Long-distance songwriting

EugenicScum

I've been thinking of working on the next few songs while recording demos on my laptop and by sending it out to everyone involved while I make progress. That would set me up for some internet related projects in the future too.

Glyder put up a video of them working on songs this way:

What are your experiences with long distance collaborations? Best practises?

Agrippa

A friend of mine and me tried this a couple of years ago. we live some 300 miles from each other so the internet seemed like a good idea.
1st off: Someone has to be the chief whip and take responsibility for getting things done on both/all parties involved, or it just dwindles out, just because of the strains of everyday life, work, children so forth.
Secondly, you now have two sets of software you´ll have to keep up and running, which weren´t that easy for my friend and I; then he got a new plug in, and my old cracked cubase version didn´t like that, and then I got a new pc and ran Pro Tools, and his Nuendo didn´t like that, and then he sent me a big structure for an epic song, and my internetconnection for some reason were down for a couple of days, so we were often frustrated because of technical issues. .
To this day we meet once or twice with a laptop with nuendo installed, a small amp and a good mic and hammer out demos that never get recorded, but we have fun.

We have given up on plug ins and the "online band", but it might work for you.

The Church do it like that, at one time they were four members, living in the US, Australia, Liverpool UK and Stockholm, Sweden respectively. But they still made a couple of good records by sending files to each other via internet. So it IS possble, but personally I don´t enjoy it.

Dinosaur David B

Long distance collaborations happens all the time now.  Janne Stark's projects mostly work that way.  My wife also works with people all over the world.  They send her tracks, she works on them then sends them back. Most of them she has never met face-to-face.

Songwriting is a little different than just recording. Getting real-time interplay between two people bouncing ideas off of each other requires something beyond email. Skype and webcams go a long way to alleviating that issue.

[Deleted User]

I have been doing this for a couple of months with an old friend that I used to play in bands with. He lives in Michigan and I live in Nevada. We use Dropbox.com to share files and it works out pretty good. We are just doing it for fun but you could definitely do something on a pro level this way.

Haffner

I agree, Skype and cams make long distance songwriting a reality. At an early point in the recording of this next cd I had planned to write at least one song with Graham, and didn't know about Skype. I couldn't see how we'd be able to do the collaboration over the phone (thought it was our only option), so I just went ahead and wrote everything.

Once Jasmine introduced me to Skype I was just amazed. It's just like the old sci-fi movies, the "T.V. Phone".