In this day and age of high tech, low budgets and the increasing green consciousness, the internet provides songwriters and artists with an endless array of creative choices. In this article, I’m going to focus on real-time collaboration and how co-writers can work together without leaving their homes.
The basic ingredients you need are a computer, high speed internet connection and a web cam. While you don’t need a home studio to co-write over the internet, there are huge advantages for those who do use some kind of music software such as Garage Band, Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase etc.
The easiest solution to co-write over the internet is to use a free chat application such as Skype, AIM, Yahoo Messenger etc. While these free applications do allow you to connect and work in real-time, the disadvantage is that you are limited to using your web cam’s microphone and your computer speakers. You also have to deal with the delay between two users over the internet. This delay is called Latency and it makes it impossible to play with or sing with someone at the same time. If you just want to bounce ideas back and forth, a free chat app, will work just fine and it’s very convenient to use the text chatting for co-writing lyrics.
The ideal solution for the professional songwriter is an audio/video plug-in called Virtual Glass for those who use some kind of music software. We developed Virtual Glass at eSession.com to allow two people to write, produce and record music over the internet from within their music software. For those who don’t know, a plug-in is a piece of software that plugs into another piece of software. For example, Photoshop has plug-ins that add certain visual effects to photos. All music applications have plug-ins that allow you to add reverbs, delays, compression and even virtual instruments to your songs.
There are two major advantages that Virtual Glass has over the free chat applications. The first advantage is that the instrument you’re playing and/or the music you have recorded in your audio software goes through Virtual Glass directly into your co-writer’s audio software. So, instead of playing your guitar into the web cam’s inferior microphone, you’re sending your co-writer your guitar directly from your music software to theirs. For example, I could be playing guitar in Austin using Pro Tools while my co-writer plays piano in Nashville using Digital Performer. When I hit the spacebar to play my song, he/she hears it from their studio speakers, not their low quality computer speakers.
The other huge advantage is that Virtual Glass allows two people to work in sync. We built the plug-in with Latency Compensation and Rewire Synchronization, so, one user tells Virtual Glass to send sync while the other tells Virtual Glass to receive it. The user who is sending sync can then control the transport and location of both user’s software. For example, my co-writer in Nashville could sit back and play guitar and I could be stopping and starting both of our songs from my computer. I could stop playback if the player makes a mistake and say, “hey, lets take that chorus again” and play from the new location.
The plug-in is designed in 3D to depict a conventional recording studio that has a glass partition between the control room and cutting room. The glass partition in Virtual Glass is the video screen between the two users, so it’s as close to working in the same studio as you can get without the hassle, use of fuel and expense of travel and studio time.
If you’d like a one-on-one training session how to use Virtual Glass, please contact eSession’s Director of Operations, Marc Rosenberg, marc@eSession.com.
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