Your Phone Is Killing Your Session

As productive and as handy as they are, phones can single handedly ruin a recording session. More than that, writing sessions suffer the most. Here’s why you should probably leave your phone in the car or outside the studio.

Photo by Neil Soni on Unsplash

Designed To Distract

Phones, or apps more specifically, are designed to keep your eyes glued for the most amount of time possible. Why? Because that makes them money. The more time you spend on an app=the more ads you will see=more revenue for the developer. It’s not a terrible thing for them to do, you just have to be careful about your usage.

Candy Crush is a game the most popular and notable for how addicting it was. TIME reported that in a survey of 1,000 players, 32% ignored friends and family to play, 28% played during work, and 10% got into arguments with their significant others over their play time!

This is how they made so much money even though the app itself was free to users; through ads. They profited off of people’s inability to manage their usage.

Though you probably aren’t playing games in the studio, you likely are on social media. What this does to a writing session especially is distract you and those around you from getting the best product of the session possible!

Mentioned in the previous article, multitasking takes away from the quality of each task you are multitasking. Since songwriting is so affected by quality, it can take a pretty big hit.

Notifications

Notifications are a way to bring people outside of an app back in, further increasing the amount of time you spend. More than that, notifications likely emit sound depending on your phone settings.

This can ruin an entire recording take! One of two things happens: you’re banging out the best performance you can, then all of a sudden it’s interrupted by a noise. Now that part of the recording can’t be used, and you’ll either have to overdub or re-record the take, depending on how you like to record. Alternatively, the notification could happen early in the take and now you’re distracted by your phone and not giving the performance your all.

Neither is good, especially if money is involved (studio time)! If the consequences of the notifications weren’t enough, it could aggravate your bandmates seeing as though they are also probably paying for the session as well.

Come Prepared

Generally, you should come prepared to where you wouldn’t need your phone. But of course, there are things that pop up that could help with the session/song. In that case, you should definitely look whatever it is up on your phone or laptop, but try to be smart about it.

You could always have your devices off until you absolutely need it, which, it's probably the smartest decision to keep your devices on you.

The engineer has a computer in front of them, and sometimes (most of the time) they are connected to the internet, so they could look it up for you if you have your devices off!

Obviously it’s a little weird telling another adult to put their phone away, but all too often I see people giving 50% of their effort towards something they came specifically to do, all because of their phone. Simply putting the phone away or off can drastically improve results, especially with writing!

Overall leaving your phone behind most likely has much more benefits than it does consequences… so… let’s leave them behind and make some music!

-Michael