Keith is from Los Angeles and Arthur from Burbank, both towns in California (USA) and virtually not that far from each other. But the LA megalopolis and its speedy life boost distances and these two friends found on online music collaboration their efficient method to evolve their musical duo. Things started in 2002, when they still used to attend high school.  At that time Keith and Arthur used to play together in a few rock bands; then the university put the duo apart and both have discovered computer based music, that became a passion ever since. Among their several projects, Cuello Nectar is currently their official one: electronic music with high doses of hispanic vibes.

1 – What is your current method for online music collaboration?

It’s been already a year that we’re using Ableton Live with Dropbox and its fantastic. Before we tried sending sessions over AIM or even sending Mp3 files by e-mail (which gave us some cool resampling ideas) but now with Dropbox we keep all of our sessions for our various projects in a 50Gb account ($10 a month) and we are always in sync and working on the same stuff. Wether I am at work, at home on my desktop, or on my laptop in a cafe. I can add to our music or make up a new track and in minutes its on his computer. I also use it to collaborate with other friends or share samples I’ve made by sharing a folder with them or giving them a public link.

Literally we can work on tracks in a day, and have them be 90% done. I work 2 hours, he works 2 hours, and and back to me or editing and mixing and its done. We just directly share the folder where we save the project, together with all project files and sub-folders, no zipping or unpacking. We’re both on Macs, but I have an old G5 and he’s on a more recent Intel one, so he don’t have some of my old plug-ins that are not UB. Regarding this plug-in issue, I usually deal with by freezing the track if its a synth. If its a processor (compressor, reverb) I usually don’t worry about it because it’s only me who do the final mix and Live has no problem working with sets with missing plug-ins, so it’s Ok for our specific case. So any saves he makes I can open up and my plug-ins are still there with my settings.

Sometimes, when track counts get high, we add tracks to a session with a rough mix to save CPU for and lower latency for recording. Continue reading ‘American electronic music duo talks about their current collaboration methods and Ohm Studio expectations…’

British techie magazine Click made a 5 page feature about the Ohm Studio in their recent June edition! For all the guys in UK it’s just about going to the news agent, but for the rest of the world to purchase this mag could be more complicated, so we scanned the article in a quality good enough for reading it. We scanned page by page, here they are: Page1, Page2, Page3, Page4 and Page5…