Collaborating With Other Musicians Online : Exploring the creative process between collaborators

• Main Author: Högberg, Emil
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Luleå tekniska universitet, Institutionen för konst, kommunikation och lärande 2020
• Subjects: Collaboration; co-writing; music; online; Music; Musik
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:ltu:diva-79873

I’m a music producer that is active in several different subgenres in electronic dance music (EDM). A music producer is a person that oversees the recording process, most often the creative side and decides how everything should sound like. You can compare it to a film director. During the last decade, the role as a music producer has progressed into a factotum position, which means you usually have several different roles yourself: you can be a songwriter, mixing engineer, recording engineer and even a singer. Another thing that has changed is the workplace. It’s common nowadays that people are sitting at home and producing their own beats/songs. This is foremost possible because of how the technology has evolved and made everything smaller and more efficient. If you rewind back 25 years this was an impossible task. You needed big studios, with big rooms to record drums, guitars, keyboards and vocals, and a huge mixing table with big tape machines to record it all. Nowadays you have everything you need with a laptop, an audio interface and with access to the internet. You can easily find pre-recorded vocals, hire vocalists online, buy sample packs with drum loops and make your own melody sounds with virtual synthesizers. There’re also huge digital libraries with sounds that real instrumentalists recorded which you can use to create your own chord progressions or melodies. So, you basically have everything you need to make a big dance record with only a simple laptop sitting in your own garage in the Bronx. It’s also easy to get in touch with other artists, producers and singers through social media and other sites on the web. In my essay I want to explore how the process looks like when you are collaborating with others online. It could be between other producers, singers, songwriters or even instrumentalists. How do you start a collab? Are there any pros and cons with collaborating? I also would like to examine what people do if they are having trouble getting along while collaborating. How do you maintain a good chemistry with the others? And if your creative process differs compared to when you are writing music by yourselves.