Zooming Across the World

What do we do when COVID shuts down our industry and we can’t have group gatherings? Why, we pivot, of course!

Lately I’ve been blessed to be a part of several high-tech large-group songwriting events - the kind that would normally having me flying somewhere to guide a few hundred people in a conference center through the process of writing a song for their corporation - but now they’re happening in a whole new way.

Today I was here in Nashville working with the Kidbilly organization, in an isolation booth inside Blackbird studio (see the pic above), linked by headphones and screens to a group of several hundred people on the other side of the continent. We collaborated remotely to write a super fun song, and they submitted their lyrical suggestions via a phone app that collected and broadcast their ideas to us as we worked through each line. Our incredible engineer co-ordinated live musicians with a pre-recorded track, and we wrote the song in real time while the participants watched us through multiple picture-in-picture camera angles.

As you can see, the studio was even more of a complex snarl of wires than usual! But thanks to some great engineering and some smart innovation on the part of organizer Billy Kirsch, it all worked together seamlessly. We’ve even been able to do this with an online gathering of people patching in simultaneously from multiple continents!

Here’s to rolling with the times!

*****

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