Musicians in Second Life

CNN.com
March 25, 2008
Music and technology
Posted: 02:59 PM ET


Why a musician starts an SL career? First of all he has to trust in his music and he must think to share something new with his audience. This is the story of Swina Allen, whose gig I attended last week at the Gold Club. In his music you can find some bluesy roots, but actually it is affected also by some rock influences(Carlos Santana and Weather Report above all) and even some innovative jazz (Joe Zawinul,Waine Shorter e Jaco Pastorius):the result is an original sound, a kind of smooth jazz and chillout.

As soon as Swina started his second life he opened a club, the Italian Mood(yudasin22.99,45), suddenly it became a sort of musical workshop hosting many live musicians gigs of different genres. But Swina felt to be mainly a musician and so he decided to get in the game! He started playing all around in SL gathering a nice crowd of fans.

After the gig I asked some question to the artist, and he kindly answered me:first of all I asked him what he feels in performing in SL and he said “ well,it depends on what do you expect:I guess that the main thing is not not the music in itself, but first of all the feelings you get across, keeping the people with you till the gig ends it’s the strongest emotion and sometimes it’s not necessary to be technically perfect: in sl you may get an immediate feedback and it is well shown by the generous tips of the avatars attending your performance!”

When I asked Swina how does he create his songs he told me that usually he starts with a drums pattern and after he adds some new parts(pads,synths)using only some virtual instruments(VLS);sometimes he edits the tracks with a little of quantization but only for the attack putting together some sampled chorus and voices.

Finallly he adds also keyboards and then he refines the whole with the acoustic guitar. I asked him what does he expect from SL:”The great advantage in SL is that it may put you in contact with many other musicians from all over in the world:you may listen easily to their music and maybe it will be possible starting a collaboration sharing experiences.

Technology seems to be such important for this artist and so I asked him what he thinks of:”Technology may help:today a musician may have his own studio without any huge investments; digital music did this revolution: it helps the autonomy both for creation and production. Of course promotion is not so easy even with web 2.0,social network and web radios. And of course SL itsef are able to spread music all around.
Submitted by Simona Dawes