http://www.virtual-musician.com / http://www.v-band.de

Marco

I would be interested to see what processes are in place to keep what could be a nice soup from becoming an overbearing stew.

In any event, the songwriting quality is reasonably high. Certainly good enough to warrant further inspection. Exciting stuf.

About real time online jamming there are a few projects that try to achieve it, but I don’t think they’ve been very much successful until now:

http://www.ejamming.com/
http://www.ninjam.com/index.php

BTW, there’s also NetPD (www.netpd.org) but it’s more directed towards laptop musical composition and edition

If you can understand Portuguese, I wrote a post about these applications:

http://remixtures.com/2007/05/software-de-colaboracao-em-tempo-real-para-musicos/

I think live jamming online will never happen for one simple reason – latency. No matter your bandwith, your audio’s never going to go faster than the speed of light. So your drummer hits the snare in the UK, the keyboards presses his key a bit later in Italy, the trumpet player quite a bit later in the States. By the time the drummer hears the other musicians, he think’s they’re playing quite out of time, so maybe he slows down a bit… you get the point – it’s all going to get very messy very fast. Okay, you could solve this problem by not being able to hear each other (only the metronome), but do you call that “jamming”?!

I have some ideas for a near-realtime distributed music production environment to support music improvisation, but I think it would be tricky to do well. Maybe I’ll attempt it when I’m richer and more talented ;)

I think George makes some very valid points. In my opinion, finding musicians and songs is the hardest part of using these sites. I know everyone’s in love with tags at the moment but they’re really not that great for non-factual multimedia content. I’ve been trying to give away some ideas to the IndabaMusic guys about how they could piggyback Last.fm to create an elegant way of finding “interesting” musicians and songs based on your feedback, your Last.fm listener profile and the feedback of other users. They replied very positively but have gone a bit quiet so maybe I’ll get in touch with “Kompoz”.

As for the value of “RL” relationships, I don’t think anybody but the geekiest geek would argue that face-to-face isn’t better, if you can. But often it’s very hard to organise so ‘meeting’ online is much better than nothing.

I’ve collaborated via the net with people I’ve never met, people were doing it before Kompoz, Kompoz has just streamlined the process. Think of the doors it opens to people geographically isolated. I find the idea very exciting because you’re not limited to your geographic area, your talent pool is the world.

Imagine a composer like Beethoven, for his artwork to become real, he needed people to play it. 180 years after his death, he still needs someone to collaborate to make his work real. Without musicians, the 9th symphony is dots on a page. When I play in an orchestra, I become part of a work from an artist long dead, yet I share a connection. It’s such a powerful link to the past and and artists genius. When I go to a museum, I look at a painting, but it’s static. I feel a connection, and emotion sure, but the artists work is done. I can’t add anything to it. Yet when I play a Beethoven piece, I inject my own talent, feelings, and perceptions into it. It’s never the same twice, it’s dynamic and living. I think when print music lost its dominance to recorded music, that dynamic was lost. Recorded music is static, it’s the same every time you listen to it. Technology has changed all that. Instead of being consumers, fans can now be participators.

I think the days of preciousness with your art being a viable strategy are coming to an close. Modest Mouse is letting fans make a video for their second single. Bare Naked Ladies are releasing source tracks so fans can remix their songs. The days of Artist/Art Consumer are ending, as the line between the two becomes blurred. People who consume your art will Expect (with a capital “E”) to be involved in the process. The web and it’s related technologies have always been touted as a “power to the people” kind of revolution, but I think it is just now starting to realize its potential, and I find the whole thing amazing in its potential to change art as we know it. After all that’s what this blog is about, right?

In my experience quality songwriters are precious about their creations and want the best for their best work so they will make the extra effort to form actual relationships and work in actual environments with other people. Same goes for quality producers, arrangers, engineers and musicians. They are all precious about their skills and abilities and won’t want to showcase with people they don’t know or trust.

The value of this will be found in the relationships that are built online – how can you compare actual relationships to virtual ones? How valuable financially, creatively etc. are virtual relationships that use this kind of platform to output?

I’d love to sign up and find a great songwriter, some great musicians to collaborate with but my guess is that it would still take a massive amount of time to first find those people then develop work that is mature so I figure I’m better off sticking to actual environment for music that I’m precious about.

However I could see myself messing with stuff via this to make some heavily edited and processed tracks experimentally. Saying that I’ll probably spend more time searching for good songs to work with than anything else.