About project:chorus

project:chorus is a meta-band, where the members get together to write and record songs. For each style there's a project, where songs congregate and eventually form themselves into more traditional albums.

Firstly, this isn't about profit or fame, although we'll gladly take some of that if you're passing it around. The ultimate goal here is to produce quality songs, and group those into decent sounding albums.

The two rules for quality are:

1. You would not skip it in a random playlist
2. You do not cringe on playback due to technical errors

It's a creative outlet for music and supporting artwork, like cover art or promotional material.

project:chorus was officially released into the wild on 8th October, 2009.

Not yet. Although we're getting very close!

We hold Piete largely responsible for getting project:chorus off the ground. In his own words:

I wanted to get back into writing, but since moving from university, I'm rarely geographically close with any of the great people I've worked with and count as friends. I'd been thinking about ways of collaboration, but every past effort had a very slow turn around time and tended not to be focused enough to produce anything of serious quality or substance.

I wanted to get all my ideas organised and available and invite my friends to do the same and help me out with producing an album.

Add enough people into the mix, and the average motivation level should go up enough to keep us all occupied. Keep the turn around fast and that sounds like a recipe for collaboration!

I thought “what better way to test out my latest crazy idea than roping my friends into it?”

What better way indeed! So far we've not lynched him or sent him too many abusive emails, but that's always subject to change.

It is a great excuse to keep in touch, to keep each other motivated, and of course: to rock.

The member list may be found here.

It all starts with an idea that someone's had, and shared (usually as a recording, but sometimes just lyrics or as an idea for a story) with Google Wave. Since the announced closure of Wave, we've started to use Dropbox and the wiki more to hold persistent ideas.

After the idea comes the development: Skype combined with the real-time chat features of Wave (now moving to Etherpad) give us an opportunity to explore and work on the song in bite-sized chunks.

Technically, the recording portion was originally accomplished using Audacity projects that were version controlled using Git, but that wasn't fantastically successful. Now there's some experimentation with other recorders and DAWs, including REAPER and Rosegarden.

Lots of scratch recordings and ideas are thrown down early and often during development, and shared around. This continues until there's natural end to the song.

Because we can't record multiple people playing over Skype, we multitrack everything and share it around to get a click track.

Finally, when the song is finished and the parts are all worked out, we start on the proper recording.

More sharing and reviewing, and then into the mixdown and release.