I have a good friend with whom I always talk music. But I'm a synth/electronic guy and he's a guitar/rock guy, so we have very different sets of knowledge and approach music and sound from very different perspectives.
Despite that, we've wanted to collaborate on tracks for a while. Every time we try though, I feel like we never make any real progress, in part because we come from totally different musical worlds. So I'm seeking tips on how to collaborate successfully with such people.
Here's a grab bag of specific questions on this topic that I've had:
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How important is it that you share similar tastes in music? I would say our tastes do overlap, but not enormously. I don't mean that we dislike large swathes of each other's musical tastes, but more that the tracks we independently create sound very different. So when collaborating, should we seek to create something in the middle, or just do one track more my style and another more his style?
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How do you navigate situations where you don't really like or get someone else's contribution? I don't mean where you think it sucks, but for instance, maybe they want a ton of reverb on an instrument whereas you think it sounds better with little bit. How do you meet in the middle?
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How do you start a track when multiple people are involved? What has worked for you?
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Once you start a track, how to you keep making progress? How do you share ideas when you can't constantly get physically together in the same space to jam?
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How do you keep the creative productivity flowing if you and your partner have different workflows? In our case, he is much more proficient at on-the-fly jamming (on the guitar), whereas I can't really play keys well so rely much more on drawing notes on a MIDI timeline?
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How do you work together if you have vastly different areas of knowledge? For instance, he knows nothing about synthesis, while I am pretty knowledgeable and can bang out interesting sounds quickly. If I create a patch and he wants it to change in a particular way, he can't always communicate what's in his head in a way I can understand, and he certainly couldn't take the controls and tweak the synth to his specifications. So that has been a struggle for us. How to deal?
These are obviously very general questions, and there are surely other considerations when collaborating. I'm just interested to hear your thoughts on strategies that have worked for you when collaborating with people who come from a different musical world.
Submitted January 26, 2018 at 07:54PM by synthphreak https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/comments/7t8f9x/tips_for_collaborating_with_people_with_different/?utm_source=ifttt