Music
The stars of the first episode of new Red Bull TV show Check Your DMs, DJ Q, tofubeats and Gaidaa, guide us through the art of online and remote musical collaboration.
For years, home production has been a solitary pastime – crafting beats behind closed curtains, weaving melodies from the confines of your bedroom, bereft of human contact, chipping away alone. Recently, though, that’s begun to change. New advances in technology have made it easier than ever before to make music with your mates without leaving your house. And why stop at making music with friends?
Creating tracks with strangers on the other side of the planet is something you can do with ease in 2020. Two decades ago, making a song with someone on the other side of the world would require a 10-hour flight, a couple of taxis, a professional translator (maybe) and enough money to book a studio for a few hours at your destination. Now the trickiest part is simply coinciding time zones.
Watch episode one of Check Your DMs in the player below.
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Just ask Britain’s DJ Q, Japan’s tofubeats and Dutch-Sudanese singer Gaidaa – stars of the first episode of Check Your DMs, a brand-new Red Bull TV show uncovering the power of remote collaboration. Each episode puts three artists who’ve never met, from three different countries with totally different musical backgrounds, in a virtual studio together and tasks them with creating a track from scratch. It’s both fascinating and on-trend: online search statistics show that home production and collaborating online, rather than in physical spaces, has been on the rise for years now. And you can follow suit.
Whether you’re hoping to start jamming, writing, recording and creating across time zones with strangers in far-flung countries, or with a friend down the street, here are some tips from the pros to get you started.
Listen to All In by DJ Q, Gaidaa and tofubeats:
Get to know the technology
First thing’s first – you need to know the basics of home recording on your own before you suggest working with other people. If you’ve opened up GarageBand, or taken up one of the free 90-day trials of Live 10 and Logic Pro X on offer from Ableton and Apple currently, what then?
“YouTube is your best friend,” says Gaidaa. Her point is simple: there’s a tutorial on the video-sharing platform for pretty much everything. Struggling to understand what the hell latch automation is? Need to know how to bounce audio stems from Logic so you can send them to a friend to jam over? Wondering how to import a MIDI file from a collaborator into your own DAW (or Digital Audio Workstation) so you can add your own layers and ideas? YouTube’s bedroom production tutors have your back.
There are official tutorials, too: Ableton’s ones, in particular, are bite-sized, easy to digest and often hosted by well-known artists, who’ll show you the ropes in style. But Ableton and Logic aren’t your only home studio options: FL Studio 20, Pro Tools, Audacity and others offer different interfaces and modes of working. And your choice doesn’t need to be guided by the software your collaborator uses. You don’t need to be working in the same DAW, explains DJ Q.
“Nowadays it’s easier for producers to collaborate using different types of programmes and technology because they all use similar file types or instruments. Personally, I work in Ableton Live. When I’m working with other artists or producers remotely I can just export WAV files, send them across and they’re able to be opened in whatever DAW the other person is working in.”
Find the best way to share
So you’ve mastered Ableton and have some musical ideas you want a friend to jump on with you. How do you send that file to start your collaboration? There are a variety of ways and workflows available. Some bounce individual audio files (or “stems”) via WeTransfer for their collaborator to insert into their own DAW (just remember to tell them the tempo of your track). Others like to use services like Pibox, Avid Cloud Collaboration and Splice to share ideas and review drafts of songs. Finding what works for you and the person you’re creating with is key, says Q.
“Things like Dropbox help as a way to send files back and forth because both parties can add to and edit online folders,” says the bassline and grime producer. “It’s easy enough to preview audio too, without having to actually download.”
If you and your collaborator share the same time zone, FaceTime calls can help steer songs in real time, replicating the step-by-step dialogue about melodies and beats you might have in a studio. Failing that, you can always share a private SoundCloud with a collaborator, uploading ideas and leaving second-by-second comments on them, identifying things to change and ideas to make parts really bang.
Embrace a slow-burn approach
Japanese genre-hopper tofubeats grew up in Kobe, far away from the country’s bustling music epicentre – and even further from the rest of the world’s music scenes. As a result, collaborating remotely became his norm.
“I’ve had more remote sessions than face-to-face,” he says, explaining one of the subtle benefits of this process: it takes time to upload, send and download files, which gives each collaborator space and time to think about the song you’re working on – very different to the pressure-cooker experience of working in a studio that you’re paying for by the hour. “It’s exciting to wait to listen to how the collaborator is adding colours to my sound. It’s also fun to take my time and think how to answer ‘quizzes’ from the collaborator,” he says.
Gaidaa knows that feeling. “I think it gives me a bit of space to get out of my head and try a bunch of new stuff,” she tells us. When you’re not on the clock in a studio that you need to leave by a certain time, you can experiment more. Take advantage of this and let your imagination run wild, trying ideas that you might not otherwise – this is one of the main advantages of working remotely, adds DJ Q: “You can work on tracks and ideas in your own time without the pressure.”
Create on the go
Inspiration can come from anywhere, any place, at any time. Harness this for your remote collaborations. “I’ve started sending acapella voice notes to people who play instruments,” says Gaidaa, who’s been enjoying getting creative on the go, using a dictaphone app on her phone.
“They come up with stuff and send it back. Try things out. Try to lay down ideas, make rough sketches – it doesn’t have to be fully realised,” she adds.
Sometimes, one melody hummed into your phone while waiting in line for the self-checkout tills at a supermarket can be the spark for an entire song or possibly even hit single.
A good personal connection helps
“Video calls are enough,” says tofubeats, when asked how to nurture the same sort of creative chemistry you’d get with someone in a studio without physically interacting. Having a good personal relationship with a collaborator can be key to making great music together. For some, that means shooting the s*** over a game of FIFA or Fortnite in between writing sessions. For others, including Gaidaa, it means opening up about personal experiences over long phone calls.
“I’m trying to be a lot more of an open book with people,” she says. “They should be able to know something about me before we try to create. I’m definitely calling and forcing myself to have more intense conversations sooner into the creative process.”
DJ Q places similar importance on maintaining a human touch. “I always find that speaking on the phone or via FaceTime is a good way to compensate for the human interaction aspect of collaborating on music,” he says. “Voice notes are a good way of communicating too, as you can explain things in more detail as opposed to just normal text messages or email.”
Encourage each other
Creating music alone, physically separated from your collaborators, can lead to plenty of self-doubt. “I think it’s really easy to get demotivated,” says Gaidaa. “For me, it’s easy to not want to continue working. It’s easy to get into your head and think what we can and can’t do when you’re by yourself in your house. But we can do a lot more than we think.”
Giving each other the encouragement and high-fives you would in a studio helps drive each other on when paranoia or imposter syndrome is near. And if something isn’t working – change tack. Take a break.
There are a range of platforms, like Endlesss, a new app from Warp Records artist Tim Exile, that allow friends to jam remotely just for fun. Billed as a virtual musical hangout with a live chat room that lets multiple users build and rearrange loops of music in real time, Endlesss is not designed to create full songs in – but it is a lot of fun for blowing off steam while remaining creative.
Keep it tidy
If you’re serious about remote collaboration, you’re probably going to be communicating via video call often. To help you navigate this, tofubeats wants to leave you with one important life hack on this front.
“You can have sessions no matter how messy your room is,” he jokes. “All you need is to clean up the area in front of the camera.” You heard it here first.
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