A few days ago, my band tried out a new rehearsal space, Le Hachoir, where the sound engineer sets up everything beforehand and after the rehearsal, you go home with a really good audio and video recording of it.
When I watched it, I found us not half bad and I figured, impulsively, “let’s put this up on YouTube.”
Seemed like a half-hour project at most: take the footage, cut out a couple of songs, upload them to YouTube, voilà.
Yeah… no.
I spent 4 hours putting it all together: incorporating the extra footage I’d taken with my DSLR and a wide-angle lens, mixing it with the footage from Le Hachoir, color-grading all the footage so it more or less matched, cutting out the most unflattering sequences, syncing the audio, adding titles…
Once I was all done, once I had uploaded the video to YouTube and sent the link to the band, only then did I start to wonder: was it really a good idea to post this online for everyone to see how good but so very imperfect we are?
“This is a bad idea, right?” screamed my doubts like Olivia Rodrigo on a particularly shrieky day.
As if I hadn’t spent enough time on this so-called “quick” project already, I then spent an hour or so talking it over with my husband, a friend and Gemini (because after a few minutes of repeating “but is it really a good idea? I mean really?”, I could feel the humans in my life starting to get a little tired of my Olivia Rodrigo routine) and painstakingly laying out the pros and cons of publishing this imperfect rehearsal footage.
The pros :
Give our existing fans the opportunity to be a fly on the wall of our rehearsal space.
I personally love seeing raw unfiltered footage of bands I like. Hell, I love seeing raw unfiltered bands I don’t know or don’t even like. I just like seeing how people work.
Feed the content machine
Finding original content to post regularly is starting to feel like both a Herculean and a Sisyphean feat. And while I work out on the regular, I haven’t got near all the muscle those Greek gods or demi-gods or whatever they are have. This perfectly honest footage with great sound and a few mistakes felt like a (Greek demi-) godsend in that regard.
Build lore around the band.
I’m still not quite sure what this is, honestly, but I keep reading stuff about how it’s a good thing and I’m almost 57.43% sure that raw rehearsal footage helps build lore.
I’d already spent the time
Yes, this is a stupid reason. But 4 hours of editing isn’t something I can just throw away. Let me remind you that I’m 50 years old. I feel the brutal mathematical limit of the four-hour blocks left in my lifespan in my BONES. Every morning.
The cons :
First impressions matter
We’re not putting our best foot forward in these videos. And if someone who wants to book us, or even come to our show, lands on this footage, they might think that we aren’t very good professionals; which, granted, we’re not professionals, so at least it’s honest.
The visuals aren’t perfect
The Hachoir’s cameras aren’t DSLRs spewing out 4K with a perfect color-grade. The sound is awesome, yes, but the images all have a pretty bad yellow tint and are mismatched despite a lot of time (way too much) spent trying to move my Davinci color-grading wheels here and there and everywhere just a little but not too much and oh no shit that’s too much and who the fuck designed these color wheels that are IMPOSSIBLE to use with a mouse??? I don’t get it. Anyways. The video is good. But not “music video” level good.
The algorithm won’t like it
If no one watches these rehearsals because they are just a little too bad to be charming, the algorithm is going to flag my video as not interesting and stop recommending it to new people. Which won’t be very different from any of my other YouTube videos, I guess, since not many of them go above the 100 view mark. But let’s stay positive here, shall we?
Spoiling the magic of the original songs
One might argue (and Gemini did) that if people have heard a raw live version first, they might not like the polished studio version later. I think this is the stupidest of all the cons, to be honest. But I’m afraid Gemini’s feelings will be hurt if I leave it out and since I’m going to have him proofread this article…
After that, I spent another hour or so brainstorming solutions and trying to figure out whether I really cared about the cons or not. I considered uploading the rehearsal footage as an “unlisted” video on YouTube and sending the link to my newsletter. I considered cutting it up into little shorts and reels. I considered scrapping the whole idea altogether.
In the end, after THREE HUNDRED minutes spent on this 30 minute project, I decided to add a disclaimer at the beginning of the video and to frame these rehearsals as a series: “prepping for our October show”.
And spend an hour writing a newsletter to my list about it.
And another hour writing a Substack article about it.
I’m still not sure if it’s a good idea, algorithmically and strategically and marketing-wise. At this point, I’m not sure I really care.
At the end of this (long) day, all I’m sure of is that this was way too long of a project.