Latest / 52 Cues - A Production Music and Sync Podcast / Exploring Sound Design with Venus Theory

Transcript

Exploring Sound Design with Venus Theory · 52 Cues - A Production Music and Sync Podcast

• 0:30
  Speaker 2: So sound designing isn't necessarily, you know, going into a field, you know with a field recorder into the middle, and I mean sound design is like tweaking a filter, you know, turning on a Moog, you know super basic subtractive synth Sound design is pulling some knobs on it and seeing what happens.
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: It doesn't have to be this, like you know, chins stroking, blah, blah, blah.
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: You know, yes, fft transforms, and you know it can be that if you want it to be, but I don't think that's most of its purpose in the application of music.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: What is happening, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the 52 Q's podcast, a weekly podcast dedicated to all things production and library music, where we talk about industry topics and take deep dives into the different aspects of being a working production music composer.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: My name is Dave Croff and I'm a professional composer and educator with placements ranging from the NFL to Food Network, and I've spent the last 22 years teaching music to career minded creators just like you, so if this is your first time here, welcome.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: This episode is made possible thanks to the support of the family, friends and patrons subscribers of 52 Q's who help keep the podcast and everything running.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: We are 100 percent community supported.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: So if you like what I do here, don't thank me, thank them.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: But if you want to learn more about how you can help support 52 Q's while also unlocking exclusive subscriber perks like live streams, workshops, coaching sessions and a ton more, then be sure to click on the links in the description for more information.
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: You know, one of the benefits of doing this podcast and having a YouTube channel is I frequently get the opportunity to chat with people who I really look up to and YouTubers who I follow and I watch religiously, so I was more than excited to recently sit down with Cameron Gorham of Venus Theory and we chatted everything from the sense of exploration how is AI, you know, doing in our space, what about sound design, how can we get into sound design?
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: And kind of what was going on with all that YouTube business a few weeks ago.
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: So here is my recent interview with Venus Theory.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: You know the the.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: If there was a YouTube YouTuber, I'll say if that's not too much of a dirty word right now there is a YouTuber Hall of Fame for composers, sound designers, audio professionals or a Mount Rushmore of YouTubers.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: This guy would be on it.
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: And I am honored to have Cameron Gorham of AKA, venus Theory, joining me on the podcast today.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: Cameron, I almost called you Cam because I could by day anyway, because we're tight like that.
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: buddy Cameron, how are you doing, my man?
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: Oh, all right, Just tired, as usual.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, dude you, you burn the candles on both and you've got so many irons in the fire.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, how do you manage all that?
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: And plus a family and a insane coffee habit.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: I mean, how do you balance all that?
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: About 12 notebooks and like 40 different, you know, note taking programs for the most part, and my Google calendar, which just runs my life at this point.
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: Well, speaking of what note app or project management app are you fond of these days?
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: Millenote is the one I use for like 90% of everything, just because it's like designed for like creative applications.
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: Okay, so the whole interface just amalgamates all the you know, notes and checklist or files or links to videos or websites or whatever, so you can have a project board that has all of your stuff on it all at the same time, which, just being more of a visual person, I think is pretty helpful.
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: And then for like road mapping things or whatever I might be doing.
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: So it's really useful for video production, like all my YouTube video stuff I scripted and do all the like production notes and millenote, I storyboarded and millenote and all that.
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: And then for client projects all that lives there, because then if they send me like a PDF of a manual or like sound specs I need to follow, I can have that there and have like a note list, a checklist, a link to a Google Sheets thing you know.
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: So that's really useful because it just does everything at the same time.
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll definitely.
• 4:59
  Speaker 2: It's like 20 bucks a month, I think, for the paid version, but the free version gives you a hundred elements, or whatever they call it.
• 5:06
  Speaker 2: Okay, so even the free version is great, but I had to buy the paid version because I have eight million things to do at any given office.
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because I'm always on the lookout for project management, because you know, like you, I have a lot of little irons in the fire, whether it's teaching, whether it's, you know, having students who live in Mumbai, mumbai or Tokyo, or working on sample packs, or running a community and doing YouTube videos and all of that.
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: So I definitely understand.
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: I think that's the thing is finding the application that works as the best second brain.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: Because otherwise, you know, it gets way too complicated.
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: I used to organize things in like Google Drive or the Google Keep but, then I had five separate applications I was using, where you know.
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: None of them worked together, and one was only for checklist, one was only for file storage.
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: So that's what's nice about Millenote, is it just handles everything in one interface, or I can link to other things but still visually reference that like this is where all this stuff lives, or whatever Gotcha.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll definitely make a note of that.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: That might be my homework for this weekend.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: It goes hard.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and you know the quality of your videos and the breadth of everything that you do.
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: Is it just you or do you have some help?
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: Like me, I have Mrs 52Q's, my wife Shannon.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: She helps out.
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: Do you have anybody else kind of you know on the sidelines or behind the camera who's helping you lift this enormous thing?
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: My wife works with me.
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: She handles most of the administrative stuff.
• 6:40
  Speaker 2: Now, as of just a couple of months ago, she started working with me, so she does, you know, the invoicing and the email, meetings and the organizing and the scheduling, especially just kind of the other littler things that just tended to eat up so much of my time, because that was the thing is, it was just getting so busy to where it wasn't sustainable to do is just one person, because a lot of the projects I work on, especially nowadays, are significantly more involved.
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: You know, whether it's a YouTube video or like the client projects I work on, you know, get bigger and bigger.
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: So after a certain point it's way harder to handle all that yourself.
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: So my wife helps out with a lot of that.
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: But with videos and stuff I do all the writing, all the editing, all the coloring, all the music, all the whatever, and then you know, sound design, whatever.
• 7:28
  Speaker 2: I do all that myself.
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: So my wife sort of acts as my liaison and in-between person, which is nice too, because, especially as the YouTube channel grows, it's nice to have that one extra step of insulation of people like harassing me from my inbox to review some like LED coffee mug or something stupid.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: Right, or come on.
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: Come on to my YouTube channel and join me on an interview, yeah.
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: And there's some.
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: There's some crazy people out there.
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: That's the weird part of YouTube.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you get some wacky people.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I've gotten a handful.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: I mean we're relatively small compared to the reach that you have, but tell us a little bit about it.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: And I want to get into the YouTube stuff.
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, a few weeks ago we over here on the channel I asked the question do you need a YouTube channel?
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: Do media composers need a YouTube channel?
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: I think the final takeaway was you need a channel, but you don't necessarily need to be a YouTuber, even though half of my video was about being a YouTuber, but you know you don't need to be a YouTuber.
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: It was tell us about that part, because that's such a big, big aspect of your footprint in the industry, right?
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think it's a big thing.
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: That's helped me a lot, and I used to think of YouTube as like half of a portfolio in a way, and it's a portfolio with a new presentation, because if you build a Squarespace website or whatever and you put your portfolio on it, I'm sure it looks great, but no one's really actively seeking that out.
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: And I think that was one of the things that really helped me was by just doing YouTube videos on whatever brands would find my channel and oh, he's really good at this and you know, or he used this plugin or oh, we make that plugin.
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: We should hire him to do presets for it.
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: So I think it's a good way just to extend your reach by utilizing the tools that are available to you.
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: So I think you know, back in the nineties that was like magazines and, you know, like getting featured in Guitar World or something would be a way bigger deal 20 years ago than it would be now, where now, if you post a sweet home Alabama cover on TikTok, you know Sony is going to come knocking at your door.
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: So I think as much as yeah, you know, as you mentioned, youtuber is a dirty word, kind of as we mentioned, you know, prior to starting this it's it's that new paradigm of everything just becomes content, which is definitely a double-edged sword, and I think that's a big part of why I've shifted my own content and like what it is and what it's about and how I approach it and how I'm sort of continuing to evolve away from what I was originally doing, both because, like, my heart just isn't really in that place anymore.
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: But it's also a matter of just like separating the two things.
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: My YouTube channel, my video process, is just a creative outlet and it's not the impetus for everything else I'm doing, which it gets hard, especially on music YouTube, and I'm sure people that you know, because a lot of people look at my channel and go, oh, he's a full-time YouTuber, which I'm not.
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: I am a professional musician and sound designer, you know.
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: Like that that is my day job, which is awesome, and I love that.
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: Obviously, as you can see by the piles of garbage sitting behind me.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: But you know it's hard to do that and put the same amount of love into it when you're having to kind of peel back the curtain constantly and I think it's not that entertaining because then the nature of the work becomes performative and I don't think that's what a lot of it is about.
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: So it's a very dangerous line to walk, but I think if you do it well it can be hugely helpful rather than just spamming people's emails of hi, I make really great music.
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: You know it's the I don't know idiom of like show, don't tell right.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and boy do I understand.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: Like I said, you know, this channel is relatively small.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: We stay really really niched in focus.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: But I can feel the beginnings of that.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: When you were, you know, had you know, 1000, 3000, 5000 subscribers, was there like a moment where it's like, oh, wow, this is, this is becoming like a thing or a real thing that is going to start getting attention.
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: And did you find yourself having to kind of shift as a musician and a composer, like were you chasing algorithms and doing all of that business?
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: Not really so much.
• 11:54
  Speaker 2: Then, as more lately as I get more into just doing YouTube more seriously, just because I enjoy it and I enjoy the video process.
• 12:02
  Speaker 2: But early on, yeah, when you get those first couple hundred subscribers, you're just like oh sick.
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: You know, it's like when you, when you upload as well, like SoundCloud's kind of dead-ish now, but like when you uploaded a song to SoundCloud and you got a hundred plays like, oh, holy shit, a hundred people listen to my song, that's awesome, right.
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: And then you get like a thousand plays and then you get 10,000 and so on.
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: I think it was maybe around that time where it hit somewhere between 10 and 20,000, where the videos were just getting more and more views.
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: Because when I started I mean it's when anybody starts something, you know a hundred people watch the video and that's really exciting.
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: But very, very small fish in a very large pond.
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: So then once I was receiving more in the range of a couple thousand views for every video and I had built up this subscriber base where I knew that the second I dropped a video it was going to get sustainably a couple thousand views.
• 13:00
  Speaker 2: That was where it kind of started clicking that something is going on and there is an audience for what I'm doing.
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: And at the same time, that was when I noticed, you know, companies and brands came knocking at the old inbox to do a sample pack or work on a sound bank or do a video on our plugin.
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: And that's super exciting.
• 13:21
  Speaker 2: At first, you know you get a free plugin that you really wanted.
• 13:25
  Speaker 2: That's super, super cool.
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: And then you get a little bit bigger and you can, you know, hit 30, 40,000 subs.
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: Then you can reach out to brands Hi, I like your things and I have one, and they're sure that's a great deal.
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: We get free content on our stuff and I get a free thing.
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: And that's super exciting.
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: Because Senpai noticed me and, yeah, that's where it really does start to shift into just becoming its own beast.
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: And that's hard because then it does become just a job in its own right and it does sap into your Creative work.
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah which is super hard to do, and I think that's, but that's anything right like yeah, when I was a teenager I wanted to be a musician and, you know, wanted to be a big rock star and whatever.
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: And it takes and I think everybody knows it like it takes a very specific type of person to do music professionally.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, it's a job with any creative art if you want.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: If you want to write write comic books, you know or if you want to be a painter or sculptor, as soon as you start doing it for money consistently, then and then the whole game changes.
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah it starts becoming business.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and to that, to that point, you know, as of this recording, just last week or earlier this week, you, you found yourself kind of in the YouTube meat grinder, yeah, and demonetized and pull things were pulled down, and I just want to say I Super appreciated your transparency and authenticity.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: I think it's one of the reasons, I Don't know, when people tune into a Venus theory episode, they know they're not gonna get any BS right, but uh, walk us through that process and what that means, like going, going into the future.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: Not not that you're committing to anything, but it was really fascinating getting a kind of a front row seat.
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I just pulled the whole mask off and I was like, all right, let's do it, because this is, you know, news.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, if you're talking about like tens of thousands of subscribers and views, I mean this is not an insignificant amount of money.
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: Well, and that was the thing too, is it hit a point where my channel was getting pretty regularly, you know, in the range of like a hundred thousand views per video, which is really where I wanted to be.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: And then that happened where it Just, yeah, I got flagged because a robot saw something.
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: Originally I thought it was the waffle house clips.
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: It turns out it wasn't that.
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: It was a clip from a music video I used from Bella porch, where there's, like these heads on a conveyor belt, but not in a violent way, like it's not gory, it's just, it's representative that the, the characters are robots being assembled in this factory.
• 16:01
  Speaker 2: So that got flagged as gratuitous, extreme violence for no reason.
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: And of course, that video is also fully monetized, and that was fine when they did it.
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: But, god forbid, I show that and right and you know, like it was a joke, it's just a quick gag in the video, but that's enough to get the whole kingdom torn down, which is super frustrating, you know, knowing how hard I work on these videos especially and that was a big part too is Then that happens I get demonetized, I don't know what's going on and no one at YouTube can really tell you anything.
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: So I reached out to the chat and I did all the proper avenues of Hello, I am having a problem, please help.
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: And I'm, like 98%, certain I was just talking to, like Bard, you know, google's I.
• 16:51
  Speaker 2: I don't think they're real people in the YouTube chat anymore.
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it ended up going to Twitter.
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: Bunch of people started tagging YouTube after I angry tweeted and a couple people tagged the creator liaison, which just infuriated me to know that there is one human being on this planet who can apparently do anything about this.
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: So that was just a disaster, and it only reached through social media, right yeah and it well, and it was just because I made this big stink about it.
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: You know, if I was a brand new creator where my third video that had this like no one's gonna do anything.
• 17:27
  Speaker 2: I think the only reason it happened is because I just happened to have enough of a platform where people started Freaking out for me on my behalf, yeah, which is just frustrating.
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, that sucks, but whatever.
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: And it ended up getting resolved.
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: They remontantized it, they took off the age restriction, you know.
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: So that was fine.
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: But then after that the next couple videos just flopped super hard, like my last two videos have performed so so poorly, but it's one of those things where, as a creator, you want to blame the platform, you want to blame the algorithm, but I think it's just maybe they were bad subjects for videos.
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: They're just not that interesting.
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's to the.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: You know that the point that we made in the YouTube video a few weeks ago was, you know, ultimately we're kind of digitally sharecropping here and we were at the mercy of what that, whatever that algorithm is, which is why, you know, pointing folks to your patreon point, pointing folks to your Ways that you, you can support, like if you are a fan of of you, you know Cameron, and if you're watching this and you're like, yep, I like the cut of that, guys, jib, right, then there are ways to support him other than, you know, watching YouTube ads.
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's the frustrating thing is then I immediately started thinking, oh, what if I just went ad-free on the channel?
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: So I have a second channel that's just kind of my test dump that you know, I just use for Testing things mostly, sure, and I threw up a video on there.
• 18:53
  Speaker 2: And then I threw up another video, one with monetization turned on and one with it completely turned off, because I was like, oh, if I Just go fully patreon, all, disable all ads on my channel, because that's that that is the biggest proverbial middle finger I could raise to YouTube is, here is terabytes worth of video content that I'm gonna put on there and not give you a cut of because they take 45% or whatever it is.
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but as soon as I put out the video, one monetized one without the one that was not monetized was dead in the water right out the gate, which makes sense.
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: It's in YouTube's interest to display ads, right, so that sucks, because now you're stuck kind of playing the game, but I think that's ultimately the creator equation with things like YouTube and Twitch and so on is just, you know, the castles only as strong as its walls, so to speak.
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: So if you can have patreon or you can have sample packs, or have a career outside of it.
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: You know, then, that's the way to do it, which I'm very fortunate in that YouTube is not my soul Thing, you know.
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: It still is just a very glorified and expensive hobby.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: Right, that brings in a little of that cheddar, but you know well, not so much like.
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: AdSense is a joke anyway, so yeah.
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: But it's, it's the principle of the thing, damn it.
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and Speaking of like sample packs, let's talk about some of the other things that you have going, other than you know, the patreon, where they can absolutely support you.
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: One of the things that I know that you do is you make Sampler instruments.
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, was that just an extension of you as a, as a tinkerer, you know, and and a tweaker?
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: Or tell us about your journey into making your sample instruments.
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, early on I got into sound design and playing with synths and, you know, experimenting with different microphones and doing weird time stretching and whatever.
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: Eventually I got into stuff like reactor and contact.
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: You know, a decade or more ago at this point and that Started to get more interesting.
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: You know, learning how to build crude contact instruments, learning how to design a synthesizer and reactor from Like a visual DSP standpoint.
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: So that was interesting and it's always been something I've enjoyed doing and it I Just think it's helpful to retain more of your own sound, so to speak, where you know I would sample out different Instruments or things or just do a bunch of field recording and throw those Random Foley recordings into contact and, you know, mess with the effects and stuff just to build something interesting.
• 21:26
  Speaker 2: So it's always been a A thing that I do.
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: It just eventually turned into like, oh, I could probably make money doing this, like people have careers as contact developers and such.
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: So that was when, eventually, I got more and a lot of this was through to the YouTube channel for the most part of getting more into doing sample packs and loop kits and things like that that you know got put on Loop Masters and Splice and da-da-da-da-da, and then did some work with a couple companies as a contractor doing contact instrument development and sound development for contact instruments and things like that, and eventually I just got to the point now where I can do my own decent sampler instruments and things like that, because I originally was wanting to do contact instruments but then David Hillowitz gifted us all with decent sampler so I didn't have to get chained into the contact realm, which is fine for me, because I hate programming and contact anyway.
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: Ksp drives me insane.
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, the decent sampler stuff's been really nice to do as well, because it's easier to develop for it's free, it's accessible, it's very lightweight.
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: So that's a fun way to develop instruments that I have an idea for or something like that.
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: And David is also a working composer, you know, not that whoever originally made contact wasn't a composer, but it has evolved such that it's kind of designed by boardroom, you know, by committee, pretty much, yeah.
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: But you know, david is like I need this, I need a sampler to be able to do this.
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: So I'm going to make one and then distribute it for free, and I think that's the beauty of it.
• 23:01
  Speaker 2: It just opens up the platform for everybody, it makes development easier and it makes getting a hold of these things easier.
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: If you're a musician who just wants to use the sounds and I think that's a big part of my own libraries is just designing libraries that I use anyway for my own composition work and music and such, but then fleshing them out a little bit more to package them as like a commercial sampler instrument release, and then you know, on top of that, doing the sample packs and loops and things like that.
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: But I've gotten more and more away from that at this point, just because you know it's extremely competitive, it's extremely annoying, the pay is worse and worse and worse every year, and then now we've got a lot of those like AI sample generation tools and you know, I don't see that being too much of a job in the next five years anyway.
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, oh, there's so many, so many different ways we could go with that, because I definitely want to talk about AI and I want to talk about, you know, commercial viability.
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: But you know so many of the folks that watch this channel and other channels like yours.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: You know they are looking to break out of you know hobby territory and into being able to make some money.
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: I don't think anybody is like thinking in a year I can go full time as a production, music composer or whatever.
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: But hate to break it to you, but if you're looking to make a full time living off music alone, Well, I don't know of any composer who is just like waking up, going into the studio, writing for eight hours a day, five days a weekend.
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: They're teaching or they're doing samples or like.
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: Chris Lord, algae and stuff like they make media appearances and Hans Zimmer does other stuff on.
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: You know, hans Zimmer collaborates with sample companies and stuff like I don't know.
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: I know very, very, very few full time musicians where that is the sole thing they do, and of the people I do know that do that, they're just as broke as they were when they were 20.
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: But now they're, like you know, 35 with three kids, which is not fun with mortgages and kids.
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I have a friend of mine who is a guitarist.
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: He's older, he's in the 60s and here in Orlando he moved in the 80s to Orlando to work at the parks and he worked at Disney for 30 years 40, like full time.
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: This is what I did.
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: But especially COVID has completely just destroyed the live performance aspect.
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you know, orlando has a pretty big theater scene and more and more theaters are choosing, you know, to use backing tracks over it, and it's that same mentality.
• 25:31
  Speaker 2: Well, that was most of what happened with the music side as well was he had the booking agencies folded because the venues were closed.
• 25:37
  Speaker 2: The venues folded because the venues had to stay closed for so long and whatever, and then the bands that had agents no longer have a way to work with, have a way to book, and the venues they used to play are gone and now they have nothing to do and of the few slots remaining, it is infinitely more competitive and there is no money in it.
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: And it's infinitely easier.
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: I mean, you know 15 years ago how would you release a CD?
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: You'd go to CD Baby or you'd print something up.
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: But now it's like you pay your $19 a year to DistroKid and you can back a dump truck of anything you make in your DAW up to Spotify, and so it's never been easier, but it's also never been more crowded.
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: So when you're, I guess when you're wanting to get into either streams off Spotify, youtube or YouTube views, or even like to cut it as a splice sample maker I mean because I feel like you watch a couple of videos on YouTube about making splice samples and then you'll see how many people are out there like you can make it as a splice, sample.
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: Well, and then you know the YouTube danger is, I feel like probably a good 80 to 90% of music YouTubers have no idea what they're talking about, because very few of them actually actively work in the music industry, which is always really funny yeah.
• 26:55
  Speaker 2: I have, which is a huge gripe I have with a lot of it.
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: But you know, and that's a big part of why I started making my own exit from that space, because I'm just over it.
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: But yeah, like when it comes to alternative revenue sources and I'm obviously speaking from the standpoint of a very different set of experiences obviously, in my case YouTube was super helpful, but yeah, getting into sample making and stuff like that can be a great little revenue source.
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: Sample instruments, I find, can bring in more revenue.
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: Just because the barrier to entry to do that is a lot higher.
• 27:24
  Speaker 2: It's not necessarily difficult.
• 27:27
  Speaker 2: But you know, anyone can make a drum kit pack.
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: It's really not rocket science.
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: But to develop an interesting sampled instrument, that's a little harder to do.
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: It's a little more specialized, it's a little more unique and you know, I think people are willing to pay for something like that, more so than another lo-fi chords, you know, when most of those are like free anyway.
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah or just yeah.
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: Just pencil them in man.
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: Obviously there's stuff like composing library music, things like that can be good to get into, but I think the biggest thing you know, in my case, youtube just helped me get that reach to be able to sustain things.
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: The biggest thing is building up as many other revenue sources as you can, but I think the real key to it is doing it in a way where you remove as many middlemen as possible.
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: You know and I've worked with like every company under the sun at this point probably, but that's the other part of it is, when you work with companies, especially when you're just getting started, you know they take their 30 percent and so on.
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: But if you do a YouTube channel or a TikTok or an Instagram or whatever, if you use these platforms to leverage your own image and brand, then you can just sell it yourself and that makes a very big difference in the paycheck at the end of the month to just do your own thing 100%.
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: I mean, that's really why I have a YouTube channel, is I enjoy teaching and it's to point people to the community.
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: That's free, you know, you can join the 52Q community for free but there are subscription tiers and workshops and lessons and coaching.
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: But the YouTube channel is just a small part of a much larger, much larger picture.
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that's pretty much anyone that does this kind of stuff.
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: You know everybody I know who works in the music industry does 100 different things.
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: You know some of them, not even necessarily music, but tangentially related to it.
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: You know I do like guest lectures at colleges.
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: Sometimes I do consulting with companies on, you know, like product design and other things like that that are in the music industry.
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: But it's not just sitting here, like you know, plunking on my keyboard all day, which I think that's the.
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: That's the vision we all get in our head is I'm just going to wake up and make music all day, every day, and that is probably the least part of the job.
• 29:51
  Speaker 2: It's a big part of the job, for sure, but in the grand scheme of things, the actual making of the music is, you know, the little foundation that everything grows from.
• 30:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: I cannot agree more.
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: And if you're watching this and you're, you know, looking at different YouTubers and everything, I'll just say just check, check, check, the check, the credits you know, just research, going to someone's website is a very easy way to just legitimize someone.
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: If somebody's selling you a course or a package or whatever.
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: Just do your research, that's all.
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: I say and I think the big thing with that, too, is also basic logic dictates and like kind of quoting super eye patch wolf's video here.
• 30:37
  Speaker 2: But when you look especially at the people selling the courses or things like that, because most of them are just garbage but is this something they could replicate?
• 30:47
  Speaker 2: Is the question you have to ask where, if I was going to sell a course on how to grow a big YouTube channel, I could do not buy that course though, because if I had to start over today and make a new YouTube channel, I don't think I could.
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: I would have a better idea of how to get started, but I do not know for a fact that I have a formula that would work Right.
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: I could try really hard, but you know, and that's like when you see people how to become a big Twitch streamer, and it's like here is a set of circumstances that applied one time, 10 years ago.
• 31:24
  Speaker 2: Right that may, or may not even be relevant or accurate for you.
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: But yeah, with the courses especially, you have to be careful with that where if I did a course on how to be a sound designer, I have the credits and stuff to sort of prove that like I can teach you this and this is something I have been doing and that is something that I feel I could teach someone to do, Because if I started over today I could do all these things again and still have a career in it.
• 31:52
  Speaker 2: You know, whether or not it's a full-time thing is a very different story, but that's any creative field.
• 31:57
  Speaker 2: Like I could teach you to make money as a sound designer.
• 31:59
  Speaker 2: But if someone is promising you, you know, quit your day job in four weeks and become a full-time midi-pack creator.
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: No, it's the worst for me because I study like novel writing and book writing.
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: It's like I'm a best-selling author and learn how to become a best-selling author Right by my book, but they're a best-selling author in books on becoming best-selling authors, right.
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: That's a real disconnect, and so that's all I'll say.
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: Just do your research, do your homework, invest in people whether it's buying their courses or whatever who are already doing the thing that you want to do, not who just know how to tell you to do the thing that you want to.
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: I think that's the big thing, especially in the age of social media and whatever or is it's we've entered this sort of grifting era and I think that's really harmful to a lot of creative communities because, especially in the social media space, especially on YouTube and Instagram, for some reason I don't know why it's so popular on Instagram, but just a lot of people hawking garbage.
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: You know how to become a full-time food blogger and you know sign up for this to 10X your insert desireful thing.
• 33:13
  Speaker 2: Here.
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: Some of those like write a nonfiction book about something you know nothing about, right.
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: I mean literally, like just go Google it now with chat, gpt and AI and everything Just.
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, oh my gosh.
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: Speaking of AI, it is the 800-pound robot gorilla in the room.
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure if are we overreacting, or is this really the Indiana Jones boulder just slowly rolling to squash us?
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: Well it's funny because AI has gotten to the point as well where when we thought of automation, especially in the industrial age, it became that menial tasks were assigned to robots.
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: You know, building the car and fabricating the metal was done by robots because it was better for a human to have a higher level role to look at.
• 34:01
  Speaker 2: Is this functional?
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: Is this doing things the way it's supposed to?
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: You know, how could we be more efficient?
• 34:06
  Speaker 2: And so on.
• 34:07
  Speaker 2: And I think that age of automation increased into, like the McDonald's example where if you go into a McDonald's now, or most of them, at least a lot more of them now I've seen these ever at the kiosk.
• 34:17
  Speaker 2: Yep, there's like one or two actual registers.
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, one or two people actually at the thing.
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: Most of the time they're actually in the back but there's maybe one person just on the register at all times.
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: But you can tell they don't want to be bothered, they want you to go to the damn kiosk.
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: And you feel like you're inconveniencing this.
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: Right yeah, you feel bad going up and be like can I have my chicken nuggets?
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: I'm sorry.
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: I'm making you do your job.
• 34:37
  Speaker 2: So I think that was, in a weird way.
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: That was the idealized future, where you know truckers, for example, that's the big one with the self-driving cars.
• 34:48
  Speaker 2: Truckers are now being targeted for automated self-driving vehicles, but in the end it becomes more profitable and, I guess, maybe more fulfilling.
• 34:58
  Speaker 2: I don't really know.
• 34:59
  Speaker 2: You know, without getting into the philosophical aspects of work, you are now the person that repairs the thing.
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: You know you go from being the person who hits the nail with the hammer all day to the person who repairs the robot that does that Right.
• 35:12
  Speaker 2: You know you go from the fabricator to the person who programs the CNC machines.
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: But now in the creative industry it's a weird Pandora's box, because we had this future where the robots do all the dumb things we don't want to do and we're left in this utopian society where we just get to be romantics and artists and yeah, this rock we're seeing really good art coming out of mid-journey.
• 35:36
  Speaker 2: We're like oh Shit.
• 35:39
  Speaker 2: I think, the music space.
• 35:43
  Speaker 2: We see that too, where it's like you know, ai is making music and some of them suck.
• 35:47
  Speaker 2: Some of the tools are getting pretty good.
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: And I'm sure you know, like even chat.
• 35:53
  Speaker 2: GPT.
• 35:53
  Speaker 2: I had that.
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: I was working on something I didn't understand and I just said, hey, could you write some Lua code to do this?
• 36:02
  Speaker 2: And there it was.
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: And I was like wow, that's incredible.
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: And I OBS CSS.
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: You know, I was like I need to change the font and I don't know enough about CSS and so can you do this.
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: I just change the font to yeah.
• 36:17
  Speaker 2: And I've used it to like debug code and stuff too, and it's really good at that.
• 36:21
  Speaker 2: And I've used it with some of my YouTube ideas where when I structure a video, I have come like bullet point structures I'll start with before I start like writing the actual thing, and I might throw that into GPT and say what is the order of events here that makes the most sense for this information and you know what are some, what are questions that a video with this title would raise.
• 36:41
  Speaker 2: That's right, so I can make sure I'm considering things and using it as a tool to retain creative objectivity, which is very valuable.
• 36:49
  Speaker 2: And, as someone who can't really draw, I got all the musical talent, my dad got the drawing talent, which is really dumb.
• 36:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there you could be your own, disney.
• 37:00
  Speaker 2: Right, yeah, so you know my dad can draw incredibly well, but I can't draw to save my life.
• 37:05
  Speaker 2: So having something like stable diffusion really handy for me to then you know, I can visualize something, but I can't do that so I could tell stable diffusion.
• 37:16
  Speaker 2: Hey, I made a sample pack called robot growls vomit step.
• 37:22
  Speaker 2: Make a picture of a robot throwing up green goo at an EDM festival.
• 37:29
  Speaker 2: Right with with bolts and nails and it just spits out 400 images and three or four of them are pretty good and one of them looks nice.
• 37:36
  Speaker 2: So I have it.
• 37:37
  Speaker 2: Variate that.
• 37:37
  Speaker 2: And, next thing, you know, I've got my cover art rendered in you know, 7000 by 7000 pixels and it looks amazing and it's, you know, custom designed for me, trained on a dataset, granted, but that's something that to me, is really useful as a creator, and I think that is maybe where a lot of the future at least in the immediate future, the use and the threat of AI lies.
• 38:02
  Speaker 2: It's in that those who leverage it gain some of these creative superpowers.
• 38:08
  Speaker 2: Those who fear it probably need to look a little more inward.
• 38:12
  Speaker 2: I'm not overly concerned that an AI robot is going to take my music away from me In 10 years.
• 38:18
  Speaker 2: It might be really good at making Venus theory music, but I still get really fulfilled making music.
• 38:25
  Speaker 2: I don't care if robots do it too.
• 38:27
  Speaker 2: I just, you know, I'm a musician who enjoys the process of writing music.
• 38:33
  Speaker 2: What a concept.
• 38:35
  Speaker 2: I think that's the thing we forget.
• 38:36
  Speaker 2: It's easy to get scared and it's easy to say than like it's going to take my job away from me.
• 38:40
  Speaker 2: And that's not what took your job away from you.
• 38:42
  Speaker 2: Piracy, record labels, endless middlemen and the age of internet accessibility took your job.
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: Streaming royalties.
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: That's what's taking your job away from you right now.
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: It's why you know, as of this recording, the writers and the actors are on strike, Right.
• 38:56
  Speaker 2: And AI is the biggest threat.
• 38:58
  Speaker 2: It's just one of the many things screwing things up, and it's as an artist.
• 39:02
  Speaker 2: You just have to love the process.
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah and yeah, I've said that here on the show.
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: You know you have to love composing more than you love having composed Right.
• 39:15
  Speaker 2: And if I, if I deleted my YouTube channel today and I sold all my gear and got rid of my studio, I, in a week I will go out and buy a guitar or a piano or something and just get right back to it.
• 39:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Because I just really love making music and stuff.
• 39:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely.
• 39:31
  Speaker 2: And I think that's, that's the hard part, and I think maybe that's what separates the the career creatives from the hobby ones is just not even really the hobby ones, but the people who really do take that step into leaning into it as a profession is just there's something in you that you have to create or you're going to explode.
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: Well, that's the sustainability.
• 39:51
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: You can't sustain a 20, 30 or 40 year career, which is, you know, that's hopefully.
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: That's the hall we're in for.
• 39:58
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: You can't sustain a career like that if you don't enjoy the, if you don't enjoy holding an instrument or or or penciling in MIDI notes, or if you don't enjoy tweaking synths and I'm not saying you have to do all those things right.
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: If the process isn't a reward in and of itself, then then you're on borrowed time.
• 40:16
  Speaker 2: Right, well, yeah, if you're going to be on a lot of different ends for validation, especially external validation, then what are you doing?
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: Well, it's imposter syndrome and resistance and procrastination and all that stuff, and I think we all deal with that on some level, especially once you start getting successful in something and you're like, oh hey, yeah, I'll make a bunch of those.
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: Right, I had to write 45 dramedy cues for a discovery channel and by 35th I was like, oh my God, I'm over this.
• 40:43
  Speaker 2: And I think that's the thing where that's where AI is going to go and that's why I see library music probably taking a backseat, other than very bespoke music, but I think that's the creative future.
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 40:55
  Speaker 2: Because the you know, I'm an independent filmmaker or something like.
• 40:59
  Speaker 2: I'm working on like a short film, I guess I'll call it right now.
• 41:01
  Speaker 2: So I'm working on this little short film project.
• 41:04
  Speaker 2: And if I was looking at that as someone who just didn't know anything about music, right, like I can't draw, so I use AI to help me draw Yep, I can draw whatever.
• 41:15
  Speaker 2: If I was working on this short film and I just needed generic piano, you know, like little strings, you know something where it's just the most generic stuff, then why would I not use AI to do that?
• 41:31
  Speaker 2: But if I had a very specific creative vision, I think it is just in the nature of human collaboration where that's going to be sought out specifically based on the artist's merit.
• 41:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah, whereas if I'm an app developer and I just need you know, because I wrote a lot of music for apps in the last couple of years, which is a weird industry, but so much of it is just hey, can you do kalimbas and some like bongos, you know where you're just making, like Donkey Kong, you know, and little like that, and then the water level, that stuff's going to be taken over by AI.
• 42:07
  Speaker 2: I'm not heartbroken about it, it's work.
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: It gave kind of a substance, the lowest hanging fruit Right.
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: It wasn't paying a lot and you know, to your point about using album art, I've used Dolly to do some album art yeah.
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: And I was either going to use like a stock picture or I was like I had no budget to pay somebody.
• 42:35
  Speaker 2: Right?
• 42:35
  Speaker 2: Well, hardly any of us do have to, right.
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: So to be using that, using Dolly?
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: What am I trying to say?
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: Folks who are going to use AI-generated music probably weren't going to pay a lot, if any, for the music to begin with.
• 42:52
  Speaker 2: Well and same.
• 42:53
  Speaker 2: Like.
• 42:53
  Speaker 2: I don't feel I took a job away from an artist having AI make the cover for that.
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: What was it?
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: Canadian wildfires?
• 42:59
  Speaker 2: Like the last track I just randomly dropped?
• 43:01
  Speaker 2: I didn't take a job from an artist using that because I was not giving that job anyway, right?
• 43:06
  Speaker 2: So if I was going to give that job, I would have just done it myself in Photoshop with stock photos and like some 100%, really really crappy, mediocre digital painting.
• 43:16
  Speaker 2: So it enables me, as a creative, to deliver a better product, right.
• 43:19
  Speaker 2: So I think it's a very empowering thing, and the people that are, like you know, worried that AI.
• 43:25
  Speaker 2: Everyone's going to be a producer.
• 43:27
  Speaker 2: You know everyone is anyway.
• 43:28
  Speaker 2: When sample packs, splice and stuff became mainstream, all you have to do is download a loop kit, slap it together, put it on DistroKid and away it goes.
• 43:36
  Speaker 2: If that is an existential threat to you as an artist, I don't think the blame there lies on that externalized thing.
• 43:45
  Speaker 2: I think that's something you really have to examine of.
• 43:47
  Speaker 2: Why am I doing this then?
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and then the more you know talking about production and library music, the more publishers I talked to know that that low hanging fruit is going to be gobbled up either by the royalty free folks, and you know Pond5 and Audio Jungle.
• 44:04
  Speaker 2: Fireworks and stuff like that.
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they're already like lowering the bar into AI space, but the publishers themselves are putting an increasingly higher premium on originality, on uniqueness.
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: Even though it has to, you know, this episode of, you know, real Housewives of Miami still needs this little hip hop, dramedy music.
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: How are you going to separate yourself?
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: Which brings me to my next question, which is the element of sound design recording, creating your own sounds.
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: Somebody listening to this right now, maybe they're an only a MIDI composer and they're all in the VST.
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: What would you say to them and how would you encourage them to kind of ease into that, or maybe, let's say, tiptoe into that space, considering how-.
• 44:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, just like sound, design and stuff.
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: In depth.
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: You've done sound design work.
• 45:00
  Speaker 2: I think the biggest challenge that's always a lot of fun is making a whole song using no presets.
• 45:06
  Speaker 2: And you know, don't worry if it sounds like garbage, it probably will.
• 45:11
  Speaker 2: It might not it might be the best song you've ever made, but that's a good way to have to force yourself to understand the tools you're using.
• 45:18
  Speaker 2: I think it's a lot like understanding music theory or mixing on a more technical level or things like that, where you just give yourself another color palette to work with, where most of the time when I'm composing I use presets.
• 45:36
  Speaker 2: Everybody does.
• 45:37
  Speaker 2: A lot of the presets I use are now my own presets or whatever.
• 45:40
  Speaker 2: But it enabled me earlier on to where when I would open a contact library or I would open serum or whatever, and I would find a sound and I would say that's pretty close, I'll go with that.
• 45:51
  Speaker 2: Now, as you grow into that, it's helpful to then understand that's pretty close, but it needs this or it needs less of that, or what if it had this filter, or what if I put it through a reverb and things like that?
• 46:06
  Speaker 2: And that's really powerful as a musician and artist to develop not only your own sound but just open up the floodgates for more creative potential.
• 46:16
  Speaker 2: What artist wouldn't want that?
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so sound designing isn't necessarily going into a field with a field recorder into the middle.
• 46:26
  Speaker 2: I mean, sound design is like tweaking a filter, turning on a Moog, super basic subtractive synth.
• 46:34
  Speaker 2: The sound design is pulling some knobs on it and seeing what happens.
• 46:38
  Speaker 2: It doesn't have to be this, like a chin stroking, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 46:42
  Speaker 2: The yes FFT transforms and blah, blah, blah.
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 46:47
  Speaker 2: It's not that if you want it to be, but I don't think that's most of its purpose in the application of music.
• 46:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it can be something you can get very creative and innovative with, especially in the electronic scenes.
• 46:59
  Speaker 2: A lot of film scores now too.
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: Absolutely yes.
• 47:03
  Speaker 2: There's a tendency away from melodicism into texture.
• 47:10
  Speaker 2: I guess tamper.
• 47:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, soundscapes, textures, yeah, and it's not tunnel, it's not anything sometimes, but it is very interesting and I think that's you know in a really dumb down way of saying it.
• 47:23
  Speaker 2: It's that punk rock attitude of just like, okay, I'll just do stuff and do it myself.
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a fearlessness to it.
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: You know, and I think the line between music and sound design it's no longer just I'm gonna make you know strings and brass in my orchestra and this other person over here is making foley and explosions and stuff it's.
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: The line is so blurry and especially if you wanna get into games and apps, you know they're gonna want a sound person who can do music and sound design.
• 47:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, right, and that's the thing I do, especially like some of the apps I worked on or even one of the other gigs I'm working on right now being able to design, you know, little clicks, things like that very useful skill to have and that's the thing that makes you the person that gets the gig.
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and to be honest, I mean it kind of scares me still.
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: I remember I had the opportunity to do a game where it was penguins pushing ice cubes, like it was like a match three game but it was with penguins and ice cubes, and so the developer wanted me to do the music.
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: But I could only do the music if I could also do the sound design.
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: It was like a package deal, right.
• 48:34
  Speaker 2: They only had the budget to pay, like one dude, and I said, okay, for just audio.
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah right, exactly, and the mix and the final master and all that business.
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: And what broke me was he said, okay, we need sound design, so we're gonna need all the little interface clicks and everything.
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: I said, okay, I think I can get my brain around that, but what broke me was okay, so the penguins are pushing 800 pound blocks of ice on a frozen lake and I need you to make that sound and I was like I don't know where to start.
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: I'm not gonna go up to Iceland, you know, and with my Zoom recorder, and I think that's where sci-fi sound design is particularly fun because then you know what is an alien laser weapon sound Like.
• 49:19
  Speaker 2: there is no bar for that.
• 49:20
  Speaker 2: But when someone says we need penguins pushing 800 block pounds of ice, you're just like, oh, is that a?
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: bowling ball on salt.
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: I mean, that's how I would probably do it now, and I know we're getting into kind of foley.
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: But that was when I realized I've got to up my sound design for the game.
• 49:37
  Speaker 2: Yep, absolutely, and a lot of it is fun too because, even if it's not something you necessarily want to get into as a career, it's like mixing.
• 49:44
  Speaker 2: Like one of the most helpful things for me with mixing and I still do this to this day is I'll just download stems from other genres that I don't even work, you know, like a jazz trio or something.
• 49:56
  Speaker 2: Just get stems for stuff like that and mix it, because it's something I don't do, it's something I'm not really involved in, but it forces me to get out of my own head and just purely listen to the mechanics of something.
• 50:10
  Speaker 2: And I think that's where doing something like that, that's more abstract, is useful, because everything you do in those sessions can then be applied to your other sessions.
• 50:19
  Speaker 2: Because when I'm mixing a Cuban techno, folk hop song or whatever you know I find stems for, I'm hearing, oh, there is a clash at like 300 Hertz, or oh, the bass sounds weird, or oh, the vocal kind of ducks here behind the horn, so maybe I should automate that.
• 50:39
  Speaker 2: But then these are all things that I can bring into my own sessions and gain a deeper understanding for the inner workings of a track and sort of see past the artistic vision into the more technical aspect and really elevate my own abilities.
• 50:53
  Speaker 2: And I think that's the big thing with sound.
• 50:55
  Speaker 2: Design and getting into the more abstract stuff is all right design the sound of a car engine starting, but it's a giant, you know, mad Max.
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 51:06
  Speaker 2: Not just like mom's Dodge Caravan.
• 51:09
  Speaker 2: So what do you do?
• 51:10
  Speaker 2: You might record mom's Dodge Caravan because you have access to it, but what if you pitched it up?
• 51:15
  Speaker 2: What if you pitched it down?
• 51:16
  Speaker 2: What if you layered those?
• 51:17
  Speaker 2: What if you rattled some cans around in your garage and compressed that with 12 OTTs?
• 51:24
  Speaker 2: There's no rules on it.
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 51:27
  Speaker 2: But these are all things that when you come back and do a musical session you might have a better understanding of compression and EQ and layering and how to hear into the arrangement from more of a frequency perspective of oh yeah, it kind of sounds hollow in like the low mid, so maybe I could do a brass instrument.
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's not like your brain compartmentalizes Nope, that's sound design.
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: Like I practiced video, not video editing, but music editing to video.
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: So taking my music and trying to chop it up the way a video editor would for, like a reality show or something like that, and you have to use the really crude, like NLE editing tools, where you can't mix.
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: You could just like cut Nope, I have a waveform and I'm trying to make it make sense and you learn really fast how hard or how easy your own music is to cut apart and loop.
• 52:21
  Speaker 2: And it makes you a better arranger too, because then you can understand that, oh, if I have some more regular fade points, it's easier for an editor to do that, which in turn makes your music more licensible.
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: That's right.
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: That's right and that's us, you know, bringing a skill outside of just music composition and it influencing and impacting.
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: So what are some of the tools Like?
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: What is your like, let's say, bambi legs, wading into the shallow end of sound design?
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: What would you recommend for a complete noob?
• 52:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, just getting into sound design, you know A synth vital or Odin or whatever you know, there's a bajillion free ones out there just a good all around blanket synth to play around with Some kind of sampler.
• 53:05
  Speaker 2: You know you don't really have to go full beans and get contact.
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: but Probably your DAW sampler.
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: I mean they're right.
• 53:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, like Ableton has simpler FL has slice X and stuff.
• 53:14
  Speaker 2: Every DAW has some kind of A sampler, so some kind of sampler to play with Couple effects.
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: Most and people like never believe this for some reason.
• 53:24
  Speaker 2: I still don't understand it.
• 53:26
  Speaker 2: But like your DAW's stock effects do everything you need.
• 53:29
  Speaker 2: I guarantee it.
• 53:30
  Speaker 2: Some external reverbs and stuff sound better, but nine times out of 10, the stock stuff probably does the job.
• 53:38
  Speaker 2: It's what is the saying the plumber covered in shit blames his tools.
• 53:44
  Speaker 2: Right, so yeah it's just if you just learn it and apply it, that's a lot more useful.
• 53:49
  Speaker 2: So you know a DAW, a synth and a sampler.
• 53:52
  Speaker 2: That's really all you need to get into sound design.
• 53:54
  Speaker 2: I would always encourage people to get a good field recorder because it's a lot of fun.
• 53:59
  Speaker 2: But even just using your cell phone, you know and they have the iPhone.
• 54:05
  Speaker 2: I know there's a.
• 54:06
  Speaker 2: What am I?
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: thinking of, there's like a mic, a sure mix a little bit, yeah, and I think IK Multimedia now and a couple of companies even do.
• 54:14
  Speaker 2: It's like a proper audio interface that just plugs into your and like that's awesome.
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I picked up one of these little guys, just a zoom.
• 54:21
  Speaker 2: you know H1N, oh yeah and you know even those things where it's just the little $200, $100, whatever.
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: Yup Field recorders.
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it has a stereo mic.
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: I mean I record my drums, you know.
• 54:30
  Speaker 2: And that's the thing, they're way useful.
• 54:32
  Speaker 2: And I've used cheap recorders in a pinch.
• 54:33
  Speaker 2: I mean, I've used my cell phone to record stuff that ended up on Splice.
• 54:37
  Speaker 2: Splice doesn't care, they just want good sounds, right.
• 54:40
  Speaker 2: So a good field recorder is a good idea, but just a smartphone with a recorder app really useful just to get out into the world and Learn to understand.
• 54:48
  Speaker 2: Active listening is a huge skill.
• 54:51
  Speaker 2: There was unpack that.
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: What do you mean by active listening?
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: Was that?
• 55:00
  Speaker 2: I want to say it was for Dice's Battlefield 2042.
• 55:04
  Speaker 2: There was an interview with the composers, or the sound designer, and the composer Her name is Hildre, something I can't pronounce because it's Icelandic.
• 55:13
  Speaker 2: It's got like a G with like a slash in it.
• 55:16
  Speaker 2: I don't know what the hell that letter is Phenomenal composer, love her work.
• 55:21
  Speaker 2: Can't say her name to save my life, but she talked about In the process of composing Battlefield 2042.
• 55:30
  Speaker 2: The idea of listening to different textures and ideas because so much of the score for that was based on people bashing a dumpster or going on to a huge cargo ship and listening to how there's these creeks and moans, and I think that's the idea of active listening is when you you know it's something you say with your friends or something right.
• 55:51
  Speaker 2: You walk into the mall I'm dating myself here.
• 55:54
  Speaker 2: People don't go to the mall anymore, but whatever, pretend you're going to a mall and it's the 2000s and Hot topic is still cool and you walk in and the door goes like squeak and you're like, oh, that was funny, that's it.
• 56:06
  Speaker 2: That is active listening.
• 56:08
  Speaker 2: And field recording really makes you appreciate that.
• 56:10
  Speaker 2: The crunch of leaves, the sound of throwing rocks On concrete, dropping a boulder into a lake, the sound of a car driving on gravel as versus asphalt, the sound of a drumstick against a tree or a friction mallet against a tea cup.
• 56:25
  Speaker 2: So it's really handy because it teaches you a lot about the physics of sound, the behavior of sound, the way that sound propagates and interacts, but also the idea that sound is the biggest liar, especially in the world of sound design.
• 56:41
  Speaker 2: I think one of the common examples is for rain.
• 56:45
  Speaker 2: You know, slight heavy rain is often the sound of frying bacon and things like that or frying things, because that you know, you hear the pitter patter of grease spattering.
• 56:56
  Speaker 2: It sounds a lot like rain.
• 56:58
  Speaker 2: So in your example Of the penguins, that final sound, from a sound designer's perspective, could be anything, and I think that's why it's fun to watch fully artists especially.
• 57:08
  Speaker 2: I have so much respect for their like yeah, I know, oh, here's this medieval night walking and it's like, you know, game of thrones, some gajillion dollar thing, like it's this night in armor walking down the castle and then he fights a dragon or something and the fully artist is like giant industrial chains, a bunch of old coffee tins throwing boots on sand and weird stuff like that.
• 57:37
  Speaker 2: But then when you hear it against the picture, it's perfect.
• 57:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I had one project I worked on.
• 57:43
  Speaker 2: It was a puzzle game and it was turn based tiles of rocks and they needed to be magical sounding, which I need to finish that project, actually.
• 57:56
  Speaker 2: But my first thought was, ok, I need rocks, right, if I'm making rocks that turn and lock into place, I'm going to go to take some rocks in my hands, put them on my driveway or something and go right.
• 58:10
  Speaker 2: But that just sounds like nails on a chalkboard, mostly just like white noise.
• 58:16
  Speaker 2: You know, just that doesn't sound like a rock going, right.
• 58:20
  Speaker 2: So what I ended up doing, swear to God.
• 58:23
  Speaker 2: I went to my kitchen and we had a bunch of bananas, just a big old thing of bananas from the Walmart.
• 58:29
  Speaker 2: So I grabbed the top of them, lifted it up and clapped them all together and it was this really satisfying deck of cards and it's almost like that ASMR stuff that's so popular on YouTube where it's an active listening sensory experience, and that's the thing is active listening and field recording and just playing with things teaches you the nature of sound.
• 58:50
  Speaker 2: So in this game it's these octagonal tiles, that.
• 58:55
  Speaker 2: But that banana going really works well.
• 58:58
  Speaker 2: So I did that 10 or 20 times through those recordings in the DAW and then I layered some.
• 59:05
  Speaker 2: I think I just took a big bag of like table salt and you know kind of went like that just to get sort of a crunch layer, and then I think I took a couple of rocks and just rolled them.
• 59:17
  Speaker 2: You know, clunk, clunk, clunk, layered all that together.
• 59:19
  Speaker 2: So 90% of the sound of rocks in that game is bananas, because the bananas sound more like rocks than rocks do.
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and you can't like, once you know you can't kind of unhear it, right, I did a track where I wanted a little ticking sound, but I wanted to use something kind of unusual, and so I have a basketball sitting over there and I just hit a drumstick on the basketball, right, and if you don't know that's what it is, it's like, oh, that's cool, so it'll sound.
• 59:48
  Speaker 2: right, didn't sound like bubbles, but but once you hear, oh, that's a, that's a basketball, yep, you're like, oh, hey, that's, you can't unhear and that's the hard part of separating that process in your brain, because, as the sound designer, as the creator, as the composer, as the artist, we know the means to the end, but the audience doesn't know and they don't care.
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: It's like can can any sound designer not hear breaking bones and not think, oh, that's a celery, yeah, celery, just whatever.
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: Like a green pepper getting crunched as someone's head getting squished, yeah, and it's.
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 2: It's funny because it it's so hard to separate that process of the appreciation of the aesthetics of the thing, of the work, of the whole, but that's a I don't know, that's a whole, another skill in and of itself, but I think that's something you only really get through experience.
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's true of any creative industry.
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: What if you're writing music for TV?
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: You know you've listened to music on TV differently.
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: If you paint cars for a living, then you seek Well that's, you know, when my wife and I are in the car and some song comes on the radio and I'm like, oh, the vocals are really sibilant.
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 2: Or like, why is the kick drum like that?
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 2: Or you know, my favorite is oh, I had, I had that pack, or like I remember that pack or you know when I hear the vengeance EDM sample packs that were so popular, because they're still super popular today.
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 2: But there are certain loops and drums and stuff from like ah, that's vengeance, I was calling them for.
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 2: I know that kick drum.
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: I have that kick drum Hearing rise and hit in the soundtrack Everything damage to always kills me, which is funny because I use damage all the time like damage and I know that's that's a good thing Damage and I need to get damage too, but damage is just such an incredible library.
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 2: But then you listen to other games or like TV shows and you're like that's damage.
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 2: I use that loop.
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 2: I've used that loop before.
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: I'm not sponsored by Heaviosity, but damage too is is worth the price.
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I need to get it.
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 2: It looks really, really good and I you know, and I've had damage, one for ever like, but I think every composer person has damage.
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: Especially when they bundled it with complete.
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: That's how I got it Right, yeah.
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 2: I mean, I've had some cinematic libraries for that kind of stuff.
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 2: But that's the fun part is you get something like damage which I believe.
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 2: Robert Dudzik, one of the sound designers, I love him to death.
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 2: He's like my.
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 2: If I could have a life size cut out of Robert Dudzik in my studio, I absolutely would.
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: I got to meet him once, not Spock, but that guy yeah.
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 2: I got to meet him once at NAMM and I just like completely fangirled over it.
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 2: It was really funny.
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 2: But watching him make some of the sounds that were put in damage so cool, cause it's literally just banging on a dumpster, but you put that in damage and you're like, damn, that's really good, you know, with some compression, with some EQ, with a little bit of saturation.
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: Their punish algorithm and all that Right.
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 2: But now you know I can go downstairs and close my bathroom door a couple of times.
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 2: But if I compress that now I've got you know, and I've done a bunch of work doing sound design for like trailer houses, for you know, hollywood effects libraries kind of like damage but more industry.
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 2: Only you know sort of thing.
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: Right the Spock stuff Right.
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 2: So I've done a ton of libraries for that kind of stuff and those are really, really fun because you do just get this sort of card launch license.
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 2: So we need impacts with a theme of action, we need impacts with a theme of magic, you know.
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 2: So I've done packs where I and I'm about to go do another session of this next week actually going to like junkyards and just smashing things Super fun.
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 2: I've done packs where my washer and dryer were in them, where you know you have this huge industrial clang but you pitch it down, you filter it, you got a reverb and you have this big low cinematic, you know thing and that's so fun.
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: And I'm just asking selfishly what recording rig do you have, like a Zoom F6 or something like that?
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: Is that what you're rolling out there?
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 2: with.
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 2: I have the Tascam X8, which I really like, but my big gripe with it, which I wish Tascam would fix, and I don't know if this is something they could fix with the software update or not but there's a really high pitched wine.
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 2: When you record at 192 or anything, I think it's anything about 48K.
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 2: If you record at 96 or 192, it has this really high pitched wine.
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 2: When you pitch things down in the recording as it is, you don't hear it.
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 2: But when you pitch it down there's this huge, super loud, just tin, idus-y, you know ring.
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 2: That's super, super annoying.
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 2: It's not hard to get rid of, but it is just annoying.
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 2: But I love that one because it's 32-bit float recording, which at that point gain staging basically doesn't matter.
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 2: So that's really handy for doing sound design stuff, especially big, loud stuff, recording gunshots.
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 2: With that especially, I will never go back to a 24-bit field recorder because being able to record a gunshot, have it be clipped and be able to save that like name your price Game changer, yeah.
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: Well, that's the difference of taking one take or having multiple takes or getting home and being like, oh, I forgot to turn it down.
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 2: I love the X8 because it's got a bunch of inputs, so I have that.
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 2: I sometimes use the built-in mics if I need to be more discreet and don't want to look like a complete psycho, because I've done things like that where I've gone into Target or Wal-Mart and recorded little kids' toys or gone into With your boom and all that stuff, yeah, or going into flea markets and recording typewriters and things where like I don't want to buy this, I just want to record a couple sounds off of it.
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 2: So that's nice for more discreet recording because it looks about the size of a cell phone so people don't look at you like, oh, that dude's going to blow up a neighborhood.
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: Right, or they're shooting a movie or something like that, yeah.
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 2: Or people are like, hey, what are you doing?
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 2: You know what's up.
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 2: But normally in my run and gun rig I have these two microphones here.
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 2: This is the HC-15 and the other one is the HC-25.
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 2: I believe they're from Rycote.
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 2: They normally make wind protection gear and stuff.
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 2: But they release these microphones.
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 2: They're incredible.
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 2: So I have the HC-25 and the HC-15.
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 2: Normally I use the 25, which is a longer shotgun mic, extremely clean, super tight polar pattern, and then I have that on a Luit stereo bar.
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 2: So in the center I'll have the Rycote mic and then off to the sides I use the two Luit 040 matched pair small diaphragm condensers.
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 2: Or I have just other various microphones.
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 2: You know, like some SM57s or I have like scientific measurement microphones I might use or other odds and ends like that.
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 2: But usually it's a three microphone setup.
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 2: So I have the shotgun in the center.
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 2: I stole this setup from Robert Dudzik actually.
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 2: But the shotgun in the center just to give me a nice tight take of something.
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 2: The side microphones, whatever they might be, just for a good stereo image as well as just a different mix of the sound.
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 2: You know, I might want one version that's like a close shot and one that's more of a stereo, like ambience.
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 2: So that's really handy and having that three microphone setup is really useful.
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 2: Just to get.
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 2: I could have three mics pointed directly out.
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 2: I could have sort of an X, y with a shotgun.
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 2: I could have a super wide like binaural setup with a shotgun in the center.
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 2: It's a really, really handy way to do that and, you know, powering it off I use just like a battery bank for like a phone I got on Amazon for you know five bucks.
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 2: And that'll power it all day.
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 2: It's awesome.
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's my usual field recording rig and I have.
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 2: I have a day bag I take which also has contact microphones, and I have an EMF microphone and just a couple other exotic things just in case.
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and if you're listening to this and you're like, wow, that sounds like a lot of gear I need to buy, you don't need to.
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 2: You've probably got one in your pocket right now.
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: Or, like I said, go Marlin Gibbons turned me on to this guy just a little field recording.
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: The whole point is record something, get it into your DAW, start making it your own, because if the AI overlords are coming for the low hanging fruit, the generic fruit, then the only way that we are going to be able to survive, especially in the production and library music game, is standing out.
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and we can do that by making unique sounds.
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 2: And I think that's been a huge thing for me, as the sound design works and whatever, and then trying to push music in other directions and whatever has been really nice, because that's definitely helped me survive the current AI apocalypse.
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 2: Volume one of and I think a large part of that, too, is from my YouTube channel and being able to show more unique and bespoke ideas and whatnot.
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 2: It makes me more attractive to hire as a composer as well, as, the reach notwithstanding, it's nice to have someone with a name recognition.
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: I totally get that.
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 1: Well, Cameron, I just so appreciate you.
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 1: I feel like I could talk to you for another hour, but I want to be respectful of your time.
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 2: I want to rapid fire some questions I guess we could, before we wrap up.
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I'm feeling really really good.
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 1: I appreciate you and, as I said at the beginning, I appreciate your authenticity and your transparency and, as of this recording I know it's been a bumpy couple of weeks I'm glad to hear that the YouTube stuff is kind of ironing out for you, Hopefully, yeah there's still some weirdness going on, but I'm kind of just taking a bit of a sabbatical from YouTube for a couple of weeks and then coming back to it with just some different projects, because that's the thing is.
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 2: trying not to blame the algorithm, I'm just going to blame myself and internalize that self-loathing and hatred into something better, I guess.
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 2: That's the name of the game.
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: So if you want to follow Cameron it's Venus Theory over at YouTube or VenusTheorycom Go subscribe.
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: If you haven't, what are you doing here?
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: Just go subscribe.
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: You will not be sorry.
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 1: And if you appreciate a nicely manicured beard or I guess that would be is that a Van Dyke?
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 1: Is that technically?
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 2: I think I guess go to I don't know.
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: Versus whatever grizzly items thing I got going on and a fine appreciation of good coffee than his videos do not.
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 2: And pretentious cinematography, lots of depth of field and whatnot.
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: Oh, I'm very jealous of your color grading.
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: Even right now, like looking at this video, I'm just like you look great.
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 2: It's a whole process.
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, a7 III, and then vintage lenses, is my main secret.
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 2: And then just a ton of work, color grading, which takes forever, which is why my videos come out like once a month, because they just I don't have the energy, patients or bandwidth to do that.
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 2: Dude, I barely have the energy, patients and bandwidth to do it.
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I hear you.
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: I hear you, my friend Well Cameron.
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: Really really appreciate you being with us today, yeah thanks for having me on.
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: Once again, a huge word of thanks to Cameron for joining me on today's episode and, as always, we're going to have links to our guests in the description, so be sure to click on all of that.
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: Just go, go, subscribe.
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: I promise you you will not regret it.
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: But that is going to do it for us this week.
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: And again, a huge word of thanks to all of the family, friends and patron subscribers who really do make all of this possible.
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: Please know that I love and appreciate every single one of you and we'd love to have you join us.
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: If you're a family, friend or a patron, or if you just want to join the community, it is free to join.
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: Head over to 52 cuescom for more information.
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: You do want to tune in next week, where I will be joined by members of the 52 cues family and we have our first round table discussion.
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: We're going to be talking about subscriptions the good, the bad, the ugly, the upside.
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: Are there any upsides to software as a service?
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: Well, I'm going to be joined by 52 cues family members and we're going to chat about it.
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: So that is next week.
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: So I hope you have had a good week.
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: Again, thank you for joining me and just know, friends, that I trust and believe that the universe has amazing plans just for you.
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: Until next time, peace.
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: The 52 cues podcast is copyright 2023 at 18 studios.
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 1: All rights reserved.
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: The music played on the podcast is copyright of their respective owners and is used with permission and for educational purposes only.
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 1: For more information and including joining the community and submitting your cue for consideration on the podcast, head over to 52 cuescom.