If you're a music producer, you know the sometimes painstakingly difficult sharing options for you to collaborate with a fellow artist. As someone who collaborates on music with his brother 400 km away I know the feeling all to well. Everything takes that much longer and the sparks don't fly they crawl. Many platforms can be used to share files – Dropbox, email, or other large-file-sharing programs – but none have been created to solve music related problems specifically. Cue Splice, a music collaboration platform founded by Steve Martocci and Matt Aimonetti that aims to rectify this somewhat annoying situation. Splice looks to add value to your existing digital audio workstations, like Ableton or other DAWs, to create a shareable, multi-access workflow for audio production.
The key is with version control. Martocci explains, as quoted in an interview with Billboard Magazine:
“Trying to work on software without version control is impossible: you’re overriding files, you don’t know what changed, people can’t work on two things at the same time. Splice gives collaborators the ability to view and open previous revisions of projects while automatically downloading all missing files, sample packs and plugin presets.”
Think the Github of music – for those of you that know the service, it's a collaborative version-control system used by computer programmers. It acts as both a social network for programmers around the world, as well as a way of collaborating and working on code. This kind of service doesn't yet exist for music collaboration, and with $2.75 million in funding Martocci and Aimonetti are obviously on to something. There's also the educational aspect; with the ability to identify stems, samples, plugins, and technical changes made with each save, musicians can track and learn as they go. Producers can learn technique, arrangement, composition, and more, all in one place.
As a promotion for the app, French DJ duo, Alesia, currently signed to Skrillex’s OWSLA label, have created a new song exclusively on Splice. Go check that out here. It's a hard-hitting, bass-heavy track with almost evil, gritty synth stabs that would blow up a club. It's a great promotion as they're getting a ton of attention from it, and displays the possibilities of Splice in its finest.
The service is currently invite only but never fear we've got some early access codes for EARMILK artists. Follow these steps to get them:
Sign up and set a username. 2. Tweet your new username in this tweet: [Insert Username] wants to #getspliced with @ALESIAmusic, @splice, and @EARMILK : https://splice.com/explore/7E3C4841-D381-4B3E-B751-C0D19D81D5E1
- Alesia on Facebook
- Alesia on Twitter
- Alesia on Soundcloud
