Song Experiment: Turning a Live Stream into a New Track
We’ve been working on something a little different lately—taking one of our old live stream songwriting sessions and turning it into a full song. If you’re following along, in this previous post, I talked about how I extracted the audio from the live stream using Audacity and got it ready for production in Ardour, the open-source DAW we use for all our recordings.
Now, I’m moving forward with adding new layers to the track blending the raw live stream audio with new elements.
Collaboration with GitHub: Our Unique Approach
You might have heard me mention before that we use GitHub to collaborate on our music remotely. It’s a pretty unconventional method for working on full DAW files, and as far as I know, no one else is doing it quite like this.
Here’s the trick: we essentially “misuse” GitHub. Instead of following the standard process where developers merge branches back into the main one, we treat each new branch as the latest version of our song. Each change lives in its own branch. So, for this new part of the song, I created a new GitHub branch before opening the Ardour session to start working on it.
If you’re curious, I’ve got a separate post on our site explaining more about how we do this, and I also talk about it in this video. But the key takeaway is that this setup lets us collaborate on full recording sessions remotely while retaining all the intricate details like effects, plugins, and mix settings.
Recording New Elements: Bass and Guitar
For this particular track, I wanted to keep the vibe of the original live stream audio, which had a raw, reel-to-reel tape quality to it. To build on that, we recorded live takes for the bass and guitar, staying true to the improvisational nature of the project.
We set up a mic in the middle of the room, turned it up really high to capture the full room sound, and Cliff played bass and Rob played guitar. To blend things a little more clearly, we also added a close-up mic on the acoustic guitar and ran the bass guitar directly into its own track in Ardour.
The result? A mix that I’m really excited about. It captures the live, unpolished feel of the original stream. After a few takes, we landed on a version we liked, and now we’re almost there.
What’s Next?
At this point, the song just needs vocals, and we'll see where that goes in the next phase of this song experimentation.
This is the kind of process we apply to most of our song projects these days—using open-source tools like Ardour on Ubuntu Studio and collaborating remotely through GitHub. It’s a workflow that lets us create while staying flexible and efficient.
If this sounds interesting to you, let me know! I’d love to do deeper dives into specific parts of the process—whether it’s the tools we use, our recording techniques, or the way we collaborate remotely. Feel free to reach out to us or sign up for our email list to stay updated as we keep building this track and more.