Indaba

While watching clips of  the Colbert Report online, I came across an interview of a guy who had started an online music collaboration site,  indabamusic.com.

The concept for this site is fairly simple. Indaba, inspired by it’s eponymous African word for gathering, started out as a group of grad students who used an online file-sharing site to create and mix house beats. As soon as the creators of the site realized the potential for music creation that it had, they turned the site into a free world-wide music mixing forum.

At first I was really excited about seeing what this site was really about. In his interview on the Colbert Report, one of the site’s founders described the first collaboration that occurred on Indaba. He said that he, two of his close friends, a man from Libya and a lawyer in some former Soviet republic all worked together to create a dance remix of an Eminem song. This got me psyched to check out what kind of music people have created on Indaba. A lot of times, I find that bands are really limited by the range of music they are exposed to. Some  groups have a tendency to produce better, more interesting music as they go through lineup changes, and I thought that creating music through an online medium might really jump start the artistic process.

When I got around to actually logging on to Indaba, I have to admit that I was disappointed. Though there were  few techno mixes that sounded decent, they were pretty lackluster. The people who were doing the electronic music on Indaba obviously weren’t professional d.j.’s, and I could tell that they were all adding cookie cutter samples. The treble and bass on the different track lines that people added weren’t ever leveled correctly, and in a couple of instances, people even put in tracks that were the wrong tempo.

The selection of rock and blues on Indaba was even more disappointing. There were definitely a few artists on the site who were really good, and the tracks they initially laid down sounded good. However, other users often added riffs and solos that didn’t fit with the original mood of the song, and alltogether brought down the song to a lower level.

After thinking it over, I realize that Indaba is a good concept, but it really doesn’t substitute sitting in a room with another musician to compose a song. As it is, the site could be good for brainstorming. A d.j. who has songwriters block could log on and potentially get some great ideas, but I don’t think that any finished product will come directly  from this site.