The Virtual studio experiment
Posted: Tue Dec 07, 2010 5:24 pm
About a year ago, my old band (seriously old) decided we wanted to cut another album after almost 35 years and basically see if we could do it by e-mail. We started with a Christmas song that one of the guys wrote, which we posted on our website last Christmas as a free download, and then spent the last twelve months adding other tunes. This week, we released the new CD and we're pretty surprised at how well our cobbled-together process worked.
Basically, the plan was to have no plan. The guys submitted quickie demos of new songs they had written and if enough people liked one, we tried it. For those songs, a better quality "basic" was then uploaded, usually just a guitar or piano, a lead vocal and a click track. The other members downloaded it, dug around in their various instrument piles, decided what they thought the tune could use, recorded tracks and mailed them in. There was little if any discussion about what instruments needed to be added or the parts themselves. That's one advantage to knowing each other for so long and having played so many hours together. No face-to-face meetings or studio sessions were involved and hardly any phone calls - mostly just a lot of back and forth e-mails. Recording was done at our homes spread across the U.S. - some using Pro Tools, Audacity, or in my case, my Korg digital decks. Once all the tracks were submitted, they were mixed and mastered at a small studio that one of the guys has (along with a couple thousand additional e-mails telling him to turn this up, turn that down, hold this out until the second verse, etc.)
We were kind of in a pickle for percussion. Shortly before the project started, our drummer fell through his porch while doing construction and shattered one leg, which has been a very long and slow recovery process, so a couple of us had to do the percussion. The album is an odd mixture of different styles and sounds, as our music always has been, but possibly more so since people have been off doing their own things for so long. In any case, we've proven to ourselves that we can record this way. The process works and I even managed to sneak the twelve-string in on a couple of tunes. You can hear sound clips from all twelve songs here:
http://www.theshipmusic.com/all_come_home_album.html
and the full version of the Christmas song is again available as a free download on the website's intro page
http://www.theshipmusic.com
Basically, the plan was to have no plan. The guys submitted quickie demos of new songs they had written and if enough people liked one, we tried it. For those songs, a better quality "basic" was then uploaded, usually just a guitar or piano, a lead vocal and a click track. The other members downloaded it, dug around in their various instrument piles, decided what they thought the tune could use, recorded tracks and mailed them in. There was little if any discussion about what instruments needed to be added or the parts themselves. That's one advantage to knowing each other for so long and having played so many hours together. No face-to-face meetings or studio sessions were involved and hardly any phone calls - mostly just a lot of back and forth e-mails. Recording was done at our homes spread across the U.S. - some using Pro Tools, Audacity, or in my case, my Korg digital decks. Once all the tracks were submitted, they were mixed and mastered at a small studio that one of the guys has (along with a couple thousand additional e-mails telling him to turn this up, turn that down, hold this out until the second verse, etc.)
We were kind of in a pickle for percussion. Shortly before the project started, our drummer fell through his porch while doing construction and shattered one leg, which has been a very long and slow recovery process, so a couple of us had to do the percussion. The album is an odd mixture of different styles and sounds, as our music always has been, but possibly more so since people have been off doing their own things for so long. In any case, we've proven to ourselves that we can record this way. The process works and I even managed to sneak the twelve-string in on a couple of tunes. You can hear sound clips from all twelve songs here:
http://www.theshipmusic.com/all_come_home_album.html
and the full version of the Christmas song is again available as a free download on the website's intro page
http://www.theshipmusic.com
