Big Jim,

I have tried cowriting on Skype with a Nashville writer recently. He called me up at 6am (that's Tennesee time, 1pm my time) as he'd been awake due to a pipe leakage, and we wrote a song from scratch in one 5 hour session, line by line. We just had audio, and no cam, though. But we worked in real time for 5 hours, at absolutely no cost! Skype is an amazing tool.

I think real time colabs are way more intuitive than email, even on Skype, and the interaction is there, but different than in a real room. We didn't really play together, but listened to each other in turns. But I realized after doing this, that the song captured some emotions I was not quite aware of. Thats the beauty of real time writing, it's intuitive, and it brings the deep stuff up to the surface - in this case without me even realizing it!

So it's somewhat slower than being in the room together, but I'd say it's the next best thing. And in some situations it might even beat real time cowriting, I think.

You need to prepare stuff beforehand though, like procedures, have the material you bring to the table accessible in pc files ect.

We ended up with a finished song, though, so I think it can be done.