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Global Collaborative Music Experiment 80

Posted by kdawson from the mixing-it-up dept.
hephaist0s writes "Last year, 165 bands completed the RPM Challenge: to record an original album (10 songs or 35 minutes) during the 28 days of February. The idea is to get musicians to set aside the barriers that stop them from working on their music and simply devote a month to getting it done. This year, more than 300 bands from around the world — including two groups from McMurdo station in Antarctica — have already signed up at www.rpmchallenge.com, and this time the organizers of the challenge have built into the site the ability for bands to share samples with each other. If a band chooses to upload a sample into the Sample Engine, then any other participating group can use it however they like. The possibilities for global collaboration are vast!"
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Global Collaborative Music Experiment More

Global Collaborative Music Experiment

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  • Where's my copy of Audition.... Even if it sucks, it's incentive for me to produce the songs I've written, and have never, ever recorded....

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Nasarius ( 593729 )
      Agreed, this is great. I don't have the resources to produce the kind of album I want to record, but I have a diverse collection of half-finished instrumental stuff bouncing around in my head. It's also a good excuse to finally get a portable MIDI keyboard.

      • Don't forget the audio interface! (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        When you get your MIDI keyboard (E-mu Xboard is pretty nice for what it costs), don't forget a soundcard that supports ASIO, otherwise you'll hit a key and wait a second for the softsynth to kick in with sound.
        • The M-audio Axiom is very nice if you prefer a semi-weighted keyboard. It's loaded with data sliders, knobs, buttons and pads, all of which have a nice feel. Big display. It's more sturdily built than the usual M-audio plastique.

          The AC upstairs isn't kidding about ASIO, either. But really? Unless you're really serious about keeping a clean OS installation and not be running lots of goodies, you're going to have problems with the USB sound modules, unless you don't mind clicks and crackles in your music

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Yoozer ( 1055188 )

            The AC upstairs just decided to finally register after 3+ years of lurking and being an AC ;).

            An alternative would be http://www.asio4all.com/ [asio4all.com] - which can get the latency for regular soundcards down. But then you're usually still stuck with the cheap noisy outputs of on-board soundcards and no fancy inputs - in case you'd record guitars or vocals, having a box with preamp you can stick a microphone in is a very nice thing to have.

            The Axiom is neat indeed - looks very luxurious. Add to the controller the

            • I can attest to the goodness that is ASIO4ALL. It makes my SigmaTel C-Major almost perfect. My latencies were cut to about 10% of their prior time.

      • Amen. I'm a hobbyist musician ( I play piano [bryanbilocura.com]) and thought, "I think I might actually do this."

        I haven't recorded any of my major performances since 2004 back when I used MIDI and virtual instruments. Since getting access to a Yamaha C3 grand piano and some decent mics I haven't recorded as much on the virtual setup thinking, "I'll only record on the real thing--it sounds so much better."

        Listening to some of my old stuff, it wasn't that bad, even with the simulated instruments. This project would force me

    • I did a 28-minute Christmas album during the month of November last year, using nothing but 15+-year old keyboards and a thirty-day, fully-functional Adobe Audition demo (available from adobe.com).

      It's fun, you should try it.

      It came out pretty good, too!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hatta ( 162192 )
      Where's my copy of Audition....

      If you can't find it you might try Ardour [ardour.org].

  • This is an excellent idea... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gearmonger ( 672422 ) on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @02:48AM (#17734934)
    ...because everyone knows the REAL reason there's not as much high-quality music as there should be is that musicians spend way too much time trying to make it enjoyable and interesting.

    Yep...speeding up that process is without a doubt the best way to improve what bands few have ever heard of produce.

    -1 Cynical

    • Re:This is an excellent idea... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ronabop ( 520121 ) on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @02:58AM (#17734994)
      Having recorded over 1000 hours on high end gear, I can definitely say that a vast amount of time is spent trying to get the "perfect" take.

      Sometimes time limits are good.

      • Re:This is an excellent idea... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by clickclickdrone ( 964164 ) on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @04:50AM (#17735518)
        Back in the late 80's when production values just got silly, my friend's band were in the studio doing their next single. The producer had the singer do the entire song 60 times and he then went through the vocal tracks sylable by sylable dropping the preferred one down to the master vocal track. Crazy.
        That said, I understand that some well known and respected singers, still do this including one that is supposed to have one of the best voices around.

        • That said, I understand that some well known and respected singers, still do this including one that is supposed to have one of the best voices around.

          These days, it's even easier. You can make even a crummy take into a good one by correcting/changing pitch, adjusting vibrato, changing the timing and speed, and adding all sorts of subtle effects. Of course, as with many modern audio engineering techniques, it's easy to overdo this and wind up with a too-perfect, cold sound. And I doubt it would work at all

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by DkY ( 444692 )
          This sylable splicing is quite obvious on the Stone Roses first album, though in fairness Ian Browns voice has never been the best. It's particularly noticable on Waterfall on a good set of speakers, which was a bit of a shock to me the first time I heard it on decent equipment, it really breaks up the flow of the song.

          Great album though, just dont listen to it on good equipment.
          • Funny, I noticed it more on Don't Stop. ; )

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )
            While I like some of the Stone Roses work, anything that distorted isn't worth playing on "good" equipment. Another band would be Social Distortion. Mid range consumer audio is about all you'd want to play that on, not least for fear of actually doing some damage to your speakers. They also don't compress well in MP3 format, although AAC seems to handle it quite well.
      • This challenge is similar to the 24 Hour Comic [24hourcomics.com]. This was a challenge issued many years ago by cartoonist Scott McCloud to one of his friends, who had a tendency to take days (at least) to finish a single page of art. The goal was to write and illustrate a 24-page comic book in just 24 hours, starting with 24 blank sheets of paper and ending with a finished story. (By comparsion, a typical issue of a DC or Marvel superhero comic takes 4 or 5 creators a whole month to produce.)

        It's a great exercise. (I

    • Re:This is an excellent idea... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Negatyfus ( 602326 ) on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @02:59AM (#17735002) Journal
      Have you ever been in a band? One of the biggest problems you encounter (aside from getting along with each other musically as well as personally over an extended period of time) is excessive time spent on perfecting your material. Musicians are perfectionists. If it's not one song they continue to work on for much too long, it's a new song they started, neglecting the old one. Songs never get finished, because they're still too busy trying to work out the right way to transition from this part to that or aren't happy about one riff or another.

      The purpose of this project, and it seems to me like a great idea, is to motivate bands to have a definite time-line and a goal to pursue. When you are actually working towards something and are under pressure to finish it, when you have an actual end to your project in sight, then suddenly the band will pull together and work thrice as hard on it. Stuff gets done, and what do you know? It turns out that creativity doesn't need years upon years of perfecting.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mwvdlee ( 775178 )
        Could anybody please back this up with some example material of the previous RPM challenge, just to demonstrate how well this helps bands in reality?
        • The OP is right.

          I've *never* gotten anything finished (muscically-speaking) without a deadline.

          And the stuff that I've HAD a deadline for -- wow, some of it's not bad.
      • Musicians are perfectionists.

        If that were true, Why they would not sign with labels that killed the quality and dynamic range out of their music?

        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ [youtube.com]
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war [wikipedia.org]

        To add insult to injury, iTunes finished the quality by encoding to only 128K and charging full bore retail. I suppose it is OK to listen to on a noisy school bus, but it is very lacking on good equipment at home.
        • Well, possibly because these musicians want nothing more than a label that will pay for their recording cost for them. These guys are expensive, even though there are many affordable budget studios these days. You do get what you pay for, which is mostly the experience of the engineers. Furthermore, some people prefer over-compressed tracks. It also depends on the type of music you're playing. For example, a solid death metal track would probably benefit from extremely compressed voice and drum tracks. Onl
    • You should consider the idea that it's less about improving the quality of music or producing hits and more about breaking down cultural barriers and sharing diversity.

    • Re:This is an excellent idea... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by wass ( 72082 ) on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @03:33AM (#17735168)
      I highly disagree (or I agree with your sarcasm). In my experience, as an amateur musician, many times when I or other band mates set out to write a song per se, things sometimes feel forced and it's hard to find that muse. But in my experience (and I'm highly curious of others reading this) some of the best songs in my and my band's repertoirs are ones that just "came out", from either screwing around and stumbling onto things that rock, to making fun of something that happened, etc. This also occurs with famous musicians, they need to release a filler track at the studio just to finish the album and sometimes the filler becomes a chart topper!


      Do you like garage rock, or even much rock from the 60's and 70's? Some common criticisms I've heard from popular musicians in those days compared with today's recording techniques is that things now are too controlled. Ie, back then you'd set up microphones, do some quick soundchecks, and play music. Today, with the high-tech audiophile equipment, you spend forever soundchecking and tweaking your parametric filters and pink-noise generators to get your ideal flat response curves. But - the complaint is that all the flat-response tweaking makes the sound kind of 'dull' and too 'studio', losing that gritty or grungy character of older rock n' roll.


      Finally, if you read the page, the point isn't to make your magnum opus this way, but to just get off your lazy urban-sprawl-induced fat ass and make some music. Have fun, you'll improve your chops, learn some things, and maybe possibly pull off a great tune that in the future you'll be glad you came up with.

      • This probably goes way back before the time of most Slashdotters, but in 1977, David Lee Roth, Eddie and Alex van Halen, and Mark Anthony walked into a studio, played 11 tracks with minimal re-takes, and walked out the same day. The result was one of the most influential albums [wikipedia.org] in hard rock history.

        Many people will dispute which of the band's many albums was its "magnum opus", but no one would discard Van Halen as a shaky, half-assed first attempt. Then again, I have no idea how much time they spent pol

      • But in my experience (and I'm highly curious of others reading this) some of the best songs in my and my band's repertoirs are ones that just "came out", from either screwing around and stumbling onto things that rock, to making fun of something that happened, etc.

        Right on. Deadlines really help too. Last fall we were planning a public meeting for the community organizing [gamaliel.org] group I work with. I told the planning team I was going to compose a choir piece for the event. I had a month to do it and had neve

    • Have you ever heard of NaNoWriMo?

      The goal here is not to produce another Tocatta, or Freebird, or Cowboys From Hell, but to get people who ordinarily woul not be producing an album to produce an album. It's motivational, it's inspirational, and it helps to get the creative juices flowing.

      Plus, it's fun. If you don't wanna do it, then by all means, go back to whatever it is you do when you're sarcastically commenting on things you don't understand.

    • Back in the early days of jazz recording, it was not uncommon for bands or soloists to cut 4-5 sides in a session. Often those sessions would be only half a day.

      Commercial music production today has taken out the "human" quality of recordings, as exemplified by artists such as Fats Waller, Fletcher Henderson and their peers. The quality of the takes is phenomenal given that they only had two or three attempts. There was no editing equipment to patch over mistakes. The mistakes themselves sometimes p

  • .rpm Only!? (Score:5, Funny)

    by DevelopersDevelopers ( 1027018 ) on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @02:50AM (#17734940)
    What, were they too lazy to make .debs? Some of us use frickin' Ubuntu, you insensitive clods!

    What? Oh, never mind...

  • Like NaNoWriMo (Score:4, Informative)

    by Form-o-Stuff ( 706090 ) on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @03:05AM (#17735032)
    Kindof like National Novel Writing Month (november). http://www.nanowrimo.org/ [nanowrimo.org] And Channel 101 (5 minute videos monthly) http://www.channel-101.com/ [channel-101.com] The internet's becoming a seasonal support group for artists lacking impetus. Now if only there was a way for these independent producers to make money off their labor...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rei ( 128717 )
      Perhaps if such contests tended to produce quality work, they'd be more useful. And I say this as a NaNoer. It achieves more "cheerleading" than "helping produce good works," as it tends to rush people toward a very tight deadline. Not to mention, 50k words is really more of a novella. I must give credit where credit is due, however: the realism forum is a great place for research.
    • NaNoWriMo also span off a NaSoAlMo a couple of years ago which is pretty similar. (SoAl = Solo Album).

      http://www.lacunae.com/nasoalmo/ [lacunae.com]

  • RPM is pretty much the same as FAWM.org (Score:4, Informative)

    by RumGunner ( 457733 ) on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @03:08AM (#17735050) Homepage
    February Album Writing Month > RPM. RPM is about recording, whereas FAWM is about actually writing quality material, much like NaNoWriMo.org. Since FAWM encourages their participants to record and upload their songs at the same time, I don't really see the point of RPM.
    • FAWM is about actually writing quality material, much like NaNoWriMo.org

      Lolz. You've obviously never done wrimo, or even hung out on their boards. Sure, there's some "quality material" but there's a whole lot more desperation to make it to 50K by any means necessary. :)

  • Hrmmph, submission grousing. (Score:5, Informative)

    by t0qer ( 230538 ) on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @03:12AM (#17735070) Homepage Journal
    I submitted this a looong time ago....

    Justin Frankel, you know, wrote winamp? Sold Winamp? Well, he wrote this program called Ninjam that allows folks to collaborate music in psuedo real time.

    http://www.ninjam.com/ [ninjam.com]

    He also wrote a DAW (digital audio workstation) called reaper.

    http://www.reaper.fm/ [reaper.fm]

    as well as a programable software DSP called Jesusonic

    http://www.jesusonic.com/ [jesusonic.com]

    This all started circa 2004 or so. Justin has set up some public Ninjam servers, and everything played on these servers is released under the Creative Commons License...

    http://autosong.ninjam.com/ [ninjam.com]

    Point being, I probably submitted this quite a few times over the years. Don't understand why slashdot would ignore a story about someone who pretty much revolutionized how we listen to music. Time for slash to get new editors again.
    • You know, your post has SFA to do with TFA other than they are both about music.

      Maybe /. needs new readers, instead of a wah-wah cry babies?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by t0qer ( 230538 )
        Late reply, late enough I won't get downmodded for calling you a dumb ass.

        The article was about a global music collaboration project. My post was that Justin has been doin this work since 2004. Though it might not be open source, Justin has traditionally released his shareware with..

        A reasonable price tag.
        B No time limit on the trial period
        C Fully uncrippled trial, all features enabled.

        He did it with winamp, and he's carrying that same style with these new products. I think someone releasing software the
    • Dude. Digg is just eight characters away. Have fun!

      -=g

  • industry (Score:1, Insightful)

    by polar red ( 215081 )
    IMHO a larger problem than making the music is getting it to the public. What with the music-industry not liking non-mass-produced originally-sounding material, they just keep that kind of music OFF the air, and pushing the next boys-band or the next Britney Spears.

  • What RPM stands for (Score:5, Informative)

    by Cow Jones ( 615566 ) on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @04:07AM (#17735362)
    In case you were wondering (like me) what RPM stands for in this context, it's "Record Production Month" (says so in the last paragraph on the linked page).
    • And the youngsters in the audience might be interested to know that RPM used to stand for "rotations per minute". See, back in the 20th century, when music was encoded in analog form on pressed vinyl, the signal was engineered to be played back at one of three standard speeds: 78rpm, 45rpm, and 33+1/3rpm. Using the slowest speed, it was possible to fit over 20 minutes of music on one side of a 12-inch disk! (And you had to turn the disk over to access the data on the other side.)

      :)
      • RPM used to stand for "rotations per minute".
        Actually it was "revolutions per minute" (in the UK at least).
  • lets skip those, they probably only did Iced Earth covers anyway.
  • This reminds me of the "14 Days of Art" sponsored by the alt.design.graphics [google.com] newsgroup for the last five or six years. During January of each year, participants would have to make one work of art per day, in any medium, and post it online for viewing by the rest of the group. Some of the results are schlock, but others are just breathtaking. There have been photographers, painters, printmakers, oragami artists, multimedia designers, etc... Google it, there's some good stuff to be seen.
  • Nothing makes good music like artificial deadlines and random user-submitted samples of irrelevant chord progressions.

    Can't wait to hear all the craptastic whiny love songs and pseudo-rebellious angst-rock.

    I gotta stop reading and posting at slashdot within 10 minutes of waking up. Cuz i'm a crabby bastard.
  • The time needed to record an album depends a lot on the style of music you make. It takes me an hour to make ten seconds of electronic music. (If you must, search for Rene Kita on Archive.org.)

    Time spent by Derek Bailey, the great master of free improvisation, in recording a one hour record:
    One hour and one minute, if you count setting up and turning the recorder on and off.
  • A friend and I recorded some 18 tracks in one night. Each song got one take, a lot of improv, and was fueled by at least one pre-song beer. And for something that sounded like less-than-literate version of the Mountain Goats, it wasn't bad. I still listen to it from time to time to remember days when I could stay up all night and drink and play guitar.

    So 28 days should be nothing, even for a full band, to record 10 tracks.

  • DMCA (Score:1)

    by zefrer ( 729860 )
    Isn't sharing original work with others(with no fee or record contract or w/e) illegal under the DMCA?
  • Then it's ONE song or 35 minutes. :)

    Hey, I tease. I'm a long time prog rock fan.
  • If you want to collaborate with musicians from different genres from the entire globe, you can do that any month at MusMakers [musmakers.com]. But I'll make sure we get onto the spanking-musicians-in-February-train too ;)
  • This is a pretty cool idea...lots of bands collaborate over great distances to get their music out.

    I happen to know of an easy (and free) solution that has become very popular with musicians these days. GigaTribe http://www.gigatribe.com/ [gigatribe.com] lets users exchange huge music files (and entire folders of music files). And it's all done within a small private network (like a band), so no one can intercept the encrypted exchanges. There's also a chat window in there, so musicians can explain stuff to each other i
  • Wonderful collaboration technology used for dubious purpose.
  • That's what Jonathan Coulton [jonathancoulton.com] did, and he did it right. A Thing a Week puts stress on you, but you are forced to get it done. Then again, you can hear that he has lots of experience and did his homework. Oh - and has talent.
  • Yeah, check it out, we're the Naughty-Five... http://www.rpmchallenge.com/rpm_player.html?band=T heNaughtyFive/ [rpmchallenge.com]

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