When I started working in studios in the late 1990s, collaborations almost always happened in the room. A guest singer or instrumentalist would come to a recording session, and everyone would work together on the song - then inevitably end up in the pub round the corner at the end of the day. Occasionally a collaboration would not be ‘in person’ but this was pretty rare. You had to make a copy of the tape you were working off (making sure that the person you were collaborating with had booked a studio with the same format tape machine – or had organised to rent one in). The tapes would then be couriered at great expense to wherever in the world they needed to be (fingers crossed they didn’t get accidentally wiped on the way) and eventually would be couriered back again with the new parts on it (fingers crossed again). I won’t get into tape line-ups and machine speed idiosyncrasies, but the bottom line was, you were in a room together or it got really expensive really quickly!

By the time I had started, though, what we now see as the first steps to real democratisation of recording had begun. The ADAT format by Alesis put digital multitrack recording in the hands of ordinary people. And due to it’s low(-ish) price point and reasonable quality, a lot of people bought these machines. With the recording done to low-cost VHS video tapes and the wide spread of these machines, people could swap multitracks around with relative ease, and between home recording set-ups – no expensive studio required. Collaboration at a distance and at scale had taken it’s first steps.

Then, finally, computers became fast enough to handle multiple tracks of audio. I distinctly remember waiting for this leap, and then when it happened not trusting computers to keep my audio safe! In the transition from tape-based recording to computer audio it was not unusual for people to work on the computer and then print the edited audio onto tape at the end of the session.

In the background, though, it wasn’t just the recording format that was changing. The whole method of making records was changing as a result. Instead of everyone being in the same studio to record to tape, people could record anywhere on a home computer, saving time and (most importantly) money. Amongst other second-order effects, this revolution in recording technology caused a fundamental shift in the collaborative process. Instead of a session being organised face-to-face in the control room, it’s become fragmented across a number of apps. For me, it’s WhatsApp, email, Soundcloud and a set of notes that I keep on my computer so at least I know what’s going on! This works, but it’s messy, and it makes it very difficult to keep the conversation in the same place. There’s always some confusion over which version of the tracks people are listening to, and who still has something to contribute to a track.

This is why I created Multiband. It’s a productivity tool and a collaboration tool in one. I find it useful for myself to see where I am with various projects at a glance (no more opening a ProTools session to remind myself where I’m at with a track!), but when collaborating with others it’s now really easy for everyone to see where the project is at whenever they want, as well as always being able to hear the latest version of the tracks we are working on, and because progress updates are automatically emailed to collaborators, I know everyone is being kept up to date without the endless email conversations or WhatsApp chats!

Why Multiband?

If you want to streamline your production process like I have then have a look at https://multiband.io/ and grab a free account today.

Music Collaboration in the Twenty-First Century

(Podcast) Recording And Mixing Q&A