Confessions of an avowed guitar player who loves BandLab

Granted I am the newest of newbies over at BandLab, but how did I not know about this before? Somehow word did not get out properly in the circles I run in about this new social media platform.
 
And that, turns out, is pretty much what it is. Imagine a social media network for musicians that combines the best of Facebook, GarageBand and SoundCloud. That's at least how it strikes me. So, you set up profile pages like you would on a Facebook or MySpace, and then you either compose your own tunes, or go collaborate with others on their songs. You can then share these songs with the community or the world at large.
 
It is also (or, will be very soon) a great network for finding music related work or people to collaborate with. But instead of merely posting a resume of past gigs, you can actually show people what you can do just using the tools available in BandLab.
 
The tools are here should you want to show someone that you can get together some great grooves or beats (DJ). Or maybe you want to show off your guitar playing prowess (Session Guitar Player). Or, maybe you want to show how adept you are at bringing like minded folks together to collaborate on a track (Producer)?
 
In many ways this is like a sketch pad for getting various projects off the ground. But that is not to say you can’t also use it to crank out great sounding finished products.
 
I am just getting going now, but I can envision this becoming a very cool tool moving forward for this community. Maybe everything really does happen for a reason.
 
Here's a cool review I found: http://tadtheapp.com/bandlab-review/

My earlier enthusiasm has been tempered a bit on the BandLab thing. It is surely a very cool thing, but I'm just not sure at this point if it's possible to use this tool in the way I had originally envisioned.
 
I see how you can tap into the loop bundles and drag those onto the timeline to build up beds of sound. In fact, this aspect of BandLab reminded me of an old loop based app called Acid that I was familiar with. That is all well and good, and I can see how, maybe if you aren't an advanced musician, that it could be satisfying to layer together tracks in this manner and call them your own. But what if you like to do everything yourself like me?
 
I was originally thinking of this tool as a great way for those of us in the Sonar community to, sort of, guest appear on each other's projects. I was thinking we could use it as a platform to collaborate with each other since the DAW is live and in the cloud. You would just invite other Sonar users to your project, and then they would have access to the song in question opened up in a live DAW ready for additional contributions ... and all online! But after having spent some time in BandLab over the last few nights I'm just not sure this is possible ... at least at this time.
 
As far as me trying to track stuff live, I was having trouble with latency ... and if you think about it for a second, you can see why. An online DAW adds a whole new wrinkle to the latency equation. In addition to having a fast sound card you also need a great internet connection I would suspect. Last night as I'm trying to record keyboard bass, the piano roll just kept stacking my notes on top of each other. Every note was recorded for the whole length of my loop. What I mean is, I had a 4 measure loop set up so that I could overdub a bass part, but all the MIDI notes recorded in as four bar long notes all overlapping each other. Then I tried drawing in the part on the piano roll, but the tools seemed a bit too primitive to get it done.
 
Granted it could be an issue that is easily solved in the settings panel (if they have one), but that brings me to another issues which is just that, if you need help, you are kind of just on your own. There is a help feature, but it is very bare bones and brief.
 
I wonder if there is anybody with more BandLab experience than me that sees what I am doing wrong? If so, I'd love to understand better. The idea of collaborating with people from all over is very appealing to me. But as for right now, I don't see how I can use this as a live recording tool or a serious DAW.

As said earlier- The future of music- You don't need to waste your time learning how to play a instrument anymore. 
Whether anybody wants to listen to music created this way is yet to be seen. 
The good news seems to be we can ignore all this as there is no plan to trash Sonar into such a beast. 

Anderton
AFAIC anything that gets people involved in making music on any level is good.

 
Couldn't agree more Craig. The more the merrier.

clintmartin
I would guess Bandlab bought Cakewalk with the intention of integrating it into Bandlab for a more advanced DAW...that could also be used standalone. Or maybe they see people exporting stems from the DAW into Bandlab. I'm sure there is a bigger vision for both.

That's what I would have thought also.  I can easily imagine (and imagination is a lot easier than coding) a situation like this:
 

1. A person can go on the website and do some "scratchpad composing" by dragging around loops.
2. This can be cloud-ified to the smart phone app, where the composer could add some vocal tracks, or maybe even a live guitar track.
3. Any of this can show up in the new DAW as a set of tracks.
4. In the DAW, you can modify the existing loops and other material, or you can add new tracks (audio or MIDI)
5. Those DAW tracks automatically show up on the website and smart phone.  Some of the DAW-created content might be locked to prevent it from being degraded from online editing, but certainly panning and faders could be done on any of the platforms.
6. A collaborator could see any or all of this and add tracks from any of the platforms, including the collaborator's own DAW --- which might not be the new Bandlab DAW.  After all, wasn't that mainly the vision of Momentum?

This would also explain why Bandlab would be interested in SONAR.  No matter how good the web and smart phone apps get, it is highly unlikely they could produce truly commercial-grade productions any time soon.  And why should they?  That's what DAWs are designed to do.

Hill62
There is already the Momentum app that cakewalk put out as well. I would guess that came along with Sonar?
Also I imagine bandlab is looking to upgrade or add a tier to their product.

my guess is that momentum will be tweaked to use the bandlab servers rather than the one it did originally

yeah i think noel did it

Meng has said it will be a desktop DAW. He did not say it would be integrated with their cloud based DAW. People keep missing or forgetting this.
 
What makes sense to me is that they wanted Sonar as a stand-alone DAW for those who need/want that. If they combine it with their cloud-based DAW, then they only have one product. This way they have two. They're covered both ways. Makes sense.
 
 

michael diemer
What makes sense to me is that they wanted Sonar as a stand-alone DAW for those who need/want that. If they combine it with their cloud-based DAW, then they only have one product. This way they have two. They're covered both ways. Makes sense.
 

I would look at it slightly differently.  There are some real limits what is practical to do on a cloud/network-based platform.  I see that stuff targeting songwriters rather than "producers" per se.  The desktop-based DAW is targeted at commercial-grade production.  I believe there is an opportunity to build bridges between these platforms, while keeping them as distinctly separate products.  The web stuff would target the creative and spontaneous.  The desktop would take that and polish for commercial production.

Hey Scott, thanks for the detail and context. We fix bugs on a daily basis and push updates to the Web almost every single day :-) this one seems a little more complex.
 
There are some strange edge cases on the browser on Windows devices, especially when dealing with external device inputs - we are in conversation with the Chrome team and have submitted a suggested patch for some of the things we've noticed - but we'll definitely check out this bug. I don't think there will be a simple fix, but we have both Focusrite and M-Audio controllers in-house and we'll get this checked out! Thanks for helping to make it a better product...

Is there such a thing as a Bandlab SDK? -S