Hi
everyone!...can I just start with a serious recommendation?…NEVER get on
a cross channel ferry without a good book or an mp3 player…otherwise,
like me, you’ll end up staring out to sea in the middle of the night,
half way between Le Havre and Portsmouth, cooking up ridiculous plans
for mass collaborations on Soundcloud.
Anyway, here is the result, your big Soundcloud collaboration,
featuring 230 samples from 200 contributors associated with 176
different Soundcloud accounts in 38 different countries. Lists of
contributors and countries are found at the bottom of this introduction.
I might be able to find you if you can't find yourself, but it will
take me a while...suffice to say, I'm in there myself and I was never
once aware of hearing my own voice when I was making the track...even
though I know it's there.
This was always meant to be a project that celebrated the
international creative community that is Soundcloud but I quickly
discovered that if you ask people to contribute, they very quickly make
it their own. The contributions included children from all over the
world, two dogs, some lovely vocal lines, whispers, growls, and, all the
way from the Phillippines, Gnetsound’s beautiful song that you hear at
the beginning; her words are the most perfect summary of what Soundcloud
is all about for so many of us.
Frank sent me recordings despite being literally up to his ankles in
the Bangkok floods, Sophie Cabana sent me Niffy’s bark…Niffy the dog
was gravely ill and had been Sophie’s faithful friend for 16 years, Paul
Sale rounded up his entire family, circle of friends and his dinner
guests from Burundi, Mark sent me recordings of his twin sons, then told
me that, born prematurely, they had taken years to speak, and I
realised what a precious sound I had been entrusted with. My own little
boy Isaac is in there, and my older daughter Siobhan as well, though
she’s got her own Soundcloud account and a musical life of her own...in
fact she is the one who introduced me to Soundcloud a year ago.
Technically, the track is 100% your voices….I’m not sure I should
say who’s a hihat or a kick drum! My old PC just couldn’t cope, so it
was all done on my Macbook with Reason 6, using 16 virtual samplers,
each loaded with a sample assigned to each key, individually classified,
edited and panned. The main problem apart from the time involved, was
the fact that the bite point for each sample was not at the beginning of
the wav, so quantising was useless and all notes had to individually
played and dragged around until they were rhythmically where they needed
to be.
Anyway, it’s been a huge amount of fun….I just finally want to say
thank you to the Soundcloud Community Team for really getting behind the
whole idea…these guys are doing a great job in general…big thanks also
to Geoff and Pete for their technical input....and of course a MASSIVE
shout out to all of you for taking part….it’s been a real life-affirming
experience.
Much love and respect
Dave McKeown,
dietriangle and 200 more!