Inverted Cyberjam

[ClavinovaGuy]

Usually when I do a collaboration, it starts with some sort of framework - drums, rhythm, etc. This one from about a year and a half ago is just the opposite - a guy posted a guitar melody by itself, and the challenge was to come up with a complete backing. Try this out when you have too much time on your hands - waaaaay too much fun, and fascinating to see how differently people perceive the same piece of music.

Here's the melody we started with (with a click track):
http://www.bradprestonmusic.com/inverted_cyberjam_melody.mp3

Here's my take, all tracks (other than the melody) done on my 209:
http://www.bradprestonmusic.com/InvertedJam-Brad.mp3

Here's the one I thought was most clever of the bunch:
http://www.bradprestonmusic.com/InvertedJam-CaptRusty.mp3

And the song as originally imagined by the guy who wrote it:
http://www.bradprestonmusic.com/InvertedJam-Buckster.mp3

[Andreas]

Hi Brad,
thanks for posting these tunes. I loaded them all, but are too busy at the moment to listen to them carefully, so I will do that next week when I am back from my conference this weekend.
One question: How do you work your backing out with an audiofile, because on the CVP you can only work with midifiles?

[ClavinovaGuy]

I just run a line from the computer to the mic-in on the Clavinova so I can hear the audio track while I'm playing along with it. I just keep working with it like that until I'm ready to press "Record".

[Andreas]

Ok, after that you have two tracks, one midi from the cvp and one audio. How do you get these together?

[ClavinovaGuy]

I record each CVP track separately to the PC, and mix them together using Cool Edit Pro, combining them with the original audio track. It's pretty easy to slide the tracks around to get them synchronized properly, and then add other effects, such as panning, reverb, and so forth.

[Andreas]

I thought, that you do it with your computer. I don´t have this possibility because my soundcard is too weak and I don´t have a sequenzer software. I do all my audiorecordings with a zoom multitracker which is connected to my cvp. Probably, if I will do such project, I can play the audiofile converted to a wav. file from my cd player through the cvp and record that together with the cvp tracks to the zoomtracker. But that will be a bit tricky because of synchronplay of the tracks...

[ClavinovaGuy]

I think this Audacity software is free, if you want to give it a try:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

N-track Studio also has a free version, but it inserts some noise into your mixdown until you buy it. There are probably some other free multi-track programs out there.