Online Music Collaboration
Over the past few years, the bandwidth capabilities of the Internet have increased dramatically – mainly driven by the popularity of data-heavy video sites such as YouTube. This has had positive implications for musicians also, and there are many ways to use the Web as a means of getting ideas together…
Soundcloud Global Meetup
Last Wednesday was the Global Meetup Day for users of Soundcloud… in Dublin, this took place in the Bernard Shaw, kindly organised by Annie Corriveau.
Soundcloud is a great way of sharing music, and allows listeners to add comments at particular points on the timeline of a track.
For the #scmeetup, Tim Exile played a live set in London – but Soundclouders from all around the globe could create samples, share them with Tim via Soundcloud and he then mixed the samples into his set on the fly.
Dropbox as Collaboration Tool
On a somewhat smaller scale, Sean over at Key of Grey organised an international musical collaboration facilitated by Dropbox.
This is actually a very easy way to share files – even audio – and is great for round-robin collaborations. In this case, different people took turns creating different tracks, adding drums, guitar, keyboard etc – and then someone new can take the tracks and mix/arrange/master to create the final opus (this is an ongoing collaboration, to which I made a fairly minor contribution). Once you’ve finished your piece, you can simply transfer it to the shared Dropbox folder; then the next contributor can pick it up and continue on.
Originally the idea was for everyone to add samples to a common pool, and then each member would create a track separately from that pool, but the single-track process won out in the end. CDM last week posted an article which covers how Forrest Reiff used Soundcloud to share samples and create an alternative type of remix/collaboration album…