustic) my music is created through a combo of playing a midi controller or/and placing the notes individually on the piano roll, with a lot of tidying up.

So, I had to think about how I’d do some kind of live setup that wouldn’t fall apart with my less than professional live keyboard playing. I decided that I could do a live sequencer jam, semi-improvising songs by switching through song patterns, muting/unmuting parts and twiddling the dials.

Early on I thought it would be good to do some live vocals too, but not long after considering it, I realised that my live vocals weren’t going to cut it – and I don’t have the confidence to do live vocals. But I still wanted to add some vocals to the SH4D setup, so found a cheap hardware sample player to trigger samples – an Akai MPX8. It only has 8 sample trigger pads, and to avoid complications (& slow loading samples) during the live set I decided to only use 8 samples – a handy constraint!

I hadn’t decided on what music I was going to share during the jam – would I focus on one of my existing music projects, a combo of a few of them, or write new tracks?!?

In the end I reworked 6 old tracks from my 3 main music projects, created a mashup of a few tracks from 1 of my releases and & included a new track.

I chose them based on tracks that were my favourites, and also tracks that I knew a few people had said they liked. I also wanted to make sure I had a couple of tracks with the singer I use for The Midnight Detective Club in there, Ellen Louise.

But I ended up reworking all of them – taking key things from the original tracks. e.g. Ellen Louise vocals from a couple of Midnight Detective Club songs, plus the main harmonies and snippets of tunes, and for other tracks parts of the key themes.

If you compare some of the original tracks & these reworked ARG! versions you’ll recognise some parts and not others and you can hear they are very different.

And I also tried to play a lot of stuff live into the SH4D, with some tidying.

Creating the music this way was a new experience for me – although for about 20 years I had lots of other hardware kit, but got rid of it, because it was overwhelming & by the time I’d switched it all on I’d lost inspiration!

Creating the music for this live jam was fun, as I just switched on the SH4D, got going & I like it’s limitations, but also it has a lot of future scope in terms of the variety of sounds you can create & what you can do with it. It also gave my old tracks a new feel.

And while pulling together the live jam I had to learn a lot about how to use this synth, the Akai MPX8, as well as other kit (M-Vave midi controller, and Pyle audio interface I bought later).

Back to the MPX8… It’s limitation of 8 pads was useful – I decided to use each part to trigger a whole chorus or verse. Seven parts for Ellen Louise on 2 songs, and one part for me on another.

Later on I decided to add more random samples (for two other tracks) via the Koala Android app & bought a cheap M-Vave midi controller to trigger them.

While I was creating the tracks I was thinking about a few other things:

How was I going to stream this music from my living room via my computer to the outside world?
How could I make this stream visually interesting, and not just have a shot of me pressing buttons, pads and not much more for an hour?
How was I going to combine all the instruments, plus my talking about the music between songs and get it into the PC and also monitor the audio too?

So, streaming to the outside world… I tried a couple of apps on the PC focused on streaming, but after a suggestion from sknob and a couple of others I ended up using OBS Studio. I found it easy to use. You can do things like setup different visual shots, combos of audio, media, webcam inputs and flick between them live. You can also add filters/plugins to audio inputs such as limiters, compressors, audio FX. And you can set it up to stream live via a url and passkey and record at the same time.

I had concerns my clunker of a PC (Intel i5 and 8GB of ram) would be able to take the strain of having so many audio inputs, streaming live, and recording at the same time. But I discovered that it puts less pressure on the OBS studio software if you get the settings in the background right. i.e. Match the visual size you’re recording at with the size it’s being streamed at, get your video and audio recording encoding settings so they don’t have to do a lot of reworking while streaming. There are lots of tweaks you can do in the background.

I tested out my setup on my own streaming video account again with sknob (thankyou 🙂 ) just to check that what I was streaming wasn’t glitchy and my PC didn’t collapse in a heap – especially as it has been so baking hot this summer. A useful feature of OBS studio is the CPU monitor – it was mostly hitting between 15 & 20%. This is handy to know, as I like to do more visuals via it for future streams.

Making the streaming visually interesting… As I said, I didn’t want it to just be me standing in a living room pressing buttons going out via webcam. I needed something else.

I decided to have videos playing too. Some were reworked from videos I’d created for the original tracks I’d released and others were new. Often I create the videos with stock footage from Pexels, edit them, create a narrative around them and add FX.

I wasn’t sure my PC would handle 2 audio inputs, 2 webcam inputs, video files, live stream & recording at the same time, so I borrowed a projector & cast the videos onto the wall with a webcam aimed at it. I had to think about whether it would be dark enough in the room for them to be seen, but also light enough in the room so I could see what I was doing. I created 1 hour long video, that included visual markers as signs that each individual song video was ending & space to chat between.

A 2nd webcam pointed to the synth hardware & both were on screen at the same time.

This setup worked and it was kind of wonky, but I think anything I do wouldn’t really be me if it wasn’t at least a bit ramshackle!

But as my PC was only hitting around 20% CPU running things this way, I’m also going to try out having the video play from the PC for any future streams. I also have other live jam ideas and am enjoying using OBS studio to record vocals for Cubase tracks that may be played live in future. I don’t know what it is, but it feels easier to record them that way. And what I’ve realised more recently is that it’s easier to get a vocal recording I prefer without having any musical backing distracting me. It’s only taken me 30 years to realise that!

Combining all the instruments, plus mics, getting it into the PC & monitoring the audio…

I ended up with a variety of hardware kit for the live stream that I needed to also get into the PC so OBS studio could stream it.

I started looking for a cheap audio interface or mixer with USB audio out & one that could handle multiple audio inputs for SH4D, MPX8, Android phone (Koala sampler app), & my USB mic.

I found a handy small Pyle audio interface that I could connect the SH4D through stereo line input, the MPX8 through RCA input & the phone via audio input. It had a USB audio output too. I connected the USB mic separately through another port on the PC, & that was fine, as I wasn’t doing any live singing.

There’s different latency on the Pyle, mic, & webcams which I’d not noticed at first. But you can change the latency of inputs in OBS studio to get them to align.

In the end my limited setup only made it possible to monitor the Pyle output via headphones. That was fine for my setup though.

That’s the main way I pulled it together & things I needed to consider, but there’s random things I want to mention too.

I considered doing the stream from the kitchen to avoid me disturbing neighbours and them disturbing me. But the sound in there wasn’t ideal – lino floor transmits a lot of sound to the mic. My WiFi connection to the kitchen was poor. My laptop I’d have had to use was slower than my PC – so many reasons that pointed to it being a bad idea.

I’m self conscious about how I appear on camera, but doing this stream helped with that. I’m getting used to looking like my nan!

I couldn’t watch the live stream, so couldn’t engage in the chat.

When streaming there’s a delay of maybe a minute from doing it live at home to it appearing on the live streaming service.

I unplugged my landline and set my Android phone used for the Koala app to airplane mode/network off to avoid calls and notifications during the set.

Additional: I always planned to release the tracks as an album after the live stream, but ended up re-recording most of them for that just because I made a couple of mistakes, some of the levels weren’t right and there were other little things too. But I’m still happy with how it all came together and sounded in the live stream regardless.

I hope this was useful to anyone considering doing their first live music stream.

Ash Noodle

https://tech.lgbt/@ashnoodle