Session diary Offline Presence
session guitarist Adam Goldsmith discovers why social media and studio work don’t have to mix
When thinking about what to ramble on about this month, it occurred to me that what I’d been doing (playing in the house band for a new television series for the BBC, recorded at their facility in Manchester) was pretty much exactly the same as what I’d been up to in the previous month – with exactly the same gear setup (the Boss MS-3 still in heavy use and performing excellently for those of you who’ve been paying attention), so therefore not of huge interest to anyone who happened to read last month’s column.
In fact, save for iPads and some different gear, the basic process of this kind of TV work hasn’t changed a huge amount since I started doing it around 20 years ago. Except for one unexpected thing, I now usually take pictures and post them on the internet via various social media outlets. Which got me thinking, why am I doing this? Is it helpful for the business end of things? Is it just a vanity project? Or, is it, in fact, a very negative thing for me to do and affects work adversely? Does the aspiring studio or session musician need to do this?
Being 40 years old I’ve seen the internet go from something that was a bit of a curiosity when I was at university, through to the allencompassing beast it is today. I see that a lot of musicians I know, and almost all the younger ones, have social media accounts. With one slightly odd exception, for the most part when I’m doing sessions they don’t get put on the internet, and a lot of the busy studio musicians don’t even have social media accounts.
I will, however, make a couple of disclaimers here. First, I love YouTube and Instagram, and hearing about what other people are doing and all the new gear etc. In no way do I wish to be negative about people who post regularly. Second, there seems to be a bit of difference when you look at our cousins in the US. Pete Thorn and Tim Pierce spring to mind, where they are obviously brilliant guitar players and busy musicians with or without the internet, and I am a follower of both.
To this end I came off Facebook a few months ago, although I do maintain Instagram and Twitter, both of which I’m not very prolific on, don’t check very often and have a pretty limited number of‘ followers’. Has it immediately affected the amount of work I have? Definitely not, I’m busier than ever. Has it contributed to a vague feeling of missing out and the possibility that everyone else’s life is amazing and I’m dried up and finished? Definitely yes. I’m aware that one’s relationship to the internet is fairly generation specific, but this has been my experience.
For the most part, the internet‘ personalities’ in the guitar world (with apologies to the obvious exceptions) are not the people doing the studio work in real life, and, in my very humble opinion, these now seem to be two almost separate industries. A couple of the younger guys I’m starting to see in studios maintain almost zero internet presence, while some people who crop up regularly on YouTube etc, I’ve never met in person. Again I want to emphasise that I don’t think this is either a bad thing or a good thing, just that, in my experience, I’m not sure these two halves of a seemingly connected business are actually that connected at all.And if you’re after a career as a professional musician, outside of blagging some free gear or telling everyone how amazing you are, the best thing you can do remains to be get in a band, do some practice and meet as many people as you can in glorious technicolour real life.