Just something random I was thinking about today when posting a collaboration I did in my songwriting thread -
I wonder to what affect digital technologies are having on musicians in terms of the way they work together and collaborate?
I used to play in a band, we would meet up once a week for "band practice" in which we all packed up and carted our instruments to each other's houses and spent a day rehearsing, creating, making music together. When one of my band members moved interstate that was that, we kinda just stopped as physical boundaries meant we were no longer able to continue our practice together.
However, recently, I was chatting with this said interstate friend on Skype, when we both randomly got out our guitars and starting playing together. Now, this is not a new thing, loads of musicians collaborate and make music online, but it was at that moment that it really just occurred to me how easy it was.
It was then that I started a Soundcloud and YouTube account and began to share things online. I actually met a musician on Soundcloud and we started to collaborate, mash our stuff together and create some music together. This was the result:
It was really fun to be able to work with someone else in creating a piece of music together, without having the boundaries of physical space, and without having to pack up and load all of my instruments into my car and travel to meet someone. However, having said that, the song we created is incredibly rough, unpolished and random. I'm not sure where we'll go from here or if it will be too difficult to create anything any more polished given the fact that we live on the opposite sides of the world and often don't communicate in real time. So it makes me think that maybe there are still limitations as to what you can do online... who knows. I guess this is a journey that has only just begun and I will wait to see what happens!