It’s been a great experience so far working on the creation of Singacoustic as it has been my absolute passion for over 20 years, a dream of mine that grew and grew but then faded out and dissapeared throughout the years, a dream to produce unique events designed specifically for the local talent of singer-songwriters out there and everywhere, and so it begins. Singacoustic is a great concept that promotes local musicians, local recording studios, and local businesses to fans globally through live stream events produced in local cities and towns around the world. The original idea was to promote through local venues, small clubs, coffee houses, and local bars but we ran into a crucial issue regarding internet connection for the live stream. Venues did not want to provide us with an ethernet feed from their modem, they would rather prefer we use the WIFI and that was not an option. After visiting a local studios in town I realized that it would make sense to produce the event in a recording studio, and so it begins.
The story of the creation of Singacoustic is a somewhat sad story. I’ve been a sound engineer almost all my life, and it breaks my heart to pieces that I’m unable to mix again due to an injury that left me with symptoms that prevent me from enjoying the most precious thing in my life, moving faders and knobs to mix music. Dang, that just makes me sad all the way to depression but I’m also grateful that it could have been worse. So out of depression came Singacoustic, a project that is finally taking a shape, growing, and evolving.
I was having a hard time coming up with a name for the show. I went through multiple names, designs, and multiple domain registrations as well. One of my favorite names is Acoustic Rave, I even designed a logo for it.
I was excited about the logo and the name and then I found out that Acoustic Rave is a name of a tune by ShowHawk Duo, the British guitarists Mikhail Asanovic and Jake Wright. Check it out, they are amazing acoustic guitar players, I mean, phenomenal acoustic guitar players.
I went through many names trying to figure out the name of the production company and I remembered my good friend James Knudsen telling me back in the day that we need to play in a band called Hot Mittens, although Jim is not a musician. And Hot Mittens Production was established and registered as an event production company.
It took me some time to create the website. I’m not a graphic designer but I found tools that helped me get the vision I had out of my head and on my laptop screen and I’m proud of my accomplishment. I owe it all to my lovely and talented wife, I learned a lot about graphic design and the layout of a post, and color coordination from her, and believe I did a great job with the site (I welcome your comments), it was a learning curve for sure.
I learned a lot from the first Singacoustic showcase, I consider it the series Pilot where we found many areas of improvement. upon great consideration, we ended up shortening the length of a Singacoustic event to a one-hour show, and instead of six singer-songwriters, we went down to three. Each artist will get 15 minutes of performance with 2-3 minutes of an on-camera interview for self-promotion and growth.
I’m excited and I’m looking forward to Singacoustic Oakland on December 2nd, 2022. So far we have two amazing Bay Area singer-songwriters, Emily Zisman and Tom Rhodes, and currently, in talks with another amazing artist to join (can’t reveal yet)I hope to see you all there. It’s going to be awesome. Cheers!
Your humble founder, hg