The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Anybody want to work on anything together? Songfights or not, either way is okay with me. I feel I've been stagnating lately, and so I'm looking for new experiments.

I have no idea who you are

I am likewise stagnating.


Let's do it.

Open to 'anything'. You cheeky bastard.

kaz wrote:Anybody want to work on anything together? Songfights or not, either way is okay with me. I feel I've been stagnating lately, and so I'm looking for new experiments.

Love me some Tuners Union. I would be happy to collaborate somehow.

Micah Sommersmith

Awesome! Ray and Micah, I'll message you guys and get things moving. Also, just so you know, I've never really done remote collaboration, so I don't have a feel for how to do this effectively. But we'll figure it out.

Email is good for 32kbps mono mp3 stems, just FYI

Thanks jb, good to know. I was thinking Dropbox may be a decent option too.

Having all participants use the same DAW is very helpful, that way you can share the entire project on Dropbox. When we collaborated with Micah on Baked Out of My Gourd, we maintained two copies of the song, one in Logic which I used for the final mix, and one in Audacity (lowest common DAW denominator) which was shared on Dropbox. I'd get parts from Micah from Audacity, merge them into the Logic project, and then share the resulting mp3 bounce via Dropbox, so Micah could hear how his parts would sound in the mix.

In retrospect, we probably could have just skipped using Audacity entirely, and just passed stems around. I'm curious how other people collaborate when using different DAWs, anyone got any tips?

Stem tracks are what I've used in past remote collaborations, and it worked out pretty well. I did provide a REAPER skeleton project for the one collaborative song I started/headed, but I think some of the people involved used different DAWs. In that collab project I uploaded a total of two rough demos and seven progress mixdowns to keep people in the loop.

I've collaborated in a few things remotely and in my experience, the most important element for success is starting out with a significant portion of the song completed (doesn't matter if it's rough). A few attempts at making more collabs failed because they basically only consisted of short snippets. Basically you need an overall vision to start out with, and you have to provide enough material to your collaborators that it comes across. In some cases we started out with an instrumental and someone added melody and lyrics later... but the instrumental provided enough of a starting point to gain momentum.

Also, if you ever need vocals, or backup vocals (complete with vocal arrangements if you like), let me know, these things are fun. I might be able to set aside a little time. I might even be up for doing a mix, but you'll find people who are way better at that than I am.

Chumpy wrote:Having all participants use the same DAW is very helpful, that way you can share the entire project on Dropbox. When we collaborated with Micah on Baked Out of My Gourd, we maintained two copies of the song, one in Logic which I used for the final mix, and one in Audacity (lowest common DAW denominator) which was shared on Dropbox. I'd get parts from Micah from Audacity, merge them into the Logic project, and then share the resulting mp3 bounce via Dropbox, so Micah could hear how his parts would sound in the mix.

In retrospect, we probably could have just skipped using Audacity entirely, and just passed stems around. I'm curious how other people collaborate when using different DAWs, anyone got any tips?

What is a "stem"?

Here is how I think about stems, which probably isn't exactly right. If you take a song and bounce each track to a separate audio file, those individual audio files are stems. Somebody can then import those audio files into their DAW and mix things as they see fit. I'd hope that each audio file would be exactly the length of the song (and silent where the track is silent) so you don't have to worry about how to place them in time.

Sometimes it's not one track per stem, sometimes all the drums will be in one stem, or all the keyboards in another stem. This makes sense when the drums alone can have different tracks for toms, kick in/out, snare, overheads, etc. It's up to the person exporting the stems how to group things together.

Thanks Chumpy and jast. Just thinking out loud here, but it'd be really cool to be able to automate stem generation, such that anybody can share projects with anybody regardless of DAWs. And then you could even use a source control during the writing phases. For instance, in my DAW of choice, I could push a "Stem This Project" button. The output of this would basically be a set of audio files (DAW-independent, of course), one for each track (or however you want to configure it). Somebody else can then push an "Import Stem" button in their favorite DAW and open these audio files.

I suspect this isn't possible without getting DAW suppliers involved, so this is probably unrealistic. But maybe I'm wrong. Any other software people out there want to talk about this?

have you seen Splice? it's like a DAW-oriented version of DropBox, and it also has some cross-DAW support that does pretty much that (although it obviously requires that you use their own plugins for processing, which is where they seem to get their money).

kaz wrote:Thanks Chumpy and jast. Just thinking out loud here, but it'd be really cool to be able to automate stem generation, such that anybody can share projects with anybody regardless of DAWs. And then you could even use a source control during the writing phases. For instance, in my DAW of choice, I could push a "Stem This Project" button. The output of this would basically be a set of audio files (DAW-independent, of course), one for each track (or however you want to configure it). Somebody else can then push an "Import Stem" button in their favorite DAW and open these audio files.

I suspect this isn't possible without getting DAW suppliers involved, so this is probably unrealistic. But maybe I'm wrong. Any other software people out there want to talk about this?

I use Studio One Artist, which has an "Export Stems" option by which you can export all or some of the tracks as audio files. It's also quite easy to import audio files. So if we are collaborating and you send me e.g a backing track and I record an accordion part, I can easily export just the accordion part and send it to you as an audio file. For example.

I'll tell you one thing, y'all ain't gonna get much collaboratin' done if'n y'all don't actually start, you know, collaboratin' at some point...

re: Stems (or how do you share?) Expore WAV files and send them off. Drums = stems (one stereo track, generally) and everything else individual tracks.

I call tracks, tracks. I call multiple tracks exported into a stereo pair, stems. Sometimes Bass + Drums = 1 stem. Sometimes All the rhythm guitars = 1 stem. etc.,

Necro post is necro.