I've been mulling over how to record and produce things with people who want to do their own singing, but who live far away. The method I've been advocating is to let me record an arrangement without singing, send it to whoever, then they fill in the vocal and post it. This means you have to have a program or recording machine and know at least enough to do this.
But it may work better the other way. If you can sing on pitch and in rhythm, perhaps a "bare vocal " could be sent to us to overdub music. I’ve never tried to record over mp3’s, mix, then re-convert back to mp3. Maybe someone can tell me if that works.
If you can play guitar/piano at all, put that on one side of a stereo recording, with the vocal on the other. If the guitar sucks, I can still get rid of it and keep the vocal. If you happen to be good, I can keep and mix both. Or put one of those prerecorded versions of the song on one side. Any way you can do it, I'm open to anything that might be funny to do and fun for us. We have been doing this sort of thing for years, but not with people spread out all over the world.
I have a Roland 1680 that I can push almost anything onto. I also have keyboards, 2 ways of doing drums, all sorts of guitars, basses, mandolin, and of course, any flute part in the world. Mari and I pretty much only want to work on songs that are fun for us, so don’t give us rap or “big” arranged stuff. I’m also not interested in attempting note for note recreations of the original. It’s more fun to play around with it. We can do big stuff, but I’d rather do several “small” projects than one great big one. Feel free to E-mail and ask questions.

I was just discussing this with Pip (the half of the duo who can actually carry a tune ;) ) and we would be happy if we could send you anything that you could work with for us... :D

...um...can you disguise voices? ;) ;D

And whose voices would need to be disguised (hee hee)?  Actually, yes, it is possible.  The Roland can "change" sex, make a singer sound like a robot, etc.

That sounds perfectly awesome. Would you mind looking through my list and seeing if there are any songs you know and would want to record in it? I can do anything related to vocals, but nothing instrumental. Thanks in advance!

Oh, and yes, if you have the right audio-editing software, it's quite easy to open an mp3 as a wav, add more tracks to it and then re-encode it as an mp3 (obviously with a slight loss in quality, but not really a noticeable one).

Rick:

That sounds like a great idea. The song that first came to mind was Bach Music, my parody of M's Pop Muzik, after reading that a flute can be played to my singing.  It would sound even better if an organ or harpsichord could also be played.

Tim