Having my own space and my own studio to work in has been a dream of mine for a very long time and now, with these tools at my disposal I can explore my songwriting ideas further, pre-produce possible songs for my first CD and record songwriting demos for my band.

I also want to use the studio for producing podcasts. I can see a Songwriting Zen podcast being rolled out very soon

As well as getting my studio hooked up I also purchased a camcorder so I can start producing videos of my music to put up on YouTube and the like. I’m excited by all of this technology however, I’m going to be very mindful not to become a slave to it.

In order to keep myself mindful I constantly remind myself of a friend of mine who, a few years ago, was in the same position as I am in now.

He and I wrote many songs together pre-studio and I always had a lot of fun working with him, no matter what the end result was.

Once we started working together using his studio and not pen, paper and two acoustic guitars the dynamic between us changed dramatically.

Collaboration was starting to become a chore.

A lot of our songwriting time was spent trying to fix studio problems and when we were recording he was more interested in getting the perfect guitar effect rather than putting song ideas down.

Instead of being a songwriter with access to a studio he was becoming an amateur studio engineer and part time songwriter. He became a slave to the technology.

Needless to say we worked together less and less over time. Last time I heard he wasn’t writing at all. That’s very sad. I don’t ever want to end up that way.

I’m all for learning new things and expanding my horizons as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the big picture.

I can see that with new technology it can be very easy to get bogged down in all of the small stuff and forget about the reasons why you got the technology in the first place.

Ah, that’s right! To write songs!

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