My old mate and former partner from the Guardians of Dalliance days, James, came to visit the other day. He’d brought the stems to a project he’d been working on and we slapped them in Protools and fiddled around for a day. It’s a good tune. Exactly the sort of thing he likes to write. He was hoping I knew of a suitable vocalist who could help out and work on it. I have a small network of lovely and talented people around me so I forwarded the tune on to one person who I knew would be able to suggest something, even though he harbours an intense hatred for beards. He did suggest something and he sent me a link to a young ladies Soundcloud page. She had a couple of good tunes on there and her voice was the right kind of thing. I forwarded the link to James.
If all goes well, he will get in touch with her, compliment her tunes, suggest a simple working arrangement (usually you just offer to work on a tune for the other person after doing your own) and they will work on his track together. I say together but the work will probably be done remotely by sending each other files over the net and recording and mixing in each persons studio. It may transpire that the two of them will never meet in person.
For a lot of people this process may seem odd. For me it seems ideal. This is mainly because I’m a control freak and one of those people who doesn’t like somebody watching over their shoulder and I’ve frequently got a weird stain on my trousers that can’t easily be ignored or explained. I’ve found one or two people who I can stand to have in the studio when I’m working but for the most part I’d rather they were sat in their own studio half way across the country sitting with their fingers in their ears and going, “la la la la la” until I’m ready to send them something. At least they won’t moan at me about the amount of tea I drink and the strange smell from the cat.
But on the other hand, a lot of people need somebody to bounce ideas off. They want somebody in the room who can share the work of polishing a weird whooshing noise that leads into the drop. They want somebody who can stick the kettle on every now and then. They want to feel like they’re part of something - a band, a group, whatever you want to call it. They want to feel like the strange noises they are concocting aren’t just going to be sent out into the vast cold uncaring universe to be ignored by anything vaguely sentient. They want their creation to mean something to somebody else, even if it’s just a Cardassian Bullfrog. (That’s just lazy sci-fi writing… Star Trek does it a lot. As if an animal on another planet would, by chance, be called a bullfrog. It’s unlikely. And why would it be called a “Cardassian” Bullfrog? Do we say, “Earth Cat” or “Earth Chicken”? No. We don’t.)
As nice as all that is, I personally don’t think it makes up for all the good things that can come out of working remotely. In the past I’ve used musicians in another country to record a little bit for me. I have the option to work with people all over the world without all that tedious faffing around with master tapes and couriers and waiting for days for a parcel to turn up only to discover the tape was damaged beyond repair by some dribbling uncaring delivery driver. If I was sufficiently famous, I could call on anyone anywhere to add their parts to my tunes. It’s hard to find people who you can work in the same room with and I consider myself very lucky to have people like James and now Daryl on my front doorstep. It freaks the postman out, but hey. Ha ha ha etc.
And sometimes you’re working away, spewing ideas out like a blunderbuss, and you put an idea into a tune that sounds utter pants, until you’ve had several hours to refine it from an out of tune cowbell sample to a mesmerising metallic arpeggio that makes your arm hairs stand up during the chorus. And I don’t really care that much if my strange noises mean something to anyone other than myself. It’s nice to get all the adulation and worship and compliments and breasts but I’m sure I’d still be doing it even if I was suddenly the last man alive and forced to exist on cold take-away food, forked hastily into my mouth during one of those rare moments when you aren’t twiddling a nob.
That would make a really boring science fiction movie. Also, I’m not sure how I’d generate the power to run the studio. I haven’t thought this through...
Anyway.
For a long time the big studios were able to use things like ISDN to control recording sessions from across the globe - this was used mainly for film and TV (recording an ADR session with an actor in another country, for example) but did also get used for music. Now anybody with a broadband connection can potentially write together no matter where they are. This is very liberating and it means that it doesn’t matter if you have brushed your hair or not.
Technology has liberated so many things for us poor shoeless struggling artists but you have to get stuck in to make it work. No half-arsed attempts will do. Success in any artistic endeavour seems to me to be down to little more than networking. Meet some people, work with them, have all your friends turn up at gigs and download your tunes, meet some more people there, work\get drunk with them, have all their friends turn up to your gigs and download your tunes… and so on. Admittedly that is a massively simplified example but you get my point. The problem with this is that a lot of artists are, as has previously been mentioned in other blogs, blessed with the social skills of your average household doorknob. And with probably the same amount of germs on them.
But anybody can use the net, no matter your social skills. In fact many users of the internet seem to prosper without any social skills at all. I’m amazed half of them can even turn on a computer. And anyone can send an email, download a file, search for like-minded people, look at naked ladies and/or collaborate on some artistic venture. Pretty amazing really, no?
Go on then.
No comments:
Post a Comment