Global Collaborative Music Experiment

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!"

Helloooooo, One Man Band!

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....

This is an excellent idea...

...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...

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...

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.

Re:This is an excellent idea...

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:This is an excellent idea...

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.

.rpm Only!?

What, were they too lazy to make .debs? Some of us use frickin' Ubuntu, you insensitive clods!

What? Oh, never mind...

Re:.rpm Only!?

Heh, Gentoo users make their own music.

Re:.rpm Only!?

Heh, Gentoo users make their own music.

And lots of compilation CDs.

Like NaNoWriMo

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...

RPM is pretty much the same as FAWM.org

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.

Shouldn't be too hard ..

My pals did this album for my girl and me in 10 days .. so its going to be exciting to see what they do for the RPM challenge (which they're entering..) [jay-christina.org]

Hrmmph, submission grousing.

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.

industry

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

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).

two groups from McMurdo station in Antarctica...

lets skip those, they probably only did Iced Earth covers anyway.

14 Days of Art

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 ...

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.

A matter of style

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.

28 days? That's nothing.

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

Isn't sharing original work with others(with no fee or record contract or w/e) illegal under the DMCA?

Need to do a prog rock version

Then it's ONE song or 35 minutes. :)

Hey, I tease. I'm a long time prog rock fan.

Global collaborations

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 ;)

Exchanging large music files over the internet

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 in real-time.

This, and cheap new recording techniques are making it easier for musicians to collaborate and get their music heard!

Right.

Wonderful collaboration technology used for dubious purpose.

That's what Jonathan Coulton did

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.

We did this last year, good times..

Yeah, check it out, we're the Naughty-Five... http://www.rpmchallenge.com/rpm_player.html?band=T heNaughtyFive/ [rpmchallenge.com]