Victor Stone, the musician and producer responsible for the Magnatune Remixed project
http://magnatune.com/artists/four_stones
is working with Magnatune artist C. Layne http://magnatune.com/artists/clayne and he's been producing/re-engineering C. Layne's newest songs with great results.
The thing that's really exciting to me is that C Layne is an incredible song-writer, but lacks polish and music production experience, while Victor is strong both as a producer/remixer, and as a musician in his own right (some of the C Layne tracks are reperformed by Victor to exactly mimic C Layne's original performance but with a cleaner sound).
You can hear his Victor/C-Layne's current works-in-progress at:
http://fourstones.net/inproduction
Victor tells me that he's started work with the ultra-talented Lisa DeBenedictis http://magnatune.com/artists/debenedictis along similar lines.
This kind of cooperation really excites me, because it's nurturing talented people to develop their art. Music is mostly a nasty, dog-eat-dog business, and I don't think this sort of talent development happens too often. I'm reminded of the 1950's Science Fiction Magazine editors, who honestly engaged their submission authors to help them hone their craft, yielding a flowering in science fiction writing. I'm hoping for a similar outcome in music.
This is "music to my ears". I have recently submitted my entire portfolio of electronically composed songs (over 80 at this point) to Magantune in the hopes that they can be used in exactly the way you describe.
One thing that I wonder about is whether you have considered allowing composers to also offer MIDI versions of the songs along with any loops used to create the composistion. This could be offered at a higher price and could radcially enable people to work with a composition at a much more basic level. Maybe this is already going on behind the scenes with your service.
Posted by: William Radcliffe | March 11, 2004 at 09:43 AM
the c. layne stuff sounds awesome...
Posted by: Lisa D | March 18, 2004 at 03:58 PM