Bucky Talks - Vlog - Music "Sessions" - Building a Healthy Music Community in Steemit
Picture an Irish pub with several musicians sitting around a table trading songs. Each takes a turn leading with a song they love while the other follow and play along. Can we create this in the Steem environment?
Last night I jumped on @aggroed's MSP-Waves radio show to chat about this challenge for musicians in our Steem world.
A critical part of the music making/learning process is interacting with other musicians. It is so important that it can be found as an outcome in every successful music curriculum throughout the world. Imagine the most musically rich cultures of the world (West Africa, Cuba, Finland, etc.) without collaborative music making. This is at the very core of "music."
Live collaborative music making is missing in our online settings. Technical roadblocks make it extremely difficult, perhaps impossible for two musicians to collaborate in real-time over a network. But the must be a way to facilitate this or some variation in order to satisfy the need for live collaboration.
The times I have had the privilege of collaborating with musicians here in Steemit the experience has been profound, always resulting in musical productions that none of the contributors could have predicted. This collaboration is "asynchronous," meaning one musician records a part and passes it to another to build upon. There is definitely merit in this format, but how can we improve upon it??
I invite discussion. I would love to explore how we can create an environment to get up as close as possible to the live collaborative environments of playing guitars around the campfire or as session in an Irish pub. Please connect with me to get the ball rolling.
You can reach me in the chats as well as on the PAL Discord - join here - https://discord.gg/e8npS64
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BuckyDurddle
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yeah the unfortunate part is that most of the existing tools which could facilitate this sort of true real-time musical collaboration, I am talking about the Skypes and Google Hangouts, the voice chats of the world - are algorithmically determined to cut out all "noise" and focus in on the human voice... this does not play well with instruments LOL
I would love to see some kind of video or audio chat, maybe just a plugin for an existing product, that "knew" the sound profiles of various instruments and worked to enhance them while cutting out the true noise.
Until that day, I think possibly sharing individual tracks - tracked out I mean, e.g. one instrument or vocal on a track - and pinning them in the music channel on PAL with an invitation to add on (also one track at a time) would be cool. Anyone could start a collaboration by leaving link to the sound file - Google Drive works well to share a file like this - and mods could pin to channel. Just a thought. The reason I say track by track is it also opens up this collaboration to all the people who do digital music to sample individual tracks while they are making a remix. There is a big community of digital musicians here on Steemit and I would love to include them as well as more traditional instrumentalists and vocalists. There could be some really cool possibilities for remixes if different people put up different melody lines over a song, etc.
Can't wait to get back in the musical saddle with you Bucky!
Much love - Carl
Great suggestion, Carl. Perhaps we could also pin some kind of inventory or sign-out sheet that can tell people what is up there and what you may be working on. For example, If @stickchumpion uploads a drum track you may not want to play over it but I will. So I make note that I am working on it. When I upload what I did you and @vachemorte may download it and sign that you are working on it.
I am just thinking that keeping lines of communication open is always a good thing. If a newcomer signs they they are working on something we can all cheer them on.
Definitely a work in progress, but we do need to be giving all this some thought rather than leaving it to chance.
Hey I like that! Great idea
Very good question. If I come up with something I'll let you know.
:)
The idea could work if you had multiple musicians over a video chat playing music together. One or more of the participants can stream it to any live streaming site such as twitch or periscope.
When it is streamed out, other viewers can watch the performers collaborate live. Although the sound quality may be an issue for the instruments. There may be a video chatting service meant for music or that has a setting that allows better input of sounds from instruments.
I'm with you on that @lacroix. In a typical 'session' at a pub, one person will start/lead a song and the others will play along. Your idea can work for this. The only part missing is being able to feed off each other. In this method the only person that can be heard is the main player on Twitch. hmmm Let's keep pushing at this. There must be a was.
Tonight at 10UTC I will be chatting about this for a little bit. "Backstage with Bucky" on the PAL Discord MSP-Waves radio. Stop in and we can throw around some ideas.
The delay issue is the biggest problem for live playing by musicians at remote places. What may work is when the whole thing is setup in series, where the first one plays, the second one listens and joins in, then the third, fourth and so on. Each musician in the chain shall get the music from the musician just before him/her and eg musician number 3 should not hear what musician number 4 and 5 and so on are adding. Record the result and then play it back. Only the last musician in the chain heard everything, while for the other musicians the end result is a surprise. Sepearte streams needs to be setup between musician number 1 and 2, number 2 and 3 number 3 and 4 and so on.
Agreed @qsounds. All the conferencing software has an unavoidable delay. So playing piano duets will most likely never happen for quite some time.
We need to explore easy ways to do things asynchronously for now. What you described can work, but there would need to be new tech put in place to make it happen. Read @carlgnash's comment. If we can start with an intuitive way of sharing parts for collaboration then we can build up from there. There is a desire to collaborate so let's feed that fire. Once we have a group on the same page we may be able to investigate some new unique developments to help in more interactive ways.
What are your thoughts @qsounds?
I'm not a musician, so I'll not be someone who will actually participate :) But yeh, get some people of like-minded musicians and work on something in kinda remix style I would suggest. One creates something, someone else adds to it and so on. What I described can be done offline. But what I describe I think can work for each musician in the chain in realtime, while each musician is not at exact the same moment, so it is like time, it only works one direction of the chain, not in the other way around. You need to setup an one directional voice channel between eg number 2 and 3, and between number 3 and 4. Now I have not idea if one direction channels are possible, but number 3 could mute the speaker and only have the mic open. Since running two instances of eg Discord or Skype is difficult on one laptop/computer, you can use multiple voice services.
Tonight at 10UTC I will be chatting about this for a little bit. "Backstage with Bucky" on the PAL Discord MSP-Waves radio. Stop in and we can throw around some ideas.
I have been waiting a very long time for technology to be at that level!!! as far as I can see( and hear ), we're very nearly there!!! ... but not quite!!! Great post!!!
Thanks @termitemusic. I appreciate the input. Where do you see the needs from a musician's point of view?
... for me its a latency issue. Its small enough now, that we can pretend its not there, but it definitely is when you try to do anything intricate.
... We used to jam ideas over analogue phone lines 20yrs ago! Digital technology still is nowhere near that!! In theory, we should be already doing this!!!!
I strongly feel this is where music needs to go though, and there is a huge market for it!!!!
Thanks for the insight. The only way to get a solid grasp on all this is to try using it. Fire up your favourite conferencing software (Hangouts, Skype, Facebook, Facetime, etc.) connect with a musician and count 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 You will see pretty quickly what the limitations are. At that point you can make a decision as to what you can do with that tool. Ambient music is is not a problem. Latin percussion rhythms... not so :)
Tust me, I try anything new that comes along because it would be very useful to me!!! and yeah, anything that involves proper timing is a no no!!
There is also the two combining factors of computer power and internet speed!( and at both ends!) I think it will happen soon, and whoever manages to make the software that works will be RICH!!!! I for 1, would be willing to pay!!!
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Some sort of Skype for Steemit - but I don't know how that would work. What platforms are currently available for this kind of thing? I wonder if some of the Steemit gaming community might have some good ideas on this?
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