Distributed Art

Once upon a time I had a rock band called Blue Shift. We made music, loudly, in smoke-filled bars (remember those?) in the 90's in Toronto, wishing we had enough money to be able to afford to record more of our stuff. I like to think that we were ahead of our time. As you may have noticed, you've never heard of us.

A little while ago I was suddenly struck with a revelation - a lot of the problems I had back in those days, stuff that held us back, had simply packed up and left in the night. I could now afford recording equipment, due to both my increased income (from, you know, zero) and by the fact that digital recording technology had made professional recordings so much cheaper than they used to be. There were many channels to digital distribution open on the Internet.

I had been sitting around thinking about trying to scrape together yet another band from craigslist when suddenly it struck me - why not just go and get the old band? The fact that we don't live in the same city doesn't matter.

So now I'm looking at four words I never, ever, thought I would see: "New Blue Shift Album". We're all sitting on our own project studios, as it turns out. The project will basically work like this:

• We'll agree what songs to record. We'll establish song structure and tempos.
• I'll record a scratch vocal and guitar track to be a guide.
• Our bass player will be doing drum programming - he'll create bed tracks (drum and bass).
• We will lay down our overdubs (guitar, vocals, keys etc).

Any one of us are allowed to mix at any time. Someone doesn't like my mix? Fine - make your own. We continue to lay down tracks and make mixes as we go along.

Eventually we agree on approving mixes to be the "official version". We get enough tracks like that - and that's the new album.

I am quite inspired by this - this is a way in which the Internet has personally changed my life - something that simply was impossible before is now in reach. I'll probably throw up a side blog to talk about this project as it progresses.