Working with Recorded Tracks from Afar
 

Is there a way to take a recorded track from another family member i.e. from soundcloud and download it then use it to play along with and record other tracks with it?

My son and I don't get to play together often and trying to figure out a way to put our guitars together when we are not.

I have Audacity and soundcloud to work with.

Thanks

Yes you can do it...here's a song a friend of mine and I did together, while living about 60 miles apart....I laid down a bass, rhythm and drum track and he added a lead part....this was done over the internet thru e-mails, using Audition.....enjoy !!

http://www.soundclick.com/html5/v3/p...&q=hi&newref=1

Here's one of few collaborations from Tony From Tulsa and myself done 100% through emails.


https://soundcloud.com/sage97-1/new-kid

Boy is that nice !!!!!!!

Thank you Martin.

Yes it is quite doable logistically. I am not familiar with the specs. for Audacity but I assume you can export full resolution WAV files which I would encourage.
Full resolution WAV can be uploaded to soundcloud and if give download permission to your son and vice versa, full WAV's can be downloaded.
Or you can use something like Drop Box through e-mail notification.

I do it all the time, with collaborations coming from all over the world - England, Germany, Columbia, Finland, etc. You can send session files (project files) if everyone uses the same DAW software. Failing that, you can export .wav files. There are some ground rules:

1. You must establish a standard for sample and bit rates so that everyone can access the files without conversion. Funky stuff happens in conversions. It just does. I wasted two hours last week importing a file from down the hall in another control room that was recorded in the wrong format. I've got the best software and I still wasted two hours!

2. You need for the first tracks to be recorded with a drummer or with a click track. A click makes entrances and exits predictable. Without it, it is very hard to follow another player. It can be as simple as putting a mechanical metronome in front of a mic and running it the length of the song!

3. If you use a click track it is helpful to print the click track to an audio track. Give two measures of click before the song starts.

4. Transmit via an email the beats per minute of the project.

5. Export all files from the same start and finish points. Use the first click as the left-hand side export point and the last audio (including any reverb) as the right-hand export point. By this methodology, the receiving recordist merely aligns all the imported audio clips to a common location and they are in-sync!

6. Label each of the files to identify, ie. "electric piano left, electric piano right, lead guitar, tambourine on last note only." Communication reduces the amount of interpretation the receiving recordist must do.

I've been forced to do it the wrong way many times. In the end, following these little rules makes it easier for everyone. Have fun!

Bob

Man those are some awesome tracks posted above and very enjoyable. Thanks for sharing!

My son is starting from scratch so I may get him to download Audacity and get him a mic.

You guys are sharing files thru e-mail, roughly what size are the files you share as e-mail does have it limits for file size.

Bob, many thanks for all those tips and will use them wisely!

most email accounts--yahoo and gmail, for example, only allow 25mb. most of my songs are between 3 and 4 minutes and they are about 40-55 mb. so, i use mediafire or 4shared, or some other sharing site, to upload the file send them the link and let them download it. it takes about 5 minutes to upload the file but usually 30 seconds or less to download. these would be in the wav format. mp3s, to me, make things sound weird and so i keep away from them. note that you can also use soundcloud as mentioned previously.

yes, bob gives us all great ideas continually!!!

play music!

That's what I thought. I just looked through my soundcloud account, is there an option to download? I can only find an upload option.

While everything Bob says certainly will help the process (formats, click track, bpm), it's not strictly necessary. I did a project a couple years ago where we recorded kids at a group sing-along: no set tempo and audio off a half-decent camera mic (Rode VideoMic Pro). I got the audio as a wav, slurped it into Audacity, and added another guitar track and a mandolin track. Done very simply.

You can hear the result here:


The hardest part was fitting the guitar/mando at the start and the end to the live kids audio in the middle. Fortunately, my tempo at the sing-along was consistent enough to make it happen without too much trouble.

Follow a few of Bob's recommendations and it will be a piece of cake.

Sound Cloud certainly could be a lot more intuitive.
When you are logged into your page.
In the black tool bar across the top, go to your user name and click
In the drop down window go to the bottom click "Tracks"
Under "Your Tracks" check the track/s you want to make downloadable and then click the "Edit * tracks" box at the top and in the dropdown click "Permissions" then check the "Enable downloads"

whoops, wrong thread.

THANK YOU OP and all who are participating. This is the kind of thread that makes the AGF so valuable to us uneducated grasshoppers.