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Music without boundaries

It is often said — ‘music knows no boundaries’, and especially, when created, collaborated or consumed in an online space, the reach of music knows no frontiers.

It is often said — ‘music knows no boundaries’, and especially, when created, collaborated or consumed in an online space, the reach of music knows no frontiers. With new virtual music collaborative projects, several talented musicians from across the world have come to the forefront. Budding musicians and amateurs have got a new platform to share their solos, albums and interesting compositions. For instance, Maati Baani, a band combining elements of Hindustani classical with various styles of folk music and new age sounds recently came up with its album The Music Yantra, which is a collaboration of 50 Indian and international artists from 20 countries across the world!

From a trade of musical ideas for a song and sending parts to backing vocalists for a live show, everything is quick and easy in virtual collaboration, believes vocalist Vasundhara Vidalur. “Back in the day, one had to go to a studio to record anything. It was the norm for artists to book studios for months, and spend their creative time there. Today, nearly everyone has a home studio set up. This has been enabling in many ways, for people like me. I have worked predominantly in the online space for past two years..I’ve had live rehearsals on Skype and have even shared my final vocal takes on collaborative albums made within India and abroad, online. My primary focus now is on a project called Merkaba with Sanjay Divecha, Gino Banks and Sheldon D’Silva. I live in Delhi while the rest of the band is in Mumbai. We e-mail each other material to work on, prepare on our own, and then when we meet in the shed, its boom!” says Vasundhara.

She adds, “A big reason why this works is because humanity mainly interacts through non-human interfaces. We are all comfortable with the idea of texting, emails, messages left over social networks, little voice notes on Whatsapp. The music making process is also becoming a fairly easy-to-do long distance relationship.”

Sarthak Sardana aka Sartek, producer and DJ, feels EDM (Electronic Dance Music) is a product of new age technology and Internet friendly musicians. “Almost all collaboration in dance music space happens online, when musicians connect with each other on various social media platforms. They bounce out their musical ideas for sending out to the producer. Raw parts of each instrument used is exported from project commonly called stems and then exchanged through Dropbox or We-transfer and the style of track is sometimes discussed on Skype or else the producer using his own creativity builds on it using the stems, and sends it back. Once agreed, collaboration takes place. Virtual synthesizers and digital compressors have taken over replacing the hardware. Digital audio workstations (DAW) have made it much easier for every musician to record and produce his music using just a laptop and a midi controller. Exchange of idea doesn’t have boundaries anymore,” he elaborates.

Akshay Johar aka Mojojojo, DJ and producer shares, “The first time I ever collaborated online was with a Mumbai based producer, Nanok on a track Greed is Good, which was a part of my debut album, Shots Fired. Since we were in different cities, it was a process we decided we would try, even though we had some scepticism attached to it. However, once we started, we figured out the process in a few days. We used tools like WeTransfer and Dropbox to send files to and fro, heavily relied on Facebook chat to chalk out ideas etc. The entire process took about a month and was rather labour intensive. We would have never been able to dream of doing this with such comparative ease 10 years ago. Technology is helping us bridge boundaries and everyone with a good Internet connection can be on the same playing field as everyone else. I can’t wait to do it again!”

Collaborating and making music online is coming of age. Vocalist and guitarist of Fuzz Culture, Arsh Sharma says, “You can tap into artists you would’ve never even thought of working with before. It also gives you the option of being surprised as when you collaborate with someone online, you give them their space and you give them the opportunity to surprise you which, at times, takes your music someplace you would have never thought. We’d recently collaborated with Army of Three, a Malayasian band. We did a remix with them for a song, and it was a total online collaboration, where they sent us the stems and we did the remix and sent it back to them.”

Hamza Kaazi, drummer of Coshish, a progressive rock band says, “We’ve had our share of virtual collaborations and it’s not easy! Our debut album Firdous was mixed by Zorran Mendonsa in New Zealand, mastered by Jens Bogren in Sweden, the artwork was collaboration with Daeve Fellows from Canada and Bernad Dumaine from France! Mixing the album was not an easy process. Even when you’re physically present with the engineer, it’s hard to describe sounds with words imagine doing that with words in an email! Sound description is also a matter of perception. What might be raw and heavy for us might not necessarily mean the same thing for someone else because of which we went through several iterations of the mix. Even the mastering was a bit of a task because we had sound samples before and after every song that needed to be aligned. Because the album was meant to be one giant track, with a rearranged track list, all the samples were getting cut, sounded abrupt and out of place. It was hard to describe what we wanted via email. A Skype session and a meticulously drafted email finally did the trick. Online collaborations are great but you need to know how to work around the limitations.”

Working with musicians over the Internet has both positives and negatives, but it has largely transformed the way we consume and produce music. Tony Das, guitarist of Peepal Tree says, “In a world of diminishing budgets, it has become a really viable way of making sure that costs are kept to a minimum, while granting you access to any performer (or conversely, any client) anywhere in the world. On projects we’ve done with music directors like Sandeep Chowta and Clinton Cerejo as close by as Mumbai, to artists such as Virgil Donati, Simon Philips and Jimmy Johnson (on some of Sandeep’s projects) way on over in the US, we’ve never needed to be in the same geographical location.”

Elaborating on the negatives of the process, Tony concludes, “There can never really be a substitute for inhabiting the same physical space with other musicians, and playing together. For a lot of commercial work, where music is just used to fill dead air, or for the kind of pop drivel that plays most of the time on the radio, it may suffice. In both cases, no one cares enough to tell the difference. But in situations where you’re trying to put a little more of yourself into your music, there’s a different kind of energy to playing together. You can feel it, and if you listen carefully, you can hear it.”

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