Music Collab - 2025-(3)

MusicExchange
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@MusicExchange-VIP

Our studio is an online platform for music creation, and our goal is to build a community of artists who work together to create incredible music. Our studio is also educational, designed to help all our members share ideas and discuss technology tools, compositional methods, and musical techniques.

We are building an exciting and fun community environment for music creation, recording, and collaboration with anyone in any location. We plan to incorporate music composition, performance, creation, and production.

We recently built a great collab, “Brazil”—a song from 1939—and we incorporated many interesting music and technology tools to complete this work.

MusicExchange members can listen to our extensive collab thread and listen to the various stages of progress here:

Brazil Collab: https://softart.io/music-exchange/19988/studio-2-collab-brazil-g-maj

Now we are excited to launch the next collab and look forward to input from MusicExchange members in the comments below!

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@MichaelSlattery - Our first collab together was a real success, and I am excited about the next one and ready to start our new collab!

I wanted to open this discussion about some general topics like collabs, producing, and publishing. As far as publishing, I am still doing research and trying to figure out what is going to work best for my music. I think the publishing options are really an individual decision since there are so many streaming platforms now to choose from. Each person/artist should think about their goals, their technology preferences, and how much time they want to spend on preparing their music for the distribution/streaming platforms.

Below are a couple of questions to open this discussion:

New Collab Ideas:

  • Do you have any original music that you would like to develop for this next collab?
  • I have an old cover tune in mind; it might take a bit of work, so is that something you’re interested in?
  • @CharlieDong , @Raphi, @NeilAwasthi - Would you guys like to join in this next collab? Is there any particular original music that you would like our team to develop and record?

Publishing Ideas:

  • Do you listen to any particular streaming platforms often—like Spotify, SoundCloud, etc ?
  • If we decided to develop/collab/produce and publish your original music, what would be your overall goals?
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@MusicExchange-VIP

@Chris - I like your thoughts about the distribution/streaming platforms. The one I use the most is Spotify. Some days, it’s just a minute or two of listening, but when I get a chance and if I’m also in a receptive mood, I sometimes listen to Spotify a lot. I like the idea of contributing to music that ends up on Spotify, and possibly on other streaming services too. My main goals at this point are to get to know other musical people and to collaborate with them.

Would you tell us what the old cover tune is, and why it would take some work? That sounds like a great option.

It also sounds like we may be able to work on more than one project at a time, or that projects could overlap each other in terms of the timing of their development, so I’d also be excited to hear and possibly contribute to original music that other members here may have conceived of or partially composed, or music they’ve composed but not fully arranged.

A related thought I had was about some drum ideas that I would like to get help with, in terms of fitting other instrument parts to them. I imagined bringing a few of these ideas to the table and asking other members to help add to them, and that could lead to exchanging lots of ideas and imagining different directions that the composition could move in, while remaining true to any aspects of the original ideas that all of us heard as strong or good. But even if nothing from the initial ideas made it into the later versions, that would be okay. I especially like to imagine making music out of combinations of ideas we create together. Does this or something like it sound appealing? (This last paragraph overlaps a lot with the previous paragraph, in my mind.)

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@MusicExchange-VIP

@MichaelSlattery - Very cool that you’re on our discourse now! This is a great discussion platform to work out our ideas before we start the collab threads. I want to answer each of your questions below:

Streaming Platforms—Yes, we share the same objectives here. One of our main goals with MusicExchange is to collab with others, generate fresh ideas, and eventually publish original music onto Spotify and all major streaming platforms.

Your Drum Ideas - YES, would absolutely love to work with your drum ideas. I will be glad to help with fitting other instrument parts to them. Please, yes, bring any of your original ideas to the table and we will encourage other members to help add parts :slight_smile:

IDEA For Next Collab - Cover Tune - I was thinking of a cover tune by the “Gypsy Kings”, a Grammy Award-winning musical group from France. It will take some work, because the tempos are upbeat, and we should have a lot of drum and horn section hits/fills, and we really need a keyboard player.

@Raphi - I wanted to check with you and see if you had time to record a piano/keyboard track on our next collab? Also, do you have an electric keyboard? We might also need piano tracks when we start publishing original music onto Spotify and other streaming platforms! Raphi - I know you are busy with school, but are you available for some online recording?

We want to record and publish original music at some point, but for now, maybe we can try one of these cover songs below. I might prefer to try “Volare”, shown in the second video below:

Here are YouTube links to two songs I like, and we can try one in our next collab:

NOTE: I actually know the bass player in the video above, and got to hang with him and talk about music and touring. I was very lucky to perform with this amazing bass player - Xavier Padilla - from Gypsy Kings shown on stage in the above video. We worked together for a bit in China when I was the foreign music manager for a jazz club near the Hong Kong border.

@MichaelSlattery - “Volare” (Nel Blu di Pinto di Blu)—written and performed by Domenico Modugno in 1958, is one of the most famous and successful European songs of all time and has been covered countless times.

Many versions have been recorded at a medium to slower tempo; however, the Gypsy Kings recorded a very up-tempo version below. Please reply and let me know if you think we can pull this off and record this in our online studio? I think this might be the best cover song for our next collab:

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@MusicExchange-VIP

@Chris - Yes, I think we can make “Volare” work, even at a similar tempo to the Gipsy Kings version! (I’m assuming that the version on their 1989 Mosaique album is the same or very similar to the music in this official video.)

Since their version has so much acoustic guitar, do you think we should substitute other virtual instruments in those roles, or would it be fine to have a more simple/basic arrangement? (Like drums, percussion, bass, piano, and trumpet, mainly, or something like that, plus some other occasional instruments in spots here and there.)

Would your trumpet play some solos like the acoustic guitar does? I could also come up with a melodic solo on a virtual instrument for one of those solo passages.

How about their intro, which is very fluid in terms of tempo? Would we rework that somehow?

I like the part towards the end of the track where it sounds like a keyboard is playing like a violin section. I could do something along those lines, but also different/unique.

I like a lot of the rhythms in this track, too. It could be cool to have that iconic percussion note that signals the beginning of each chorus (except the first one) be a little different each time in our version. For example, the main sound could be the same (off to one side like their version has it), but other percussion sounds could join in on that note, different ones each time.

I’m listening to some of my drum recordings, looking for ideas to bring to the collaborative table for another of our projects. It’ll probably take me some days to listen to the selections that I’m especially interested in, and after that I’ll try to translate a few of the ideas into virtual drum tracks, so other people can get a better idea of what they’ll actually sound like, since my drum set is very muted, and probably sounds more like an unusual percussion setup than like a typical drum set.

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Hey @MichaelSlattery - I just finished an 8-day run of gigs, with 2 or 3 restaurants per night! Last week, I was also hired at another new restaurant, so now I have a total of 6 restaurants per week—whew! I was super busy last week and just now able to reply; thanks for your patience.

Cool, since you think we can pull it off, I will go ahead and set up the next collab page.

Yes - I think we should have a more simple, basic arrangement :slight_smile:

Good idea—maybe you could write a harmonized melody/soli that the trumpet and your virtual instrument could play together?

NOTE: “In music, a solo features a single performer, while a soli features an entire section of an ensemble playing a prominent musical line together.”

Yes - we need to workout/write our own unique intro—for this one, I would like a long and slow introduction to highlight that beautiful melody, then lead in and hit the fast tempo groove.

All your ideas about percussion and hits and using virtual drums instead of your muted drums sound great. I would like to incorporate all your ideas into this collab and start to build our own online studio team.

Since I have not heard back from @Raphi - I may need to just create the keyboard parts myself, which is fine, no problem. I am very interested in building a long-term online studio musician team, with each member able to record from any location, and actually focus on landing paying studio work. It may take time to find all the right players, but we can start with you and me and Charlie. In fact, @CharlieDong is not only a trumpet player, but also a very talented piano player and singer, especially in Japanese pop songs—and he sings in fluent Japanese and Chinese. He is only 15 years old, but a real young gem, and in the future he can be a powerhouse studio musician!

Ok - I will start setting up the page for this new collab, and I am really excited about this new “Volare” collab!

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@MusicExchange-VIP

@MichaelSlattery - Hey this is Raphi. I am the piano player that forgot to respond sorry. But I can definitely record piano parts for Volare. I love that song.

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@Raphi - That’s awesome! I’m so glad you’ll be contributing piano recordings.

@Chris - Everything you wrote here sounds good, including the soli part. I love your idea about building our own online studio team! And congratulations on all your restaurant gigs, including the new one!

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@MichaelSlattery - I am very excited about moving forward with all your ideas. On my end, I am really overbooked in weekly performances now, so I am trying to slow down a bit and reduce the number of restaurant gigs to allow more time for our online studio.

There are still a few things to setup for the new “Studio_1” area, but I am working that, which is necessary for the new collab. I also thought maybe we could try something new before we start this new collab: IDEA - Maybe, if our schedules allow, we can gather the studio team together for a Zoom meeting before we start the new collab?

Studio Team Zoom Meeting - Possible Dates / Times: I could meet on Zoom this Saturday OCT 18 at 12pm noon. @Raphi , @CharlieDong - Would any of you guys be available - SAT - OCT 18 at 12pm noon - to meet on Zoom?

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Saturday at noon works for me.

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Sounds great, Michael. We are on for tomorrow! Also @CharlieDong replied and said he wants to be there. Not sure about @Raphi, but hopefully Raphi can join us also! Everyone can just use the normal Music Exchange Zoom Link, or use the same link as your Zoom lessons.

Excited to get the studio team together, and see you guys tomorrow at 12pm noon on Zoom!

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@CharlieDong , @MichaelSlattery - Thanks for joining our Zoom today and taking the time to meet each other and chat about collabs and music creation. I did get a note from our piano player, @Raphi, that said he could not make it because he had a previously scheduled performance.

It was very interesting listening to each other’s music and discussing how each work was created. Charlie did not use any electronics; he simply sat at the piano and played a really nice Japanese pop song cover.

Michael had a very interesting piece that had an electronic music feel, with nice progressions, nice layering, and some interesting solo runs. I believe his track was created primarily using a computer with a mouse, with some additional parts that he played on via MIDI keyboard.

Lastly, we listened to one of my more esoteric tracks, which I created using a different method altogether. On my track, I played 3 trumpet parts—two trumpets to create an interval/horn section sound. Then I played the lead trumpet with various effects and a bit of distortion on top to emulate an electric guitar sound. All the other instruments and drum groove underneath the trumpets were created using AI.

Thanks again, guys, for getting together on Zoom today! I learned from both of you and am excited about launching our new “Volare” collab.