I just found a few pretty cool sites that go along with that whole digital recording spectrum of conversation. Awesome really. I haven't been able to look at them too deeply, but the idea is great.
Digital bands.
On these sites you can digitally collaborate with friends or strangers in order to write music. How great is that?
This option lets me avoid having to live near people that I'm afraid of meeting with personally (will they rape me or inject me with a roofie and rape me?) or figuring out where to meet to play or what songs to jam out too beforehand, or if they'll come up behind me with chloroform, put me to sleep and rape me with their instrument(s). Really, it takes the whole nervous meeting new people thing out of the equation.
I do wonder how the sites deal with issues if digital bands get bigger than the sites themselves. Do they maintain distribution rights? I'm sure I can wade through the terms of use to see what control they have over the music produced on/for their sites
Like I said, I'll have to look at these sites a little closer but in the meantime, you can check them out for yourselves.
If you find out anything interesting, let me know. Or if you have any experience on these sites, give me a shout too, I'd love to know how they worked out for you.
UPDATE
Instead of adding a new post, I decided to add to this one.
Anyway, so I've been taking a look at MyBandOnline to see what the deal was. Pretty cool concept, actually. Collaborations are in the form of projects
. After signing up for the website, you can take a look at some of the projects they have on the website, and also see that a lot of them haven't been touched in awhile, which is a shame.
Since I'm now intrigued by the website, I decided to see what the capability was.
First thing I did was browse through several of the projects in order to find one that had several mixes and tracks to choose from (tracks are individual building blocks of larger mixes). Once I found one that had a few mixes to mess with, I decided to give them a go. I went ahead and created a new folder in my Downloads specifically for each track and mix and stored them there.
What's pretty cool is that you can listen to the tracks and mixes before you even download them. So before I even downloaded any of them, I weeded through the ones that I didn't like. For example, there was a track of just singing, and it sounded terrible. Simple enough, I just didn't download it.
So I downloaded three tracks - a basic mix with rhythm guitar, bass and drums, a lead guitar, and lead vocals. After saving them, I went ahead and opened up Reaper.
Once I did that, I added the basic guitar/bass/drum mix, the lead guitar and singing.
From here is where you can do all the cool mixing stuff. You can add effects to each track or raise the gains. The primary mix is actually already pretty good by itself. So instead of fudging around with that too much, I'd rather go about messing with the lead and singing tracks.
The lead guitar sounds alright, but it drowns out the vocals a little bit in certain parts so I lowered the volume on that.
The vocals already have some added effects on the track... which kind of leads me to a point about vocals: don't add effects to vocal tracks when you're initially recording them, add them after.
Anyway, so after mixing you can convert the entire Reaper file into an mp3 and upload it back to the MyBandOnline workspace. From there, other folks can view it and add any comments.
Another thing you can do is add your own instruments or singing to the song, and add those to the website. I just chose mixing because it was the least amount of effort required from me tonight (plus, Mrs. Me is sleeping, I didn't want to wake her).
Not that I ended up adding anything to the project, but you can take a look at what exists already here.
If you're a musician, and like me, don't have anybody near you that plays music and you're afraid of in-person rejection, this is a reasonable solution to collaboration. Plus, you can always facelessly tell someone that they're a dickface and their mom is a whore without physical retribution, ala XBOX live.
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