The EM Poll

Band on the Web

Jul 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Gino Robair

           

Sucia's (www.suciamusic.com) first release, I Want My Records Back, offers compelling songs, tight grooves, and luscious vocals with an intimate, somewhat voyeuristic quality that is downright irresistible. Yet the members of the band — vocalist and lyricist Sheah, keyboardist Norville, and guitarist David Schmidt — shared the same studio only once.

Sucia began when Norville saw Sheah perform at San Francisco's Liquid club. The chemistry between the two was immediate, and they soon began putting her words to his beats. Norville's subsequent move to Los Angeles, however, made further collaboration difficult, and Norville enlisted San Francisco-based guitarist David Schmidt to help maintain the band's momentum.

Because of the distance between them, Schmidt set up an FTP site for sharing files. Norville and Schmidt used Propellerhead's Reason, which yields small files thanks to the program's common sound library. Larger AIFF files were used for swapping guitar and vocal overdubs.

The convenience of collaborating in this way led Schmidt to create the OpenMusicProject (www.openmusicproject.net), a site designed for Web-based musical collaboration, primarily among Reason users (see the March 2002 “Web Page”). “Reason is an incredibly efficient program for putting together high-quality music,” says Schmidt. “You can cut and paste a quick arrangement and ride the wave of inspiration because you're not bogged down by the tedium of a linear, tape-oriented recording.”

Once the basic tracks were created in Reason, Norville and Schmidt used MOTU Digital Performer and Macromedia SoundEdit 16 for tracking vocal and guitar overdubs. These were later made into samples for use in Reason's NN19 sampler. The final mixes were exported as 24-bit AIFF files for mastering in IK Multimedia's T-RackS24.

While the tracks were flying back and forth over the Web, Sheah developed the lyrics for each piece. “We would give her something on CD to work with as a preview,” Schmidt says. On the energetic “Ordinary,” Norville penned the lyrics and added his own voice in the mix. The song also features distinctive samples from Count Zero's outstanding release Robots Anonymous (see the February 2002 “Pro/File”).

Although the results of the long-distance collaboration are stellar, Schmidt admits there are good and bad points to working this way. “I felt a bit frustrated in terms of communication: working over the Internet is not the same as a face-to-face session,” he says. “However, I liked the fact I could take my time on guitar parts without having someone looking over my shoulder.”