I've been doing this kind of thing for a while now, with folks all around the US. Yes, it's easiest to start with either a finished drum track or a drum machine, and make sure everybody is using the same reference for tuning. Make sure there's a count-off section before the song starts, and it doesn't hurt to have a reference tone for tuning. Just as important is to make sure that all the guitars have the intonation properly adjusted, there's no help for that after the fact unless somebody has an expensive version of Melodyne, and it's still not easy or always possible.
File format has to be agreed upon...if you have a group of diverse experience levels and different programs, try to find the common denominator- probably WAV 16/44.1, I'd imagine that everyone has a way to record in that format. You don't really want to keep converting from WAV to MP3 and back, or between MAC and PC formats. Even if cassette is all you have, that could be mailed to someone & digitized later. One of the biggest hurdles you'll run into doing this is the differing levels of experience with this process, I can see it already. For instance, if someone knows how to play guitar, but doesn't know much about the recording process, it'd be helpful to make a reference mix for them that had the band on the left channel and a scratch guitar track on the right, so they could learn the part & then mute the old guitar part & play along with the rest of the band. They'd then only have to upload the new part, and that could be mixed in later.
One helpful thing has been to have a shared off-site storage account so that files can easily be shared- we use Dropbox, and they have free accounts available. That also makes it easy for multiple mixes to be done- anybody that wants to take a swing at it can have access to all the different files via the shared account.
Little things like file names (and file management) become really important, to- it's best to set a guideline so that everybody has a clue what is in each file, and which one is the newest/best take. It's also very helpful to have everyone understand how to only upload files that are the same length as the entire song, so that they automatically line up in time...of course, in my experience it's next to impossible to get people to do that consistently.
I recently finished one bunch of songs that have a drummer from VA, singer from NY, singer & guitarist from FL, singer & guitarist from VA, singer & guitarist from CA, and me on guitar in VA. It's an interesting process.
I'll help or contribute any way that I can, in fact I was thinking of doing something like this on a Dan Baird song that I'd re-written a bit to be a sort of "Ballad Of AK". Actually, a very good song to try this out on would be the Dan Baird/Georgia Satellites song "Keep Your Hands To Yourself", it's an easy and fun song to play, and usually the one I'd call if non-band members were called up on stage to sit in on a quick song. I've got ProTools here, and electric guitars, acoustic guitars, basses, keyboards, drums, percussion, whatever.
je
