Ceri Charlton is from Barry, an ex-docking town in South Wales, UK. He’s been doing online musical collaborations over the last 10 years and has some interesting experiences/feedback to share. In this interview he explains which tools and methods he used at the very beginning – with him and his partners running on Fruity Loops – and how things evolved to his current method: he and his partner already working on Reason 4 and planning to go for Reason 5 as soon as it’s released. He also talks a bit about the mixing process in a collaborative environment and which features he’d like to see on the Ohm Studio. You can listen to Ceri’s most recent collaborative productions here, they will make a nice soundtrack while you read the lines below…

Who are your musical partners and where are they from?

The main guy I work with at the moment is called Straker and he’s from Worcester, which is just over the border from me, in England. In the past, I’ve collaborated online with people from all over the world, Australia, Holland, Germany, Sweden, France, America, Chile.

So online collaboration has been a important role on your musical path?

Very important indeed. I think that’s one of the benefits of the internet from a social point of view is that you can “meet” people who you’d otherwise never bump into. From a musical point of view, this is particularly important. A lot of people talk nowadays globalisation and cultural homogenisation but, unless you live in a big city, if you have any sort of niche or indie musical tastes, you’ll really struggle to meet significant numbers of people with the same interest. Of these, only a small proportion will be making music that you’re into, so your prospective ‘partners’ are fairly limited. The internet takes away these restrictions that your physical location imposes.

At the beginning, how was using Fruity Loops for your collaborative productions?

I think the first thing I ever collaborated online with was Fruityloops 3.xx.xx, one of those really long version numbers that contained all the details of the patch level! In terms of collaboration, one of the best things was being able to save a file containing all samples used as well as the actual track itself and then ship that one zipped file off to whoever you wanted to share it with. Prior to that, it was limited to exchanging CD-rs, and even floppy disks with a very small group of school friends.

The other nice thing was that it came bundled with some samples, FX and synths, in one particular collaboration, we agreed to stick to just these, to keep files sizes down (so that it was mainly just a glorified midi file and patch data being sent).

Both these things were such big benefits and gave so much freedom to edit/tweak the other person’s material that at the time I only really sough out collaborations with people who would work in Fruity Loops too. I remember experimenting with ’remixing’ style collaborations where the other person gave you a set of .wav files and (if it wasn’t obvious) Continue reading ‘South Wales’ producer Ceri Charlton shares his experiences of almost 10 years of online music collaborations, talks about his methods and tools…’