Author: Adam Hammer Author: Times Section: Lifestyle
 
Doug Millaway and Rob Denton of Third Level Project drove to Nashville last April to meet their saxophone player Bob Johnson of Funkdawgs for the first time at a Funkdawgs concert. "It was the first and only time we met the guy, but we've been playing together for two years," Millaway said. Johnson lives in Ottawa, Canada, and records with Third Level Project, a jazz fusion group from Avon and Waite Park, via the Internet. The band released "Connected" in January and is working on another CD with a new online member from Italy.

Funkdawgs is also an online recording group whose members are from Italy, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee and Canada. The band's show at the Gibson Theatre in Nashville was their first live performance together — the first time they had even rehearsed together. "After about an hour, it was basically like we'd been playing for years," Johnson said.

Starting out

Third Level Project and Funkdawgs are taking part in a music production movement that uses the Internet to link musicians from around the world by a like-minded musical thread. "I'm really into jazz, blues and fusion, and there wasn't really a scene like that here," Johnson said of the Ottawa music scene. With no Ottawa locals interested, Johnson started looking globally. Web sites such as NetMusicMakers.com, which Third Level Project and Funkdawgs are both members of, helped put the musicians in contact with each other. NetMusicMakers.com currently serves 727 virtual studios, has 1,819 members and has 623 songs in its database.

"It does seem funny when you try to explain it. People nod knowingly, but they don't really get it," Johnson said. On Denton, Millaway and Johnson's latest project, they have been joined in the virtual studio world by drummer Filippo Bertacche from Italy. Millaway and Denton said they watched and heard auditions of the musicians online before e-mailing them to see if they were interested.

Millaway and Denton have started to call their online music production "enigmatic jazz" — jazz fusion with a linear production model. "The music starts here and ends up in Italy," Millaway said. Tracks are recorded in each musician's studio and sent back to Millaway as stereo .wav files. Millaway imports the tracks into the mix at his home studio in Avon, where the final songs are produced. "It's actually not that different from what goes on in a lot of studios right now," Johnson said. Studios working for major record labels commonly bring in musicians one at a time to record separately.

Making it happen

Through the Internet, home-based musicians also have the opportunity to do the same thing without having to leave their homes — or their day jobs. The key to making all the parts come together in the final mix is to make sure each member has the same start and end point and that they are playing to a good click track to keep them all in time with one another, Millaway said. "The hardest thing for me to get used to when we first started off was understanding how to line up the parts so that they fit," Millaway said. When it all comes together, the final product is an eclectic blend of like-minded jazz musicians from around the world.

"The direction we're going in? Who knows? The music we're doing is not your average stuff," Denton said. "I think people hear it and say, 'I don't understand it, but I like it.' " Millaway and Denton said they hope to someday meet Johnson again and would like to get all of the Third Level Project musicians together to play a show live. "That would be like the ultimate experience for us," Millaway said.

Bringing musicians together

Here are a few Web sites that help bring musicians from around the world together:

www.artistcollaboration.com — A source for creative influence and advice.

www.netmusicmakers.com — Online virtual studio community.

www.myspace.com — Online musician and fan community.

www.box.net — Offers a free 1 gigabyte upload location to share files.

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