Online Music Communities

I have found that trying to round up people to participate in a planned Ninjam session is a difficult task to accomplish. This could explain why there is very little traffic on their message boards. Part of the allure of using Ninjam is just dropping in when ever, and jamming with whoever happens to be there.
My Virtual Band (MVB) is another great way to collaborate on music online. This site supports asynchronous music collaboration through the use of an FTP site and a message board. Here is how it works. Suppose you have just completed the recording of a killer groove with drums, bass and guitar. You want to complete the track, but you vocal abilities are not the greatest. This is where My Virtual Band comes in.
The site contains a message board where people post projects for others to collaborate on. To start a collaboration, you upload your tracks to the MVB server and start a new post on the message board. This post will contain links to the tracks that you previously have uploaded. Now, anybody who is interested in adding new tracks to the project can simply download the tracks and add there own.
The great thing about this site is that it is platform independent. A collaboration could include tracks created with a high end recording system, such as ProTools, combined with tracks recorded using free, open source program such as Audacity. Anyone can collaborate with anyone else, and all can hear the results of the collaboration.
And, there is no need to get other people to show at a certain time to collaborate. Could it be that asynchronous collaboration is a more productive platform?

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Here is a link to the survey I have sent to the members who use Ninjam and My Virtual Band. The more information I get, the better. So thank you to everybody who has already responded. And, if you haven’t responded yet, the survey is very short—it should only take about 10 minutes to fill out. The information I collect will help shape the research for my paper.

Happy jamming!

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So, I have been collaborating musically on both the Ninjam and the My Virtual Band sites. I thought that I would post some of the results of these collaborations, and analyze the results. It turns out that that the resulting recordings are very different, as you will soon hear.
First up are some improvisations from Ninjam. Remember, Ninjam is an improvisational real-time platform, so all of there recordings are free-form collaborations.

heavyWah_twoBasses.mp3

This is one of the first collaborations that I participated in on Ninjam. The recording contains me on guitar, two bass players and a drummer. Having two bass players is kind of an odd situation, but because of the ‘work with who happens to be on the server’ paradigm that Ninjam uses, it is common to have unusual instrumentations in a collaboration. For instance, this collaborations contains drums, vocals, bass and flute. The flautist is quite good, actually.

Vocals_flute.mp3

After listening to a few of these collaborations on Ninjam, you will begin to notice that the improvisations tend to work around a single musical riff that repeats over and over. This is common in face to face improvisations. Because of the semi-syncronous nature of Ninjam, it is difficult to do a lot of rapid chord changes. For example, if the guitar player decides he is going to play a typical 16 bar I, IV, V chord progression, the bass player isn’t going to here the chord change until 1 measure later. So the guitar player has moved on the to the IV chord, and the bass player is still playing the I chord for an entire measure. Typically, to instruments playing different chords sounds really bad, and in the case of a blues jam this is no exception.

An exception to this is evident in this recording.

slowHeavyDurge.mp3

Here, the guitar player is doing cord changes. It works in this case because the chord changes all have the same root note. So, the base player can really just jam around on the E minor chord, and the guitar player can play their chord changes based on that E minor chord. So, in this case, chord changes do work.

All of the audio in this post is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

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Now, I will let you hear some examples of collaborations I participated in on My Virtual Band. For my first example, I would like to walk you through the process of collaboration on MVB. Since MVB is an asynchronous collaboration platform, there are various versions of the recording throughout the collaboration life-time.

A typical interaction on the MVB bulletin board goes like this:

• -Person A starts a new thread on the MVB bulletin board, posting a link to a single track


• -Person B downloads that track, imports the track into his/her recording software, and records 1 or more of his own tracks along with the original.


• -Person B then posts a mix of the original track and his/her tracks.


• -Person B also posts the individual tracks that he recorded. For example, if he added drums and a bass line to the original track, he would post the drum track and the bass track separately as well. This allows future collaborators the option of using Person B’s bass line, or adding their own.


• -Person C downloads all of the individual tracks, and adds his own, continuing the collaboration cycle.

For example, on June 28th, Bryan starts a new thread on the MVB bulletin board. He posts this little track of him playing acoustic guitar.

Tall_1.mp3

One day later, on June 29th, Mullr adds a bass line to the original guitar track, and posts both his mix of the two, and a track that contains only the bass line that he added.

Tall-bass.mp3
Tall-mix1.mp3

Then, on November 5th, over four months later, drumkey87 adds piano and drums, posting both a mix of all of the instruments, and the individual tracks that he contributed.
talldrumkeymix.mp3
Piano.mp3
HiHat.mp3
Kick.mp3
Snare.mp3

Seven days later, on November 12th, I add a little lead guitar track.

Tall_lerbleMix.mp3
Tall_lerble_guitarOnly.mp3

You can view the message board thread for this collaboration here.
Some other collaborations that show off what is possible on MVB are as follows:

Ruby-martyMix1.mp3
Silentshoutnewremix1.mp3
Jazzy-marty-mix2.mp3

All of the audio in this post is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

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