Remote Working

If your music deserves the best musicians, the Internet provides the means to find them. We test the three leading on-line session services.

Sam Inglis

Technological change has had a profound effect on music over the last decade. Downloading and peer-to-peer sharing have contributed to nosediving CD sales and the decline of the singles market, while at the same time, home studio technology has made it possible to realise ever more ambitious recording projects on ever-smaller budgets.

The same revolution has also changed the lives of many professional musicians. With recording budgets shrinking and studios closing, it’s harder than ever to earn a living as a ‘session man’ in the old mould. The silver lining, if there is one, is that there is still a demand for quality musicianship, and the Internet now makes it possible for musicians to sell their services directly to anyone who wants to buy them, anywhere in the world.

Nevertheless, it’s definitely a buyer’s market. So if you are a buyer — in other words, a producer or songwriter looking to add remote talent to your recordings — what’s the best way to spend your money? It turns out that there are several very different approaches to working with session musicians on-line, and in this article, I’ll be comparing some of the leading web sites that offer on-line recording services. For a little light relief, I’ll put the results up to be downloaded from the SOS web site (see box, right), although, for reasons I’ll explain, you probably shouldn’t put much weight on them in choosing a service for your own music.

Before I introduce the services I tested, a brief word on what this article isn’t about. There are a number of web sites aimed primarily at fostering creative collaboration between musicians, usually with little or no money changing hands — examples include digitalmusician.net and kompoz.com. Hopefully we’ll find space to cover these in a separate article at some point. There are also various plug-ins and applications that allow you to set up real-time remote recording, such as Source Elements’ Source-Connect, eJamming Audio, NINJAM and Bitwaves MusicBeam, but these won’t handle the business side of finding and hiring session players. Finally, there are a lot of musicians, especially drummers, who offer their services independently via their own web sites.

The Contenders

In this article, I’m going to narrow the focus to web sites that offer professional recordings of at least the basic instruments that make up a typical rock and pop arrangement: drums, bass, keyboards and guitar. I tested three services, each of which turned out to have a quite different focus and philosophy.

As well as tracking individual instrument parts for you, all of these services also offer complete production of your tracks from start to finish. However, I suspect that will be of less interest to the typical SOS reader, so I tried to approach all of the services from the point of view of a songwriter/producer who is happy to record his own vocals and guitar, and to mix the results, but doesn’t have the facilities or playing ability to track real drums, keyboards or bass.

The Test

Sometime last year I was seized with the irrational desire to write an old-fashioned Christmas song. Having only ever got around to recording a horrible demo, I decided this would be the perfect testing ground, even if it turned out to be rather unseasonal! I had recorded basic guitar parts that were OK, but my MIDI drums were sounding pretty tired, I don’t own a bass, and I wanted to hear what a proper keyboard player could add. (The answer, it turns out, is “quite a lot”.) I also wanted the whole thing to have a coherent sound, along the lines of those ‘dead but warm’ productions from the ’70s. In order to create a level playing field, I noted all this down and sent the same instructions to all the services on test.

The Missing Track

The most straightforward of the services on test is The Missing Track, which calls upon the skills of a small group of musicians. Hiring The Missing Track is a pleasant and very informal process: you fill in an order form on their web site, they get back to you with a quote, and so forth. Once you’ve agreed exactly what they’ll be doing for you and how much you’ll be paying, you’ll get a Work Agreement, and you can upload any demo files you’d like them to work to. You should then get your finished files within a week.

Like most of their rivals, The Missing Track will record and produce a song from scratch if you wish; alternatively, they can provide any or all of drums, bass, guitar and keyboards. I found the informal nature of the service very helpful in narrowing down exactly what I wanted. You’re not forced to choose between a number of preset options; instead, you can explain what it is you’re after in your order form or subsequent emails. Likewise, if there’s anything they’re uncertain about, they’ll send you a friendly email to clarify matters.

The Missing Track is also likely to work out the most affordable of the services on test. A complete production, including recording, arrangement and mixing, works out at a very reasonable $269, and rates for individual instruments are similarly competitive. Each individual instrument will cost you $45, with the exception of drums, where $65 gets you individual files for kick, snare, overhead and room mics. For the test track, I asked for drums, bass and Rhodes piano, which would therefore have clocked in at $155 in total. When you think about how much it would cost to rent even a small studio for a few hours, not to mention paying conventional session musicians, the word ‘bargain’ springs to mind. The parts, incidentally, were all delivered as stereo stem tracks, with some processing, such as gating on snare and kick, already applied.

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Remote Working

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