LONG-DISTANCE RELATIONSHIPS
Feb 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Jason Scott Alexander
RECORD IT
Both Digital Musician and eJamming provide the ability to record what you've written on the spot, but two other online services cater more toward getting things down “on tape” than merely jamming out ideas.
Though still in its early testing stages, eSession (www.esession.com) is most similar to Digital Musician in that it offers real-time collaboration between musicians over high-speed Internet — but with an exciting twist. The site aims to be an Internet database of the music industry's top musicians, engineers and producers — hired-guns if you will — and is designed so that users around the world can hire members of that database (what the site calls eTalent), communicate with them and work in real time. The company states that, with the desire and budget, you'll be able to hire Peter Gabriel's bassist or Alanis Morissette's guitarist to lay some hot tracks on your projects.
Registration is free, and getting started is easy. Once you've browsed through categories to find the instrument, production or engineering talent, you create a work request. Here, you upload an example of your project, or the song you want them to contribute to, as well as complete a form that helps them decide whether to participate and what to charge you. Deadlines and technical details are negotiable as much as necessary. All this could take anywhere from minutes to hours, days or weeks for the busiest talent. Once you both agree, the talent will send you a fee schedule, including the 50-percent deposit amount you must pay at the time of acceptance. What's really cool about this is that you're always dealing with the talent, not some intermediary sales dude.
Then it's on to the fun and creative part of eSession: the Song page. This becomes the organizational workspace you use to send and receive files and communicate with your collaborator. I loved the Audio Bin, where you can drag-and-drop files to and from your Song Page and computer hard drive. There are six of these bins that you can use for various stages of your collaborations. The Stem Bin, for instance, is where you'll upload stems for each of the instruments in a project, and your hired talent can grab those to work on them. In turn, they'll create their own eTalent bins and upload their takes.
You can work with more than one eTalent at a time, each working on individual schedules or, if you're fortunate, sitting right there with you live and communicating via the eChat Buddy List audio/video/text chat tool. eSession also has a plug-in for this interactive method of real-time production. The audio/video plug-in works on Mac and PC and is available in RTAS, Audio Units and VST. Once you both have the same set of stems lined up in your DAWs, you can press play in Logic and your long-distance drummer would hear playback in his Pro Tools session. You can watch, hear and record everything he does and even communicate production changes on the fly.
Because these are consummate pros with major-league track records, your bill may be steep. But if you think spending several hundred dollars for a few hours of guitar tracks by a known player is justified to give your track a boost, I can't think of a better method, short of sitting in studio, than eSession.
Another fun alternative, Sonoma Wire Works (www.sonomawireworks.com), has a new version of the RiffWorks software ($129; Mac/PC) and online jamming platform that allows you to create, collaborate and podcast your music in a seamless flow. Previously bundled with Line 6's GuitarPort, the multifaceted recording software has taken gigantic leaps and bounds, making it an ideal guitarist-recording tool and a great “sketch pad” for noodling out ideas with others online.
RiffWorks looks and feels like a vintage multitrack tape setup, complete with a suite of vintage guitar VST effect plug-ins, including IK Multimedia AmpliTube LE.
The software is extremely easy to use and acts as your stand-alone sketch-pad recording environment and online collaboration client. Clicking on the RiffLink button lets you test a free 60-day trial of the collaboration service, where any musician (as many as four at a time) can join your session and work with you on the same song. Each instrument layer is streamed to participants' computers, as well as saved on the Sonoma server for users who wish to contribute later. As song changes are made, they are instantly uploaded by that user's RiffWorks client and displayed to the other musicians only when fully downloaded. It all happens behind the scenes, appearing transparent and instant. Though not a real-time collaborative effort, it is live and functional. It's a great way for musicians who are shy of live performance to perfect their parts before shuttling them out to the rest of the team to hear.
RiffCaster Internet broadcasting service is the latest addition to the package. Once your song is complete, a click of a button converts it into a podcast-ready file with its own URL that the RiffWorks server hosts.
MIX IT
At this stage, your song has likely gone through many collaborative hands, each receiving mixing tweaks along the way. Now it's time to nail it all down in one professional mix. Enter The Mixingbox (www.themixingbox.com).
Track mixing is often a scary and nerve-wracking process even for seasoned musicians. Finding a competent professional who shares the same vision about your music is often half the battle. “Many end-users don't even know where to find a professional to help mix and improve their music,” says Scott Church, co-founder of The Mixingbox. “If they do find someone, issues such as schedule and price make working with a producer even worse. Many top-notch engineers won't take on the end users who may not be at their level.”
This fear of rejection, as well as the hassle of negotiating, is more than many musicians are willing to undergo. The Mixingbox, in partnership with its exclusive online-sales partner audioMIDI.com, brings accessibility to professional mixing services with unprecedented convenience. Users can submit projects created using any major DAW and receive high-quality mixes, vocal correction and drum editing by a professional team of Digidesign-certified mix engineers.
The Mixingbox offers four levels of service. The most specialized, Drum Fix ($225), assesses the performance, timing and groove of all drum and percussion tracks, correcting where necessary to get your song sitting truly in the pocket. Similarly, Vocal Fix ($225) is a multistage process in which the timing, pitch, amplitude/dynamics and timbre/tone of your lead and background vocal tracks are individually assessed and fine-tuned with sensitivity to the mood and aesthetic of the song.
For full song mixing, Session Mix ($649) mixes tracks as provided, while Session Mix Complete ($849) adds the highly detailed scrutiny of Vocal Fix and Drum Fix. You can send tracks by Digidesign's DigiDelivery system, by email or on CD-R to The Mixingbox's studio.
A great approach is to order Drum Fix first, before you record final takes for the rest of your project such as keyboards, vocals and so on. Send The Mixingbox all of your individual drums tracks, including any auxiliary percussion tracks (as many as 18 tracks total), along with a stereo bounce of the full mix for reference. Within two weeks, The Mixingbox will have your drums in time and ready for download to import them back into your project. Move on to record the rest of the tracks, and head back for Vocal Fix or a full mix.
When the mix is finished, you'll receive a 24-bit/44.1 kHz audio file of the mix, as well as a bounce with the lead vocal or instrument muted and 192 Kbps MP3 by e-mail for approval and/or Internet use. If you're not happy with the initial mix, Session Mix or Session Mix Complete includes one round of revisions. Just fill out a project-revision form with the changes you want, and the engineers will get busy. And even though your song receives complimentary mastering as part of Session Mix or Session Mix Complete, you'll also receive an unmastered, uncompressed WAV file to take to a mastering house.
It's a real team effort once you hand over a song to The Mixingbox. Each member of the engineering staff does what they do best — from corrective edits to tonal treatment and leveling. The entire project is rebuilt in Pro Tools|HD.
Unlike other mixing services, The Mixingbox not only delivers a bounced version of the final project/song, but it also returns the entire Pro Tools session, including the individual tracks and stems. The company works exclusively with McDSP and SoundToys plug-ins, which are available in TDM and RTAS versions, so end users can open the session on a Pro Tools system and learn from The Mixingbox pros if they choose.
And yes, you do get what you pay for. The results are pretty amazing. You can hear every single transient of every drum track being handled with TLC by The Mixingbox engineers, always preserving the feel and guaranteeing a groove. The company will even do drum replacement as needed. These two processes alone are what major-league producers pay megabucks to have done on every song you hear on the charts. You can't underestimate the importance of tedious timing and pitch correction in getting that tight, polished, professional sound.
The Mixingbox team also knows how to make lead vocals really pop and backgrounds that are smooth, tight and spacious in the stereo field. If you're curious, simply check out the online samples, and you'll be sold.
At the time of project submission, there's a simple but comprehensive questionnaire that you fill out to help The Mixingbox engineers understand your artistic goals. You can instruct the engineers on how far to take certain aspects of your mix. For example, whether to do subtle pitch correction of truly bum vocal notes, moderately fix things to sound pleasantly in tune or go for broke and turn you into robotic perfection. Likewise, if there's a spot where you want all tracks muted except for a wicked drum fill — tell them. The more detailed you are with instructions, the better. The Mixingbox crew is really into achieving your artistic goals.
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