2020 has been an epic year, and not in a good way. Race riots, a pandemic, and far-reaching economic impacts surround us. So what did we do? We built a studio and a show.
White Horse Black Mountain has become something of a home for RadHaus over the past couple of years, and this year we solidified that partnership by co-producing White Horse Live, a weekly live music series being broadcast online — because White Horse has been closed by the state government for months due to the pandemic.
Artists and other creatives have been abandoned by most government programs designed to assist with sudden unemployment. Cancelled dates, closed venues, disappearing tours and festivals — all the things that musicians and music techs depended on for their livelihood just went poof, and most couldn’t claim unemployment because they were not actually employees.
With White Horse, we designed the live music series to 1) help White Horse stay in business and 2) help a few artists make ends meet, by way of an online tip jar.
We wanted to lift the production values of these live streams to something a little higher than the usual stream-from-your-laptop approach that many musicians took, and decided to model the series after some network programs we’ve admired over the years: the Transatlantic Sessions, Yo-Yo Ma’s Goat Rodeo Sessions, Snarky Puppy’s Family Dinners, Daryl’s House, and so on. The thing these programs all have in common is outstanding audio and beautiful video.
We brought our longtime broadcast engineering skills to bear in this ambitious pursuit, buying cameras and diving into a discipline — live video production — in which we had little prior experience. The learning curve was more like a vertical climb. But climb we did, and we’re proud of the results. We hope you’ll tune in, enjoy the show, and show the artists some love!