Trevor: Good morning and welcome back to We Are Austin I’m Trevor Scott I’m so glad you guys are hanging out with us today. Whether it’s from Austin to LA New York to London or even Sydney to lima music and podcast collaboration across the globe is now possible with Sessionwire president and CEO musician songwriter all-around renaissance guy Colin Wiebe is joining me this morning to share how Sessionwire facilitates and listen to this studio-quality audio from the comfort of your own home. Colin, good morning it’s great to see you.

Colin: Good morning it’s good to see you too thanks for having me on.

Trevor: it’s our pleasure this is a fascinating topic here today um so session wire really is changing the way even major musicians in bands are kind of able to record their music how does it work tell us all about this.

Colin: Well first of all, Sessionwire is a peer-to-peer platform that allows musicians singers songwriters engineers producers teachers even podcasters to connect online and record high-quality audio together at the same time it’s very much like Zoom for musicians only with two dual audio-streaming services which are very high-quality and it works with any digital audio workstation. If you have some musicians in your audience if they’re familiar with Pro Tools or Logic or Ableton any of the big majors it work withs all of them

Trevor: Wow! that is incredible to know I mean when this all first began and of course here in Austin Texas you know we like to carry the moniker one of the live music capitals of the world, it was really a devastating effect on our music industry here and you did start to see slowly but surely bands and musicians kind of trying to get together to perform this way it seems like Sessionwire is really going to help amplify the ability to get together and kind of collaborate with other musicians right?

Colin: Yeah, it’s absolutely built for that it was built by musicians for musicians as a musician myself, all my gigs for 2020 and a lot of them for 2021, have been canceled so I know what that feels like. But it was kind of a blessing in disguise because I actually spent more time in my studio writing and recording and I discovered the power of Sessionwire myself before even becoming the president and CEO. By getting people that never would have access to a studio, that are miles and miles away actually play on my record.

For example, the sax player that played for Prince for many years, had once said in passing to me at a NAMM show convention, “Hey if you ever want a sax solo on one of your songs just hit me up” Well, I did. I called him on Sessionwire and sure enough, he played a beautiful sax solo and with Sessionwire you’re actually kind of in the room. It’s like being behind the glass so you get to have that interaction. You have a talk-back so you can say, oh I’d like one more take or play that a little faster and you can actually be part of that collaboration process and that’s what musicians really crave is the ability to communicate with each other in real-time.

Trevor: That’s so cool! I love the way you said “behind the glass” because that’s kind of what I was picturing here. It’s this digital version of being in the studio together that’s so fascinating and one thing that’s really important to mention clearly by some of the testimonials you have we’re talking about high-quality especially with audio because I know musicians are really proud of the work that they’re putting out there and they want to put out the best possible product. Sessionwire really provides that really high-quality audio?

Colin: Yeah, it does we’ve done tests between some of the biggest engineers in the world and they listen to what they’re recording in their studio and what they’re recording streaming from Sessionwire and they can’t tell the difference. But the reality is, it is that it’s not going to the cloud or the internet it’s actually peer-to-peer so you get this rock-solid, bank-encrypted you know system hookup where it’s it’s you’re actually able to control someone else’s recording software or vice versa so I could be recording you while you’re singing and or you could be recording me while I’m playing the piano or we could do it the other way around so there’s a lot of different options but the reality is by having the dual streaming pristine audio and then, of course, the video conferencing just like we’re doing now with Zoom, you put that all together and you’ve got the perfect platform for collaboration so it really is a revolutionary platform and it’s the only platform out there and you can read all about it at www.sessionwire.com

It’s the only one out there that actually has a social part of it where you can put in your profile and your audition videos and your discography it’s kind of like Linkedin for musicians. Yeah it’s fascinating

Trevor: Wow! it really is fascinating, I feel like I could talk to you about this all day and the word that was popping into my head is revolutionary I mean the access that this uh the unfortunate part of the pandemic locking us down and keeping us in our place really a positive side effect of that has been kind of this digital access to people from around the world and I can only imagine how important that community is to musicians and you know I don’t have to tell you I know you’re a musician too and here in Austin several of our friends and friends of the show it’s been a tough year for musicians a lot of gigs cancelled the cash flow is is a little limited I hear that still, Sessionwire is still accessible in terms of price point for musicians.

Colin: Yeah, Sessionwire comes in at around $15 a month, kind of similar to a lot of the Zooms and things like that however keep in mind that we’re releasing a brand new platform in January, hopefully for the NAMM show currently it’s only MacOS which we really cater to the high-end engineers but what we found is that they may have the big full blown out max studios and whatnot but some of their artists, their singers or professional musicians they’re Windows or PC based so we’ve developed plug-ins for both cross-platform and a brand new Windows standalone version. We’re actually doing a grandfathering deal for the people that get in in an annual plan before the end of the year they’ll automatically get that upgrade for free and that’s really exciting we really want to build this community and and a lot of the like-minded musicians and engineers and people out there are are giving us feedback and we’re continually working with them at the highest levels of the industry. We’re talking multiple grammy award-winning producers and and people using this, I mean obviously people are locked down and like you said musicians have lost gigs, but you know musicians are resilient they’ll find ways of earning some revenue. But now people are discovering with Sessionwire they can teach guitar lessons yeah they can do mixes it’s fascinating they’ve never been able to do that before.

Trevor: Wow! it sounds like the possibilities are kind of endless and I know musicians locally and globally are appreciating this and I’m sure here in Austin Texas a lot of our music friends who watch the show every morning are like what so please let us know where can we go to learn a little bit more about sessionwire and sign up

Colin: Yeah, go to www.sessionwire.com and everything’s there and there’s a free trial we’d be happy to have one of our engineers help onboard you if you need a little bit of help you just send an email to info at www.sessionwire.com and we’ll take care of you we’re we also have a Facebook users group if you just type in Sessionwire into Facebook you’ll be able to find us there.

Trevor: It’s a brave new world in terms of this new digital gig enterprise and you seem to be leading the charge thanks so much for joining us today.

Colin: Well thank you I love Austin it is a music city and I’m really excited to get in front of a lot of the musicians there because I know that they’re hungry and they’re ready to make and create and we want to empower creators around the world and we’re doing it with Sessionwire! Visit sessionwire.com