Indaba Music is an online community of musicians all connected to a highly advanced browser-based music production console.  As of today, you can join a “session”, import your audio and mix everyone’s musical contributions using a super cool mixing console.  Volume, panning, mute, solo… it’s all there.  But that’s just the beginning.

The Indaba Music Mixing Console

Indaba Music is gearing up to release the Session Console 2.0, which will introduce complete browser-based recording capabilities.  That means you can literally fire up the session console in your browser, plug in your instrument, and hit record.  Add your creative touch to the community-based recording session.  I will post a followup review with Indaba 2.0 launches.

Online Musical Collaboration

It’s truly amazing where this technology is going.  I mean, the thought of collaborating with musicians from across the globe so effortlessly is astounding.  Just from browsing through some active mixes on the site today, you can immediately get a feel for the true variety of styles and diversity of cultures represented – all within the same sessions!

There are loads of cool ways this online tool can fit into the lifestyle of musicians.

• Collaboration takes practice.  This is a great way to hone your skills as a musical collaborator when you’re just starting out on your instrument, or if you’re picking up a new primary instrument.
• Maybe you don’t have the time to dedicate to a real, in-person band.  Indaba gives you the opportunity to keep the excitement of jamming with others on your free time and you still keep your day job, spend time with the fam, etc.
• Real-world bands can collaborate with virtual online bands through Indaba.  Spread you’re band’s influence by injecting it into the sessions of your fans.  Lots of directions to take that idea.
• Expand your creative musical pallet by producing music and interacting with others from across the globe.  You’re now in touch with a world of musical cultures, backgrounds, influences, genres, styles…

Where is This Going?

Beyond the creative and technological capabilities here, I’m interested to see how this type of community can evolve.  Will there be internet-based “bands”, gaining popularity with fans, recording and releasing music all online?  This type of new technology certainly brings an interesting twist to our centuries-old craft of songwriting.

Have any of you collaborated on Indaba Music yet?

A few weeks back, I wrote a guest post on the Indaba Music Blog titled 8 Tips for Successful Collaboration With Your Bandmates. To achieve success as a band, you must engage in meaningful and creative collaboration with your bandmates.

Here’s a quote from that article:

In sports, they say the Most Valuable Player is one who makes his teammates perform better.  The same principal applies to playing in a band.  Always play your best, and encourage your bandmates to do the same.  Verbal encouragement is always good, but it’s even more effective to communicate through the music.  Play and adjust your musical part in response to what your bandmates are playing.

Read the full article here.

Can you share additional tips and experiences that make for excellent collaboration in a band?

Sometimes a great song can surround and swallow you up in all of its sounds and colors. Using creative instrumentation and serving your song with melodies that fit right into place with one another are a great way to achieve this effect on your listeners.

We often hear a complete melody or phrase without realizing the sound is composed with more than one instrument or voice. The instruments are similar in tone, and their parts blend nicely into one another.

The key is to piece together the different parts in a way that makes room for one another while keeping the flow of the musical phrase intact. That could mean using counter rhythms — one instrument plays while the other is on a rest. Or it could mean playing simultaneously and blending them together using harmonies and varying aggressiveness. Or using mixing techniques — EQ, volume and effects levels. Most likely, you would use a combination of all of these.

How do we accomplish this type of composition? It’s usually not as methodical as I just described above. More often you stumble upon the perfect fusing of parts through jamming with band-mates, layering parts one at a time while self-producing, or fiddling with knobs and faders in the studio.

The most important thing to keep in mind while you’re knee-deep in the writing process, is to let the song dictate what it wants. Keep your focus locked into the groove of this specific phrase and let that be the road map for where to place your notes. Always remember that adding notes to a melody can often be just as important as adding rests. Check out this article describing the importance of using space in songwriting.

This sound is very common in Hip Hop because it’s all about fusing various sampled sounds to form a unique sounding beat.  The samples are often very far apart in sound, tone, and color but when done right, they are crafted in such a way that new musical phrases are born.

Below are a couple of songs where this technique can be heard:

Parallel Universe – Red Hot Chili Peppers
These guys are the funk-rock masters. This song is all about Flea and Frusciante locking in their picking as they match eachother rhythm, but play different notes in harmony.

Ghostwriter – RJD2
You can hear what I’m talking about in just about any track from RJD2, but this one is among my favorites. It’s off the amazing Dead ringer album and it fuses some funky clean electric guitar sounds with a booming horn line creating an instrumental hook with a ton of impact.

Colorbars – Elliot Smith
This off of the amazing Figure 8 album (reviewed here on my other blog). The acoustic guitar outlines the impact notes played by the piano in a beautifully colorful way as it is done all over this album and the rest of Smith’s full-band work.