all the pieces, bits and pieces...

'ere mate, got a spare middle eight you wanna offload...?

Not a challenge idea as such, more a collaboration idea. It's a safe bet that most of us have bits of songs hanging around that, for one reason or another, have hit a brick wall. A verse, a hook, maybe a riff or just an interesting chord progression. You know the frustration of this - you get something cooking and..........shiiiiiiit........you're up a cul-de-sac and reverse is busted. Same applies with lyrics, I suppose. So.........what if we upload these bits with a general invite to everyone to have a go at adding to them - or even, perchance completing a song. Could be interesting. Obviously would need to be a long-runner, perhaps even another sub-category in MiFiMu?

posted by MajorDundee (12 comments total)

Sounds great. I'm in.
posted by The World Famous at 2:23 PM on June 29

Yeah, it sounds very good, though I can't imagine how it would work. It would be hard to use a part that is only a verse or a middle 8 that was recorded with a certain speed/quality/harmony and working it into a new piece (for those of us who don't really use samples). The idea sounds terrific, but I think we have to work out the details.

A way it could work, perhaps, is with more complete songs that need one particular instrument that the musician doesn't play. I, for instance, have a song that is "finished" but it doesn't have drums. It used to have a programmed sequence that I took out because it was killing the song, and haven't been able to record anything else. I'd love to see if people would be willing to record drums on that.
posted by micayetoca at 2:46 PM on June 29

micayetoca - I don't think the tempo thing is a problem. The idea would be that, say, you upload a fragment and than I, say, play your bit with a new bit on an acoustic guitar and then upload for your use or otherwise. They're just kind of back of a cigarette pack sort of things. We don't have to do full-blown recordings - it's really about the basic ideas/structures and helping each other out when we get stuck. Sometimes it'll work and sometimes it won't. I guess it might also be about how people write... I'm old fashioned and I tend to be of the school that if I can't play something on an acoustic and make it work, it ain't really gonna work when it's tarted up in a full recording (you can't polish a turd etc). Philosophy aside - does that elaboration help?
posted by MajorDundee at 3:10 PM on June 29

If we want to get a bit more sophisticated than that, it's not difficult to swap actual session data or at the very least the individual raw .wav tracks via email or various file sharing methods. I would love to, for example, swap entire Pro Tools sessions for collaborations with MeFites. Regardless of what system you use, if you consolidate an individual track so that it starts at the beginning of the song and goes all the way to the end (rather than little fragments) and export it as a .wav that way, it can generally be shared in various different formats where, as long as you know the bpm, it can be snapped to the grid pretty easily and then used for lots of things. I do this with a friend who uses Logic (I use Pro Tools) and it's pretty do-able.
posted by The World Famous at 3:14 PM on June 29

I have 2 or 3 hardrives full of hooks and things that have never bore fruit! I've also had the honor of collaborating with the great and talented micayetoca, and with great success. Having some knowledge of the ins and out of this idea, I DIG it.
posted by snsranch at 7:21 PM on June 29

Sounds great to me, I'd be up for it.
posted by askmeaboutLOOM at 8:28 PM on June 29

Seems like with people using a lot of different session formats, the raw .wav dump approach is probably the smartest general-purpose tack (though two people interested in sharing/collab who happen to share a platform could always swap sessions too).
posted by cortex at 7:04 AM on June 30

At least with Pro Tools, .mp3 works, too, but just doesn't have the same resolution (obviously). We could have a running thing where people could post a "song" on MeFiMu that is a single track or bounce of a few tracks from a session and provide BPM data in the description (and maybe a four-count click track at the very beginning to make lining up to the grid easier), and then others could import that MeFiMu track into their system and take it from there.
posted by The World Famous at 10:17 AM on June 30

Ooo, I like this idea. Unfortunately, my recording computer has recently passed on, and I don't think this machine has enough PCI slots for my superly-awesome sound card. Well, time to make sure the old hard drive is still ok (it damned well better be!).
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 12:21 PM on June 30

Just so long as it doesn't get too technical. I'm a bit technophobic and I get very frustrated very quickly farting around with the IT side of all of this digital gear- if I could get hold of an old Studer steam-powered 24 track, 50 miles of 2" tape, a bloody great desk and a Revox 2-track I'd be in heaven (yes, that technophobic....). Back on earth, I use a Yamaha AW2400 DAW - so I guess I could import WAV files and hope for the best....

Cortex - is there any way we can have a discrete partition in MiFiMu for this stuff - it might bore the arse off everyone else if the main upload area gets jammed up with little bits of songs......
posted by MajorDundee at 1:29 PM on June 30

It's the sort of thing that probably makes more sense as an off-site storage thing, I think—someone with some spare file hosting could set up an FTP account or something like that, say, for folks to upload to. As a direct extension of Music it's kind of fiddly and off-target, I think, though I like the idea in general.

And yeah, uploading fragments on a regular basis to the Music itself is not really a great idea (though the occasional "hey, here's something worth listening to in its own right but I'd like feedback/collaboration/etc on it" type post is fine, of course).
posted by cortex at 1:38 PM on June 30

It's the sort of thing that probably makes more sense as an off-site storage thing, I think—someone with some spare file hosting could set up an FTP account or something like that, say, for folks to upload to.

Would bandcamp work for this, assuming everyone had the password for uploading stuff? Is it too awkward?
posted by Karlos the Jackal at 1:08 AM on July 1