Recording - April 2017 - 44

a walking tour
The Internet can work for you
as a songwriter,and it doesn't
have to cost a penny

BY MIKE METLAY

We've come a long way since the Internet was first

used for text emails and it could take an hour to download a tiny photo over your phone line. Nowadays, highspeed net connectivity is all-pervasive: we have it on our
desktops,in our tablets,on our phones,and it's gotten fast
enough so that moving audio around isn't terribly painful. With that in mind, it's not too surprising that several
ambitious companies are now offering practical ways
to collaborate on music online, leveraging the socialnetwork aspects of the Internet and putting them to good
use for the recording songwriter.
Many companies are trying their own approaches to online
collaboration. For most purveyors of commercial DAW software,
the preferred methodology is to add an online component to
the existing product-built-in tools for seamless collaboration as
part of the music making process, or an online server system to
allow for easy storage and sharing of work. Steinberg has been
doing this successfully with VST Connect in Cubase for a long
time, and Avid's cloud collaboration ecosystem is picking up
steam with the latest versions of Pro Tools. The big dogs aren't
alone, either-at least one independent company, Ohm Force,
is making a dent in this market with an independent DAW called
OhmStudio that has heavily integrated cloud features.
Most of these platforms are "freemium"; you can do basic
sharing and have access to a restricted (sometimes heavily
restricted!) set of tools without having to spend any money,
but if you want to (a) have more professional tools at hand,
(b) store more than a very few ongoing projects online in the
cloud, and/or (c) download high-quality versions of your finished projects, you'll have to shell out for a subscription to the
service, a paid version of the free software, or both.
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RECORDING April 2017

This makes a lot of sense if you're a professional who's
already invested in a particular DAW platform or who wants
to be able to use the very best tools available, but what about
the songwriter who's just looking for an easy way to work on
songs anywhere and share them with collaborators? Wouldn't
it be nice if there was a simple and easy-to-use online platform
for basic songwriting and songbuilding?
Now there is. People have been trying to do this sort of thing
for years, even decades, but the Internet has finally caught up
to their dreams-with the current generation of tools out there,
it's possible to build an online collaboration system that doesn't
require any specialized software at all. That service is BandLab.

What makes BandLab unique?

The most important thing to realize about BandLab is that
it's almost entirely web-based. As a result, BandLab is accessible on whatever device you have handy: Mac, Windows
PC, iPhone, Android phone, iPad, tablet... I suppose that a Linux
machine with a properly set-up web browser would work
fine, too. (The exceptions to this rule are the iOS and Android
apps; they are actually native, as this allows for better latency
compensation and realtime monitoring.)
The fact that any hardware that can run a web browser
can use BandLab is a big advantage. It allows anyone to get
started making music online, and even if you already have
a fancy DAW setup in your studio, it lets you capture ideas
and inspiration with nothing more than your phone, no matter
where you are. The downside of this is that the tools available
for music creation are necessarily rather generic, but
as evidenced by the thousands of people creating tracks on
BandLab right now, they're not slowing down most folks.
To join BandLab, all you do is go to the website and sign up for an
account. You can use your existing Facebook or Google data (which
has some advantages if you want to take your work public), or provide an email address and password of your own. Once you've
done that, you upload a photo, change your username to something more memorable than "@band2395863564598349563",
and you're ready to get to work.

Creating songs (and keeping track of
your creations)

Songs created in BandLab are called Projects. They're
stored online, and you add to them using the Mix Editor, an
onscreen DAW that lets you build tracks with an online drum
machine or virtual instrument, record guitar or bass through
effects to an audio track, or simply drag and drop audio files
or loops (or select them from an online loop library).
You can add and delete tracks, edit MIDI data in piano roll
form, set (or remove) quantization, loop sections of a Project, do
overdubs, add effects, even draw in volume automation or warp
audio and MIDI from one tempo to another. It wasn't long ago
that these functions were only available in desktop DAWs, and
while the Mix Editor might not replace your copy of MOTU Digital
Performer or Ableton Live, it's amazing for what it can do on your
phone with nothing more than a mic or connected guitar input.
Having your song ideas accessible anywhere is cool, but
BandLab gets really interesting when you start to share your
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - April 2017
