This was posted before, but needs to come up again.

Back a while, I wrote a song called What If It Was Love. It was one of my first attempts with Real Band. The link to the file on Soundcloud was posted and it got a lot of plays and some positive feedback.

Enter Rog, from here on the forums. Rog teaches and plays, and some of his students also sing with his band. Rog heard that song and asked if I would mind if his BGV girls added some harmony. I told him he was welcome to go for it.

In the process, I loaded that song back into RB, exported all tracks to individual WAV files, zipped them into a more manageable size, and sent them to him via one of the "send big mail" sites. He took the file down, unzipped, loaded it into his software, had the girls add the BGV, and then sent it all back to me. He had also added some tasteful guitar fills. I unzipped it, imported the WAV files back into RB, did some mixing, and came up with the finished product.

I should mention that I am in Ohio and Rog (and The Bluebelles) are in England.

Yet another reason why I love technology. One of my friends heard the remix and asked where the girls came from. I just smiled and said "Oh, they're in England." And of course I had to tell the story again, but this is just another great example of how technology flattened the world.

I sent him another song about 10-12 days ago, and they added BGVs again. Thsi time, via email, I asked "Could they do it again and try...." That was done in a day or two, the tracks were again exchanged, and the final product was mixed last night. Taking his adds and adding it to the existing made it "a song".

The next project is that one of the girls really likes one of my other songs and wants to take a run at it as a solo. Once again my reply "Go for it. Have a hit with it! And I can FINALLY say I got a song on the radio." Those files went to him in England overnight. Very anxious to hear what Jessie has in mind for it.

Man, I LOVE this stuff!!!

What If It Was Love (redo)

Sweet! The girls are a great addition. What a cool thing to be able to do...

Eddie's right - we've had so much fun doing this stuff.

To send a whole song's worth of wav files by ftp takes us about 30 min and it's easy to discuss the project via email. The distance and the fact the Eddie and I have never met makes no difference.

We all have our own strengths and it's great to be able to pool expertise in this way. If anyone else decides to have a go at a joint project and want's more details about file transfer, just give us a shout.

ROG.

Absolutely fantastic

Aren't collaborations funs?

Edit - Do not use zip to send files back and forth. Zip files are lossy compression files, thus you will loss some data. Instead use either flac, http://flac.sourceforge.net/download.html or ape, http://www.monkeysaudio.com/ files.


Both are lossless, no loss in sound what-so-ever, music compression programs and both are free. This way you will get the best sounding wavs possible.

A question... you said that you exported all the tracks and sent them. Wouldn't it be just as effective to simply send the song (even as an mpg) and they could track to that? Just wondering...

Mario - It doesn't really matter what Eddie sends to me as these don't get used in the final mix. Anything I send back is in the form of uncompressed wav files.

floyd jane - When we're tracking up backing vocals (BVs) the girls like to set up their own mix. You wouldn't realize it by listening to it, but at one point in the song there are sixteen tracks of BVs going on! Having separate tracks lets us take out anything which is distracting and also lets us suggest things like alternative instrumental parts which Eddie can pick-and mix from.

BTW, everything is done in Biab, RB, or Powertracks.

ROG.

Quote:

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A question... you said that you exported all the tracks and sent them. Wouldn't it be just as effective to simply send the song (even as an mpg) and they could track to that? Just wondering...

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In this case, I want Rog to have individual WAV files so he can, if he chooses to, replace the guitar, the bass.... if I sent it "compiled" into a stereo track he could not pick out just the bass or just the guitar.

I would be interested in knowing the computer logic behind the statement that zip or rar reduces quality. I dispute that though because all it does is compress FILE SIZE, not content. And it does so with a mathematical algorythm where it find similar strings inside a file and replaces them with a variable. So if the hexidecimal information inside a file finds a sting of 74Fa5D3A2 10 times ane replaced that string with a +, that is 10% compression. Then when the other side inflates, it goes the other way. Zip and rar don't touch what is inside the file. If it did, it would then have some effect when you zipped a GIF or a bunch of JPG files and the output would not be the same as the input.

Compression doesn't mean the same thing here as converting a WAV to an MP3 because you put a WAV in, you get a WAV out.