Read Arlin Godwin's Thoughts On Songwriting

These days there's no reason why a full blown album can't be made in your own bathroom, if you know what you're doing that is.

The photo below shows one small corner of my old "studio" which was set up in what a normal person would use as a living room. This awful digital photo was taken in my basement apartment in the Georgetown part of DC - December 2003. This is where I was working on stems for a live show. That's the old Roland keyboard there off to the right. And my Groovebox in the foreground. You can't see them but under the computer monitor are the disc drives where the music actually gets recorded. I used to use digital audio tape during the mix down but these days I don't use tape at all. It all goes to hard drives and discs. And sometimes after that the songs get put back into the computer and processed for the final CD. It's a long and complicated process that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. You really have to love music to torture yourself this way...


All the tracks on "The Secret Life of Boys" and "Rush Push" were recorded in home studios of various kinds. I have worked in "real" studios from time to time but I prefer to work alone in my own environment.

If I feel like getting up in the middle of the night and recording a track stark naked, I can do it---not that this is a common occurrence. But this kind of freedom makes for a very flexible working method. When an idea strikes, there's no wasted time booking a room at some big, high-priced studio. I can lock myself away for hours or even days and not have to worry about time or money.

People are always asking me HOW I write. The answer is that I sit down (nearly every day) and just fool around at the keyboard. If you're really a musical person this is all you really need to do to get ideas. Producing the ideas is another matter - but coming up with musical phrases and progressions is automatic for a musical person. For me it's never been hard to think of ideas - it's been much harder to weed out the boring ones or melodies that sound too familiar and work on the ones that are actually good.

Another "method" that has yielded some great tunes is dreaming. As in going to sleep and dreaming music. This happens to me a lot and has for my entire life - even before I got interested in composing music. In the last decade or so I've had a number of instances in which I have gotten up and staggered to the computer in the middle of the night and come up with quite useable stuff. I then go back to bed. Later I check out what I came up with in that dream the night before and if it's good then I'll work it up further and see where it goes.

The keyboard I use the most is an old Roland D5 and nearly half the keys in the upper range are broken. I've banged the shit out of this poor thing for years so it's pretty busted at this point. But I still use it as my controller. Even so, because so many of the keys are broken I have to play everything on the lower octave and a half. If I need something higher I transpose it through the software on the computer.

Most of my tracks originate from this "fooling around" stage in which everything that I play is recorded into a computer. If I hear something that I like then I might stop and play it back and proceed to start adding other parts and developing it further. I almost never start out with lyrics or vocals. Usually I'm more interested in the music itself, and the lyrics (if there are any) will later be suggested by the way the music feels. However, I do write lyrics all the time and keep notebooks of ideas. But only very rarely have I actually sat down with a completed lyric and then written music to go with it.

Techno productions like "About Your Soul" routinely require as many as 80 or 90 separate channels to be recorded. And I have been known to work on some of my songs for months at a time, going over and over every single note until the music sounds the way I want it to sound. Regarding MIDI technology: I think if Mozart or Beethoven were alive today they would undoubtedly be drawn to this technology in some way. They might continue to use orchestras for public performance but for private composing it's hard to beat a computer.

The list of equipment that I have collected over the years is too long to detail here. Plus, some of the stuff I use is sort of like my own personal secret arsenal. I can't give all my secrets away. But I did just buy a Roland MC505 Groovebox and I'm using that a great deal on tracks being prepared for the new Delphinium Blue album. I also just added a TC Electronics Finalizer Express for mastering. A very partial list of the rest of my studio equipment would go something like this:

SONAR Studio 6 running on a suped-up Dell PC with 2 Gigs of RAM, ACID for adjusting loops and pitch, Pro-Tools for effects, Alesis HR-16B drum machine,Alesis 3630 Compressor, Alesis Quadraverb, Alesis D4 Drum machine, a Digi-Tech Vocalist 2 harmonizer-preamp, a Roland D5, various Korg samplers, Fatar MIDI Controller, Alesis EQ, Panasonic SV3700 DAT machine, a Tascam TSR-8 eight track half inch machine, HP CD-R recorder and a lot of other priceless junk.