JESSE CANNON: Processing Creativity, Head vs. Heart, Finding Flow State

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, brought to you by STA Audio. Sta Audio creates zero compromise Recording gear. That is light on the wallet only. The best components are used and each one goes through a rigorous testing process with one thing in mind, getting the best sound possible. Go to stem audio do com for more info. And now your host, Joey Sturgis, Joel Wanasek and

Speaker 2 (00:00:26):

Eyal Levi. Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast. I am Eyal Levi with me as co-host, Mr. Joel Wanasek. And hello, hello. We have a very special guest. This is his second time on the podcast. One of our favorite people to speak with have gone on his podcast before, so has our, not with us dearly departed, but still alive. Co-host Joey Sturgis has also been on his podcast. He's an author, entrepreneur, engineer, smart, cool person, Mr. Jesse Cannon. If you don't know who he is, you should know who he is, whether you are a client of his at Kennan Foundation Studios in New York. Well, New Jersey, Brooklyn, yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:01:23):

Right outside.

Speaker 2 (00:01:24):

Right outside. You can record with him or he does primarily mastering very, very great master engineer. He actually taught a course on it for Creative Live. He's worked with bands all the way from the Cure to Animal Collective to the Misfits Limp Bizkit. So I mean Dillinger Escape Plan, his range of engineering experience goes all the way from the nastiest cool stuff to I would say the Glossiest major label stuff. He's got a podcast called Off the Record, and that one is kind of about music industry, business stuff and tech behind it all. And then another one, which is honestly, I'm very biased. I think URM podcast is a great audio podcast, but if I had to say which one I thought was another fantastic podcast that I love, it's called Noise Creators Podcast, which Joey and I have gone on. And that's where kind of similar to URM, he talks to producers and other music creators. He's been a manager for bands such as Man Overboard and Transit. He's an author, his first book, which is what like 700 pages long

Speaker 4 (00:02:44):

Is

Speaker 2 (00:02:44):

Called Get More Fans, the DIY Guide to the New Music Business. And one thing that's really cool about that book is that when you think of music industry books, at least me, I think of books that are very outdated that talk about the old record label structures and the old way of doing things. But Jesse's book is, I would say a college level book about the way things are done in the new era. And he's updated it many, many times. So it remains current. And we have him on because he wrote another book called Processing Creativity, which is brand new and it is exactly what the title says. I've read it and Joel has read it too. It's a fascinating book. It's about how to actually turn creativity into something that you can summon at will and introduce into your workflows a regular part of your life rather so that you own it rather than it owning you. I guess maybe that's a dumb way to put it, but what would you say it's about Jesse?

Speaker 3 (00:04:04):

I like that actually it is about getting control of the creative process. And now that you've said that, I feel like I have a little bit more grasp on I'd say it. I think there's just so many pitfalls. Obviously everybody thinks, oh, I wrote a great song, but it's man, we all know, and I've heard you guys discuss it. It's like the pitfalls that go along the way are way, way, way more likely to mess you up of even just, I was listening to your episode with Jay Moss this week and it's like talking about the guitarist, the fight of should the best guitarist play the guitars on that record and things like that and the ego wars. And what I tried to do is just figure out everything that's gotten in the way of a good record. And I took notes for four years, so every time I saw a band making a bad mistake, I'm like, this is what it is. Every time I heard a podcast like yours and I was like, oh yeah, I should discuss that. And I just wrote it down and found what I had that was interesting to say on the subject.

Speaker 2 (00:05:02):

And I want to key in on the fact that you said that this took years because it's not just something you threw together in a night. I mean, this is very well researched.

Speaker 3 (00:05:11):

I appreciate that.

Speaker 2 (00:05:12):

Yeah. You're pulling in examples across the entire musical spectrum and ideas across the entire musical spectrum. I think it is very, very thorough. Definitely.

Speaker 3 (00:05:27):

I have that thing of, I'm sure you guys have this with books too, and there's this big trend of write a book in 30 days these days. That's like 90% of books should be a 28 page article, maybe at best, probably not. That just like we try to make the records, we're going to revisit all over and over again. I try to make a book that people are going to want to read countless times and revisit at different points in their life, even if they don't find one part interesting, to go back at a different stage of their life and think about this again as they mature and stuff with a lot, a lot of depth because I mean, dude, I had to read 200 books and most of them I literally wanted to just cross out and throw away, why did you waste seven hours of my life with somebody I could worded an hour. You read 200

Speaker 2 (00:06:14):

Books researching this.

Speaker 3 (00:06:16):

I read 200 some odd books, tons of research papers. I was really lucky that when I started, I was dating a neuroscientist with a past login for all these academic studies. I mean, I must have watched tons of documentaries. And then also I've been, you guys I'm sure did this too, is you have the preparation sheet for before the band comes in. It's like I've been kind of always adding to that thing. And mine got to 45 pages at one point and no band was reading it. So I was like, all right, this is ridiculous. But I'm like, what if I made this something else? And I had that idea, actually, I say I wrote this for four years, but there's literally blog posts I had on my old blog Mation. There's sections of this book that were taken from that that are seven to eight years old,

Speaker 2 (00:07:04):

So long time in coming. And why this topic? And by the way, before you answer that, let me say that I think this is a great topic because there was a time period in my life, I think when I was actively writing music all the time where I tried researching this topic a lot. This resonates for me because I wanted to know what did Einstein and Mozart have in common, for instance, where did that spark come from? What makes those great people create? How do they just do it all the time? And so seeing that you did this for me, it's something that I've personally been very interested in, but why?

Speaker 3 (00:07:52):

So when I finished get more fans, I chopped up 300 pages and a lot of that was on songwriting and objectivity and things like

Speaker 2 (00:07:59):

That. So get More Fans was a thousand pages long.

Speaker 3 (00:08:02):

When I first wrote it, it was 1200, then I got rid of 200. I mean, if you think this way, this book is two 60 and I had 5 75 when the first draft was done. And then I always overwrite, the other thing about the way I write is I've learned this thing. It's just like what you do with music. It's like when you have an idea and it's trying to get out of your head, it's like get it down in every detail because everything you don't get out is probably not going to come back unless you're really, really lucky. So I overwrite and then I trim and trim and trim. I mean, I think I did probably six months of the process was just trimming it and getting the best sentences because I'd say the same thing over and trying to get the best way to say it, the most clear way.

(00:08:47):

That was a lot of the time and probably the most intense work I was doing of when I really, I was like, I can't take production gigs anymore. I mean, I stopped dating for a while, which is insane for someone like me. I killed my social life. Yeah, I mean you're dedicated person and it's like that thing of I really needed to go in, but the way I got here was, so I trimmed those 300 books. I thought I was going to write a book on meta production and lifestyle stuff. And then as I researched the creativity stuff, I was like, I found myself more interested in it. And I was realizing, I'm like, man, half the time I'm listening to people talk about these things. They don't know. Most of the stuff in here all heard the discussion of why do I have all my good ideas at night?

(00:09:35):

It's like, well, there's actually reasons for that and let's get into how you can get better at that too, and let's give concrete things. I never hear anybody say that. And I just kept finding like, wow. So also a lot of this book was like I exercise in staying passionate about this. Obviously I'm on year 19 of doing this full time and I can't say that every day is as challenging, but ever since I researched this book, I'm like, I'm in a whole new world where it's all fresh and new to me and I'm so excited again. And part of that was going deeper and we know as nerds, the three of us, that's what you got to do all the time is find the new thing, find the new challenge, and go deeper. And this was my way of doing that.

Speaker 2 (00:10:19):

Well, one thing that got me right away was in the first few pages you talked about a no BS approach

Speaker 4 (00:10:29):

To

Speaker 2 (00:10:30):

Creativity. It's one of the headings. And you kind of referenced how in other books, they will evoke a spiritual or metaphysical or bullshit approach to when they're referencing creativity. And I really like that because I've never seen it like that. However, I do think that I've thought about it, the light bulb comes on and the light bulb comes off. And I understand, I understand why sometimes creative people will say that it was downloaded to them from a higher power. It feels like that, but I've never thought that it's actually coming from there. I've thought that you're just waking your brain up. So could you talk us through some of that nitty gritty science that bolsters your case for process and creativity? Yes.

Speaker 3 (00:11:21):

So with that kind of was, you guys know the book War of Art, it's the highest biggest selling creativity book. I read that and I was like, wow, this book sucks. It has a great point. The resistance idea is an amazing idea and it's amazing way of putting that into words, but it is like an 18.5 where half the pages are blank. And he talks about all this stuff that's just rambling on and on about things that aren't there. And I'm like, I'm a science geek. And it's like that thing, nothing thrills me more than reading psychology and science. And so there's a lot of subjects in the book, but a lot of the I, I think the biggest thing people miss, and I know I watched you guys say it to people in forums all day, it's like there's an emotional aspect of this that's so many people miss. They're trying to make their records loud, technically right on the grid, perfectly, this and that. And it's like it's not what it is. It's like it's an emotional expression and learning how and not leave. The other side of it is those white stripes worshiping Jack White masturbator who I'm going to leave all the mistakes and it's going to be so fucking cool. Dude, I live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I walk among them.

(00:12:36):

So there's these two sides to it. And what both those sides miss is kind of the thing that the mistakes that actually work and the looseness that works is it works emotionally and so much of that. And then so there's this scientist, Daniel Leviton, he wrote this book called This Is Your Brain on Music, which is a fantastic book. And so he was a record producer. He produced Blue Oyster Cult and all these crazy seventies bands, and then he decided to become a neuroscientist. So a lot of his stuff is just about how flaws left in and or flaws in the humanness in music is actually what makes people respond to it. So I got into a lot of that and then I got into just a lot of, there's a great doctor named Dr. Keesler. So hilariously, one of the things I point out in the book is creativity was never a word in the New York Times till 1950.

(00:13:27):

So we've only been discussing it really in the main lexicon for 60 some odd years. And Keith Sawyer is one of really wrote the only textbook on creativity. And so when you go through that, you learn there's a reason. Every one of these things that we have happen in the studio, there's usually a reason behind it that science has studied. And I wanted to get into that and make it fun language because obviously we're musicians and we don't want to read this. I recognize it's really fucking boring. So I wanted to put fun language to all of that.

Speaker 2 (00:13:57):

So before the word creativity was used, what did they use? Or is that where the metaphysical language comes from prior to the word creativity?

Speaker 3 (00:14:11):

You guys are familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of Needs or should I explain that to the audience?

Speaker 2 (00:14:15):

Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (00:14:15):

Yeah. So you guys know, so for the audience, it's like this thing that you're in a survival mode and then after you get to that you can get to actualization. So actualization is being able to do creative things. So if you think of it this way, up to 1950, most people weren't able to actually, sure they might paint, but creativity was really a small part of their lives and people would use the word innovation, but they just didn't know how to discuss creativity. The concept I really like to explain this is when the three of us were younger, we'd have a fear of missing out, but no one ever said that term fear of missing out when we were teenagers. Now that's one of the most popular words in the English lexicon and one of the most Google words around, I think it was all, and it's very real too, but we didn't have the way of explaining it. They just were still getting really good at discussing creativity. And when I looked at, I did an exercise of, I looked at all the creativity books and I looked at what their copyright year is and it's insane how many more are coming out now getting good at saying it. And it's literally the first book even published on it, it was 1928 that said it, and it wasn't a book that sold

Speaker 2 (00:15:23):

Interesting. So I guess it seems very, very timely for you to be throwing your 2 cents into the pot. I didn't realize that it's such a modern concept.

Speaker 3 (00:15:35):

And the other crazy thing is when I was like, oh, there's no book on this subject. There's one that's close, which is Michael Vanhorn, who is one of my favorite producers ever. He wrote a book called Unlocking Creativity that gets into music, but it doesn't do what I do. It's more like just some long meditative essays on it. And he gets into cool things like how he got the 16 inch two track machine made for Ozzy Osborne, no rest for the Wicked and things like that. But it's not the same thing. He doesn't go through the whole process and try to detail every aspect of it. So I just really felt like this is what will advance the conversation. I think that's always something I'm like, I am a big political nerd and I hate listening to all the people who say boring things about politics. I want to find the people who say interesting things that get your brain to understand it more. And it's the same for this.

Speaker 2 (00:16:26):

Makes sense. And now you talk about seven myths about creativity such as a myth that creativity is inherited

Speaker 4 (00:16:34):

Or

Speaker 2 (00:16:34):

Those with higher IQs or more creative. And again, I'll tell you my opinion before you tell me yours, how important is it in your opinion to dispel these myths in order to basically fulfill your potential? And my opinion is that when I've been at my most creative, I'm not thinking about any creative ideas or about the theory of creativity or anything. I'm just in the moment.

Speaker 3 (00:16:59):

Yeah, well, so that's the flow state, and that's what we're all trying to get into when we perspire as opposed to getting inspired. The reason I have that myth thing in there is much more that man, you talk to so many people, even one of the girls who edited the book, it's like she doesn't feel like she's a creative person. She always heard, oh, you have to have this high iq or Oh, your parents did it. And yeah, I know your dad is highly in music. My father was a music manager. But what we really find when people actually do scientific studies is like, well, yeah, those creative people let their kids be more creative and they value that higher because they do it with their lives. Whereas we all hear the story of the people that their parents wouldn't let them work on music and stuff, and some of them make up for it later on. I mean, actually a lot of people make up for it later on, but all these myths that make for good articles and clickbait stories aren't actually the totally real case. It's like there's really logical reasons for all this. I would agree with you.

Speaker 5 (00:18:00):

I think that's a good topic. If we don't mind digging in a little bit more, because let's take this into something practical. We mentioned talked about flow state and there's a good book on this that you talk about in your book, which is Flow. I forgot who the author is,

Speaker 3 (00:18:13):

Read the, it's the most impossible name to say out loud. So let's just do this. CRI is some Holly insane

Speaker 5 (00:18:22):

Guy. Yeah, he looks like a wizard. Wizard. Call him mc.

Speaker 3 (00:18:25):

Yes.

Speaker 5 (00:18:26):

So Mc Hammer writes a book called Flow Can't touch that. Ooh, that was

Speaker 2 (00:18:33):

Good. Yeah, dude, that was definitely a zing.

Speaker 5 (00:18:37):

Let's apply this to some of the listeners. We were talking about all this great stuff, but I feel like we should give him something practical. So getting into that creative state in the zone is something that's very, very important. I mean, picture it, you guys ever do heavy songwriting or anything like that?

Speaker 2 (00:18:52):

Yeah.

Speaker 5 (00:18:53):

Band shows up at your studio at eight in the morning and they're like, write me a song. And they sit there and stare at you and you just drive the computer and then all of a sudden you look up at the end of the day and you've got a song and everybody's in agreeance. That level of focus just complete absolute nothing else matters except what you're doing and you're just at absolute peak performance. What kind of things and strategies can people do working in the studio like producers and et cetera, to get into that and to maximize that and to basically make that more of a part of their actual workflow? Like we would say turn it on.

Speaker 3 (00:19:29):

So the first thing, and I say this as somebody who this book really changed who I am, I was one of those people, I could barely watch my favorite TV shows without looking at my phone the whole time. Get rid of the fucking phone, turn off the fucking notifications, especially turn off the fucking notifications. You don't need to see that PayPal due to buy the compressor while you're being creative. It can wait till the end of the day. The other thing, clear your head of things, but there's also a big thing with closed state. So I know a lot of people who are in your Arm academy are at the beginning of learning proficiency. So there's actually a really interesting thing. The book came out right as Minded, but I read it, it's called A Stealing Fire by Steven Koler. They talk about that there's this ingredient to flow where you're pushing five to 10% past your ability, and that's one of the things that keeps you sustained is that you're just interested enough that you're challenging yourself, but you're not going so far.

(00:20:29):

You're not somebody who only knows how to play Green Day trying to then play a Mastodon riff. You're doing something a little bit past your abilities. And then the last thing too is you have to train your brain to be able to have an attention span. Everybody self-diagnosis themselves as having a DD. And so much of what we forget about creativity is it's the exact same thing as exercise. And I say this as a not gym going type of guy I exercise, but I try to see how long I can hold my attention and things I try to push past and figure out how I can get better with every single part of creativity, whether it's the ego depletion. I think one of the biggest things too is how many things can you keep your attention on? I mean, you guys, I'm sure have produced records for people who they only can write three good songs in a three month period and then they try to write nine for an LP and a three month period and six of them just suck because they don't have enough tension span or proficiency to have that many ideas to expel.

(00:21:35):

You have to train yourself to get better at those things and push past what you're normally used to.

Speaker 2 (00:21:41):

I think that there's something else, in addition to everything that you've said that I think is hugely important, which is learning to recognize when the moment's about to happen. Because

Speaker 4 (00:21:58):

There's

Speaker 2 (00:21:59):

A very big difference between what you'll write when you're in flow state and when you're not in flow state and the difference in the quality of what I've written musically or any type of creative thing, but let's just stick to music. The difference is the best songs I've ever written with the coolest rifts that people who like my music like the best and that are still cool years later and that just remove the audiences the most. Were always in a flow state,

Speaker 4 (00:22:33):

And

Speaker 2 (00:22:33):

The songs that made me insane tend to always be not in a flow state and a flow state. It doesn't just show up. You need to coax it.

(00:22:47):

And one of the things that I learned how to do is I would use technical practice to coax it, meaning about if I wasn't feeling it that day or whatnot, I would just start practicing guitar just doing exercises and try to learn something new, even if it's a new song or a new exercise, a new picking pattern. And I would work on it and force my brain to get that new idea until my a DD would kick in and I'd be warmed up from the new idea and I'd just start coming up with a riff without even thinking about it. That's when the light bulb is turning on. You have to realize when you're going off. For me, it's when I was going off track, but I was feeling good about it. So I'd go off track and play something badass over and over and over and not be on the exercise anymore.

(00:23:44):

And then it's like, okay, that's right there. That's that spark. It's starting fucking hit record and go. Now you begin writing the song. And once I finally realized that that was typically nine out of 10 times, that's how it came about for me. I mean, some days you just sit down and the first thing you do is fucking cool, but that's the minority of the time. So I learned to realize when flow state is how to summon it and how to recognize when it's about to be there and then capitalize right away pounce be ready to do it. And I think that a lot of people, for instance, say they decide they want to practice guitar,

Speaker 4 (00:24:27):

They'll

Speaker 2 (00:24:27):

Sit there and they'll practice instead of stopping practice, once flow kicks in, they'll just make themselves go back to the exercise. And then when they're done with their practice, then they'll move on to the songwriting part of their schedule or whatnot and then not really necessarily come out with great results. So you need to understand why you're practicing guitar and what the point is, for me, it was always to facilitate better writing. So the moment that the writing muscle kicked in or the light bulb turned on, I would stop the practice because that's what I was trying to get to happen. Anyways. So self-awareness, huge, got to know when you're in the mood.

Speaker 5 (00:25:14):

Something that always really helped me achieve that kind of flow state was having some sort of external stimuli or a challenge. So somebody comes in and says, we need to do this, and you're like, well, crap, I don't know how to do that, but they're paying me. So you know what? I better figure it out real quick and pretend and to make it look like I actually know what I'm doing. And having that pressure, it's go time, for example, you're on camera giving a live thing or you're sitting here doing a podcast or you're in the studio and writing with the artists, having that certain external pressure and it really makes you hyper focus. And that I think it's just really sitting down and doing it a lot of us to procrastinate on things that are tasks that we can flow on, I feel like. So we'll be like, alright, well I got to write this song for the album. And you're like, well, it hasn't hit me. It hasn't hit me yet. And then it's always the time when you sit down, you're like, alright, let's get this done, damnit. And you get stoked. You sit down and boom, there it is. At least in my experience. So I think those are some good practical things that can be helpful.

Speaker 3 (00:26:17):

And there's science behind this. It's the same thing of how everybody's like, well, why is the bad place so good live? And then they don't sound as good at practice. It's like there's this thing that kicks in of survival mode that puts you into a better thing. And the same thing of the fear of embarrassment can really kick you into gear. And they show this time and time again that there is a bad side. You're the type of person, and I think all three of us are that when the band's sitting there, it's a motivator, but some people, they have so much and makes them collapse. And that's the people who usually leave what we do real fast.

Speaker 2 (00:26:51):

You can't let that doubt get to you, or if you don't like people sitting there looking at you, you just got to tell them there is that too.

Speaker 3 (00:27:02):

Yeah, I don't mix with people in the room ever. It's just not happening.

Speaker 2 (00:27:07):

Yeah, I mean I feel like that's fair enough. I've been hired to do things before where I've had to write for people and had people kind of staring at the back of my head and micromanaging me the whole time. And sometimes I've been okay with it and then sometimes I just kind of felt like I was putting on a show for them. I didn't realize I was doing it, but a few hours in I realized I was just, and I wasn't really writing, I was just trying to impress them and then I kicked them out so I could write. So on the topic of Flow state and all the different ingredients that you talk about for achieving the flow state, one of those ingredients is proficiency

Speaker 1 (00:27:53):

Or

Speaker 2 (00:27:53):

Not being obstructed via lack of proficiency and bearing that in mind and that not many people in this day and age have as much time to harness their craft. I guess they have real lives and jobs and things like that. They don't have four hours to dedicate to guitar and then a bunch of hours to dedicate to songwriting and production. How do you feel about tools like Guitar Pro? Do they help or hinder?

Speaker 3 (00:28:22):

Yeah, I mean Guitar Pro can help. So there's another thing I discuss in the book is the two trajectories of musicians that are most common, and everybody's a gray scale of them, but you have a theory trained musician, and then you have the punk kid who just screams with a lot of heart, but he doesn't realize all his chords are out of key and things like that. In time, there's a really good thing about how yo-yo Ma talks about how no one liked his music until he learned to express an emotion. He was always just thinking of the Guitar Pro thing. And we all know these guitarists that it's like everything is perfect technically, but there's no emotion to it. And yes, in metal, we sometimes get really into those people, but the people who get really rewarded I think are the ones that there's also an emotion behind being able to shred.

(00:29:11):

And so Guitar Pro could be really, really awesome, but both things, if you're struggling, you just got to put in those hours to get flow states and it really is. The thing too is that they show time and time again. It's like, yeah, flow State is a more intermediate skill for creators, then it can't be totally unfamiliar or you're not going to get to them. And that's also why the thing you said that is also proven time and time again is that people talk about that their best music is made in flow states the best experiences. One of the reasons, there's actually a really good thing in that flow book about everybody when they look on the outside before they have children, they're like, oh God, it's got to be so boring to sit around with that kid. And then they see that you go into this flow state when you're playing with them, that actually gives you a really high functioning experience. And the same thing happens with songwriting and they show that it's literally the same braid and wave state as that and monks meditating.

Speaker 2 (00:30:08):

Interesting. Very interesting. Joel, can you talk about state? Yeah. You're the expert about that, Joel. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:30:14):

We're out luck here. Well,

Speaker 5 (00:30:17):

Yeah. I mean when you're not mad and you're not yelling at them because they're not listening or they're causing trouble when you're sitting down and you are playing with them, I would say a few things are as rewarding as, for example, teaching your kid something is always really cool, or showing them like little curiosity machines, they don't know anything about anything

Speaker 4 (00:30:35):

And

Speaker 5 (00:30:35):

They sit down, they're like, what's this? What's that? What's this? And you sit down, you explain, or they'll see something, they'll be like, oh, what's that thing? You'll be like, oh, that's Egypt. Oh, what's Egypt? Did you start? And you open up some books and you go through it and two hours later you're like, wow, you just spent all this time. So yeah, you definitely get into some sort of deep zone. It's a euphoric thing because you have obviously unconditional love for your kids, which hopefully at some point is reciprocated back from unselfishly. But you know how that works. But yeah, definitely, I mean spending time with your children and doing things together that are cool, even just watching your kids draw or do art. For example, my girls, they love to draw. They're really, really good at it too. And I know every parent says that and then every parent justifies it. But they took some classes in Moscow and they came back and everybody else at daycare, their stuff looks like a scribble. And then when I go look at the modern art section and I look at what my three-year-old does and I'm like, you could be on the wall.

Speaker 2 (00:31:39):

Wow, that sounds

Speaker 3 (00:31:40):

Like a parent.

Speaker 5 (00:31:42):

Yeah, definitely. But

Speaker 3 (00:31:43):

There's the proficiency thing though is that they got an added education so they've gotten better. Yeah,

Speaker 5 (00:31:48):

So what I'm saying I guess is you watch 'em, you watch 'em do that, and they have so much enthusiasm and you definitely enjoy sitting there. And even though you're not doing anything and occupying your mind, you're just kind of in the zone and you're enjoying it through them finding it and discovering it and experiencing it.

Speaker 2 (00:32:06):

Can we go back to Guitar Pro for one second? I need to say what I think. I think it fucking sucks for writing. I think it's great for documenting and people should document their riffs, but man, I have dealt with the devolution of writers, I guess going from writing in their heads or on their instruments to coming in, never having played their music and only in Guitar Pro. And it does not make the music better, it makes it awkward, formulaic in a weird way and not necessarily transferable to the instruments they're writing for. And I just think it's shitty.

Speaker 3 (00:32:59):

But don't you think this is the thing I kind of get into is the head in the heart is that they're doing too much head with that and they're not feeling and expressing it's just that thing. It's like I've worked in so many different genres. One of the reasons I had to say this was, man, even if the band only has 400 people who will go to their show across America, there's a big difference between that and the one that they can't get their significant others to go to. And all those people are the people who sit there in the Guitar Pro and write something that they think is going to impress people instead of expressing an emotion and thinking about a tone they want to evoke and figuring that out. It's just, and reiterating upon that, the biggest difference is also the thing of somebody actually writes a cool riff and all these cool things and the music sounds awesome. I've had it three times this year of a band walks in and I hit play the song and I'm like, dude, these lyrics are about your father shooting himself and finding them. Why is this so fucking happy? Oh, it was the last one they wrote. And this is when I put my lyrics to, I'm like, what the fuck are you on

Speaker 5 (00:34:03):

Things always. That's one of the things I always used to hate is a band would come in, their last record would be really good, and they would walk into the studio and I'd be like, so how's the new record guys? What does it sound like? And they'd be like, ah, dude, it's sick, dude, it's so technical. And then I'm in the back of my head, I'm like, shit, the record's going to be garbage. And then they bring the songs in and I just like, yeah guys, these are great. It's got 16 more chugs in this riff, but the riff still sucked.

Speaker 3 (00:34:32):

Yeah, I mean it's just that thing and it's so much easier to be technical than it is emotional, especially for all these repressed male energies. I make the joke about it, man. It's like I'm that guy in every relationship is like, you don't express yourself or your emotions. And it's like, oh, once I got that in music, I'm like, oh, it also makes all of life easier to go like, okay, emotions are okay, emo is okay, let's do this thing. Let's say how we feel and push it out into the world. And then I feel so much calmer. This is good. Instead of just drawing lines in a screen,

Speaker 2 (00:35:04):

The thing is that even if it's one emotion and say let's just say anger, or if we're talking about metal, let's just say the emotion of wanting to smash stuff or whatever or whatever, I know that there's a lot more emotions that go into the genre, but let's just say for the sake of argument that we're talking about a band that evokes one emotion, which is ah, but by a beast even that you to actually evoke that shit, to get a crowd to move, to get people to speed down the highway listening to it and blasting it. They need to be feeling that emotion, even if it's just rage, the first slip, not record or whatever.

Speaker 1 (00:35:53):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:35:53):

That still needs to be communicated again, even if it's what some people will call a base level emotion. So I just wanted to say that so people didn't think that by emotion you just mean like the emo genre?

Speaker 1 (00:36:06):

No, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 2 (00:36:07):

It means any style of music is conveying some sort of an emotion.

Speaker 3 (00:36:13):

Yes. And I think that that gets lost on a lot of people is that I can remember that first big on Earth record and I was doing a record with a band, and it's like all they're doing is sitting there and figuring out how they could change the rifts on it enough that it didn't sound just like on earth. And I'm like, that is not an emotion. You want to know why it still feels terrible because that's not an emotional expression, and then you're just putting whatever fucking lyric on top of it instead of saying, oh, this song sounds like the way I felt one time. It's like, that's what I see time and time again is made the best music.

Speaker 2 (00:36:52):

Oh, so you mean bands that were copying on earth?

Speaker 3 (00:36:55):

Well, yeah, they're copying it. And then you know what really the thing like I say in the book is the emotional check is do you have a reaction? If you're the singer, hear that song and then how does that song make you feel? And then figure out what you have to say on a subject that does that maybe. And then instead of just going, well, I heard Death Cab for Cutie the other day and he did phrasing like this, maybe I'll do this. It's so much of creativity. If you want to make a Reese's Peanut butter cup, you can do the idea sex thing of just, here's two things mashed together, but that doesn't make an emotion in music. And that's what I think a lot of people get really wrong,

Speaker 2 (00:37:33):

And I know that there's some great ones out there, but this is kind of why I hate concept albums.

Speaker 3 (00:37:38):

It's very hard to make them the right emotion. I think you're dead on with that.

Speaker 2 (00:37:43):

Yeah, I mean, if we're going to talk about Dark Side of the Moon, okay, that's phenomenal, but that's like high art basically.

Speaker 5 (00:37:53):

Yeah. So you didn't like V by Symphony X in? No,

Speaker 2 (00:37:57):

I've never heard V by Symphony X, but I mean, I like that. And Symphony X is considered one of the best bands in their genre, but I'm not talking about the very best examples ever. So V I'm sure for that genre is equivalent to best kind of stuff. Dark Side of the Moon is considered one of the greatest records of all time, and I would say is Beethoven level for rock, for classic rock. So let's forget those guys. Let's forget the geniuses.

Speaker 5 (00:38:33):

Statistical outliers

Speaker 2 (00:38:34):

Gone. Yes, exactly. And let's start talking about normal people. I've had to record lots of concept records where it's like they're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole because they decide on this concept ahead of time and it doesn't resonate emotionally with the music at all. So they have these lyrics that don't fit the sounds, and then they might have some really, really cool music and then they won't just run with that and then try to come up with the best lyrics to take that song to the next level. They'll try to work that into the concept and thereby kind of fuck everything up.

Speaker 3 (00:39:25):

I think this is one thing that we've all felt tied our lives. We've all sat through those records, but I think what's interesting for the producers out there with that is also that is the thing with why you need to be diverse. And one of the things, I like what you guys do, and it's like I'm way past the years where I need to be putting in the learning time if you take learning as a educational thing like they do in school. But I love watching Nail in the mix because I learn other people's tools for how to get an emotion across. When I watch some of 'em, I'm like, oh, what's funny is, so the worst thing so many producers do is just go, I'm going to make this record as loud as possible. And that's the most common trajectory of people who get into heavy music is then they get the death cab for Cutie Band or their friend doing acoustic and they're just loud and it's like, dude, that song is so vulnerable and soft and soft spoken and you're killing it with just brightness. It's a metal record. And it's like you have to learn how to accentuate those emotions and make reactions from what you hear that are not just, this is how I do things. And I think that's one of the things that's really awesome with what you guys do is you're showing how people react and make decisions.

Speaker 2 (00:40:39):

This made me think of a very interesting, not interesting, just something cool that I experienced 20 years ago. I used to be a huge Mr. Bungle fan,

Speaker 3 (00:40:51):

Same

Speaker 2 (00:40:51):

And how they broke up and then got back together, right? Yes. So they got back together for California album and did a bunch of tours. And so when they got back together, that was a really big deal for those of us who hadn't seen them. And so I lived in Boston at the time, and so they played all around. They played New York, they played Boston, they played Hartford, and I wanted to get to all of those. And I went to The Hartford Show and I miscalculated and ended up there three hours early. So I went into the club and they were about to do their soundcheck and they were opening that tour with what the world needs now, a cover of that song. And so you think Mr. Bungle crazy band, I mean not known for lighter music or anything? No. But they started with that and after about one minute into them playing it, Mike Padden stopped the soundcheck and railed the sound guy and was like, this is supposed to be subtle and nuanced, and I'm not hearing either of those things in how this sounds, so let's do it again. I just thought that was interesting.

Speaker 3 (00:42:12):

Wow.

(00:42:13):

But what's funny is he's another one though. Everybody thinks his technical pros. I'm actually doing a record for him right now for his label, and I'm mixing it, and it's like he gets the emotion and music on levels that are stunning. It was the same thing being around at the end of that record you did with Dillinger Skate Planet. It's like people think it's all just like him being doing weird sounds. It's like, no, he's making an emotional picture that he feels, I mean, he's a weird guy, so he feels different things, but that's what he's doing.

Speaker 2 (00:42:41):

I didn't know you worked with him. That's pretty cool. I wouldn't call myself a fan boy, but definitely a fan.

Speaker 3 (00:42:48):

I mean, I embarrassed myself the first time I met him and told him Video music awards playing epic. You shave the side of your head like the famous Skrillex thing. He did that back then, and I did that five minutes at the commercial break once he was done, I'm like, there it is done. And totally embarrassed myself him by telling him that he, he's like, wow, you're a fucking dork.

Speaker 2 (00:43:10):

That's actually part of the reason that I became a fan of his was because he talked to his fans like that. Yeah, it's impressive. I enjoyed it. Yeah. So back to you talked about head versus heart.

Speaker 3 (00:43:25):

Yes.

Speaker 2 (00:43:25):

And one thing that I've noticed people have a hard time with is once they do write, they start to overanalyze everything and just start to think too much about it and then tweak and tweak and tweak or just don't do anything. And I call that analysis paralysis,

Speaker 4 (00:43:45):

But

Speaker 2 (00:43:47):

I know that that's a pretty common term for it. Do you have any techniques that you use to get around that?

Speaker 3 (00:43:53):

Yeah, so part of the book I talk about that objectivity is basically a race we're all running. Greg Wells has this really good quote. He's like, he produced Dylan and Katie Perry that the hardest part of music is that we can never hear it, the whale, a listener would the first time. So one of the big points of the book obviously is you have to make the music you want to hear because thinking you're making music that other people are going to is always a failed road, you're just guessing. So because of that, then you have this problem is that you have infinite choices, all these considerations. And when I started framing, so this is one of the biggest things I did post learning stuff in the book starting about three, four years ago now, is instead of allowing people to just go into these things of like, let's wait for the synth patch that sounds cool, and scroll through a thousand presets, it's like let's have an emotional discussion about what this brings this song.

(00:44:47):

Are we trying to make the song happier? Are we trying to make it sad? Are we trying to make it more ominous? What can we do? There's a great line from Justin Melde Johnson about producing that MA three record, which I think is one of the most emotionally interesting records of recent years, is that they would literally have a oak tag sketch of touch tones, words, pictures from movies, all about what they were trying to create. Grounding a song in what that emotion is makes such a huge difference in the analysis process. You can easily dismiss what it is. And it's like that same thing we're always doing. I know when you and I have conversations, we try to re-engineer things. It's actually one of the favorite things I learned from Finn McKenty doing the creative live is going backwards and figuring out the very bones of something.

(00:45:34):

And it's the same thing with music and emotion is that people get too heady about this of what's complicated. Well, complicated is not an emotion. What's this? Even I've been in the studio with Diller skate plan, they're not going, what's complicated? He's doing emotions. And it's like that same kind of thing is I think so many people are having the wrong conversation when they're having that analysis paralysis. Now with that said, trying to find the kick that makes the dance song pump the most, and you have a vengeance sample pack, there's still about 300 options if you have the complete pack. And that's enough for analysis paralysis. And I think there's that thing

Speaker 5 (00:46:11):

That is true.

Speaker 3 (00:46:12):

I try to do cycled whittling down with big decisions. So I'm very big on that you should not be trying to do everything one day. I think some of the studio structure that our lives are in is very broken. I try to really do, if I have to work a 16 hour day, which I do a lot in the studio, I try to do three different projects working on them three different days and do three half days. I think if you whittle down a lot of things and go into different modes, that works better for my brain. So I'm doing that dance track, let's say the kick drums. We're trying to choose the kicks. I choose first maybe my 20 favorite kicks, put them up in the song, and then if we're still having trouble, I get it down to five and then I get it down to one the next day. It's finding how you whittle that down in a process that works for you, just as you were talking about with what worked for you with practicing, it's like you've got to observe what your mind does because all our minds organized different. But I do think generally that helps a lot with analysis. Paralysis is whittling in phases, even if it's not days, it's like coming back to it, whittle down some more, come back to it, whittle down some more.

Speaker 2 (00:47:17):

And it sounds like by pinning down the emotion, you're doing something that I do in business stuff all the time, which is to try to keep things outcome oriented rather than just instead of to-do lists. I like to think of outcomes because we like to 80 20 things a lot, and when you make a to-do list, you can get wrapped up in minutiae, but if you keep to outcome based thinking, you can eliminate lots of the bullshit that you might just add on. Lists are fun to make, but if you keep it to focusing on the emotion that you're evoking, it's kind of like you're already determining the outcome of the song right there. So you can eliminate parts or ideas that don't fit that.

Speaker 3 (00:48:09):

Yeah, and there's that funny concept. I talk about this a lot in bars when I'm really drunk, but we've never had more access to instruments than we do now. Everybody's computer comes preloaded. So you could make a flaming lips type record with every instrument, but then you notice no one's making music like that. It's so rare anybody does that. And because limitations are good for creativity, having a finite emotional palette within your thing actually helps you be more creative. And they showed time to time. They say, Johnny, ive, when he's designed Apple, one of the biggest things he does is he takes away tools from people.

Speaker 2 (00:48:45):

Interesting. Yep.

Speaker 3 (00:48:45):

That

Speaker 2 (00:48:46):

Makes perfect sense. I definitely,

Speaker 5 (00:48:48):

I very heavily agree with that.

Speaker 2 (00:48:49):

You've noticed that Joel?

Speaker 5 (00:48:51):

Absolutely. I mean, anytime you have too many, yeah, you need to, because like I said, sometimes that limitation forces pressure. It's like I'll equate it to writing pop songs

(00:49:01):

An interesting topic after reading your book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean I love pop, but I love writing pop songs and things like that. I just don't do it that much anymore because I'm busy doing this stuff. But when I used to do it a lot, what I always liked about pop, as we said earlier, writing the really technical stuff in a way is almost easy because there's no rules or no direction. It's just like, oh, this riff is cool and technical. Let just slap it together. Oh, can't get this next riff to go, oh, we'll just change times and just do a stupid drum fill and then we'll go into this riff because it's really sick and it should be in this song even though it completely doesn't fit. So when you're writing music like that, that's supposed to be really technical and crazy, it's a lot easier.

(00:49:42):

But when you're in pop, you're like, okay, I've got X amount of chord rules I can use. We got to get something that's amazing. We have to talk about something that's going to resonate with people. What are we feeling today? What kind of emotion are we in? And you're playing in this little teeny box, but it's infinitely large, if that makes sense. And that pressure of having to know that you're playing in that box inspires a lot of crazy creativity that you wouldn't normally think of. It's kind of like I'll equate it to when I used to teach guitar many, many years ago, I would sit down and explain to people how chord movement affects emotion and soloing and things like that. You can sit there and you can solo over just like an e standard tuning, sorry, I know this is like 2002. Okay, so give me some slack.

(00:50:29):

I know now it would be like droppy, but e standard tuning. We can sit there and minor and I can just play like a slayer open riff. And the chords never change. And no matter what note you play on the guitar, the solo is always going to kind of suck. But as soon as I go into a four or five, six progression or something that's got some good core movement, if you literally sit down and we say, okay, eliminate all notes, the only thing you can do is rhythm. Now make a great solo using just one note 12th that high E, in just making rhythm and those limitations. You'd be surprised how creative you get when you have something so small and easy to work with and you take out all of the options. And it was always interesting as an exercise for students where I'd be like, okay, we're going to take this scale, but we're going to eliminate all the notes. You get two notes and you can only use these two notes and rhythm. Now you have to make a great solo for this riff. Go. And we would practice doing that, and I was always impressed having those constraints. I'm going to do something in this little box, and it seems constricting at first, but as soon as you get into it, the brain accepts the challenge and goes into that flow state again, like we were talking

Speaker 1 (00:51:30):

About.

Speaker 5 (00:51:30):

And then you realize that that box is infinitely expansive. So I always liked writing stuff like pop songs because it was like a challenge, like how crazy and cool and awesome can I do in this teeny little supposedly teeny little box with all these constraints.

Speaker 3 (00:51:44):

And to take it back to science that is proven that in that stealing fire book, he talks about the limitations enhanced FO states.

Speaker 2 (00:51:51):

Well, there you go, science bitch. So can you half tag science? Can you talk us through some of the higher level points surrounding, for instance, stuffing yourself with inspiration like Ray Bradbury versus fasting or starving yourself of it like Grimes?

Speaker 3 (00:52:10):

So it's interesting because when we talk about inspiration, you can see so many examples and you can extract so many things if you just use antidotal evidence of like, my friend does this, I read that this guy does this slash does this, I saw in a interview, but there's really truth to it is that inspiration is really research. And just as you could not write a paper in school without reading the research, without your teacher going, you didn't read this. You have to listen to a certain amount of music and take it in. But that doesn't mean that everybody's in that mode at all times. So Grimes, my friend Ezra from Morning Glory, and I all do the same thing as that when we go to start to really do the bare bones skeletons of our work is that we want to not have any inspiration come in.

(00:52:59):

Then we're thinking about what was last emotionally resonant to us. So Ezra, when I work with him, he actually lives at my studio when we work and he will not listen to anything, but he wants to leave the room if I put on a guitar tone baby. And it's so that he stays away from that when he's trying to do the big broad strokes of his work. And I think it's a thing that a lot of people have trouble with. You always hear people like, oh, well now my stuff sounds too much like this because I've been listening to this. The guy I'm working with last week, he's been listening to the guy you had on volumes. And he keeps being like, oh, it sounds too much like volumes. I'm like, I don't want to hear it. I don't want to know that. I want to just judge if it sounds good, but then play it for me afterwards and we'll see if I think you're going too much like that.

(00:53:45):

So what the Ray Bradbury quote is about that you need to stuff yourself full of it. But the thing that Ray Bradbury says that I think a lot of people don't take in is too, is there's another side of inspiration, which is that movies can be really inspiring books. Getting your brain excited of the possibility of possibility is so much of what this is. So even if you're not going to listen to music all day for a little while, while you try to write your present songs, like, I mean for me, I go see a great movie and all I want to do is create, it sparks me. I went and saw L CD Sound System play in a 1800 seat venue last night. The last time they played New York was Madison Square Garden, and it was so inspiring. It was one of the best shows, and all I want to do all day today is make cool things.

(00:54:36):

It pushes it out of you. So there's a lot of things where people justify. They're not listening to music or staying comfortable. I talk about music as a diet a lot, that if you're trying to figure out cool percussion parts, it might be good to listen to the Cure. Right now it's like if you're, instead of just that your favorite band, local band who doesn't have that good of ideas but feels good listening to, it's like you have to see inspiration as a diet and that you're finding emotional tools to reference on a regular basis.

Speaker 2 (00:55:10):

Well, something interesting I noticed in my life, or my opinion on a lot of this, of the feeding yourself with it is that you have to always be doing it, in my opinion, but you need to be mindful of what you're taking in. And when I went to Berkeley in Boston, one of the complaints that a lot of people had about the Berkeley students was that they all kind of sounded the same. And for the most part I noticed that too. And I know why it was, I mean, with some exceptions of course, but because they're all learning the same thing all day, every day. They're learning the same songs, the same exercises, the same everything. And lots of times it's their first time learning certain genres. So their only knowledge of say, jazz is what they learned in school. And it's the same thing as 20 other people in their class who never listened to jazz before. So that influence in their playing is identical to everybody else who had that same experience. And I started to notice that when I went, and that's when I stopped going to those classes because I didn't want that to come out in my playing or my writing because I feel like what you bring in is going to filter through you and come back out somehow.

Speaker 1 (00:56:41):

Yes,

Speaker 2 (00:56:44):

I didn't want that sound coming through me. I didn't want blues coming through me. I didn't want jazz coming through me, and I certainly did not want elevator music coming out the other end. So I limited what I was being inspired by or what I was taking into stuff that I wanted to be inspired by, if that makes sense.

Speaker 3 (00:57:06):

I think that there's the opposite side of that is I started listening to pop music because I wanted my vocal production to get tighter, and I grew up on eighties and nineties punk. Those performances are fucking terrible. Whereas you grow up on tech metal, you're already at an advantage. You're always hearing things that are pretty on time, pretty in tune. I mean, some people's vocal tone leaves a lot to be desired, but you're hearing things of a greater technical accuracy. And I was noticing I had to up my standards and so I had to change my diet to get better standards.

Speaker 2 (00:57:38):

So let's talk about standards because you talk about that a lot. For instance, with Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt,

Speaker 3 (00:57:48):

You

Speaker 2 (00:57:49):

Said that it wouldn't be better without the breaths between the lines or Twist and Shout by the Beatles Wouldn't be better if John Lenon hadn't been singing all day

Speaker 4 (00:58:01):

Leading

Speaker 2 (00:58:01):

To a raspy voice. And I think it's important to set standards, but I want to know your takes on standards because I'm sure you've noticed that a lot of modern production can be quite sterile.

Speaker 3 (00:58:15):

I mean, this is the longest discussion, and I think we're all in the same age area where we're the kind of bridge generation between a lot of people who just really loose records and we're the ones that are like, no, I'll take it pretty tight, but two tights a little much. And there's just this thing of, I mean, it goes back to that Daniel Leviton study. It's like when you put everything on the grid, people don't feel anything, and standards are everything. Even just the thing of, I mean, I've heard you guys talk about, so I know my pain with this, but we all know the guitarist who you get a really good emotional take, but then they don't feel like their finger moved properly during the take and they want to do it again until they suck the life out of it. And it's like they know their form and they treat it.

(00:59:02):

Gymnastics standards need to be the emotion and judging when it feels, not when it's on the grid and everything looks right. I've been really lucky that I've gotten to work with a lot of my favorite bands. If there's one thing I can tell you, it's like when I even, I got, I've done archival work for the Misfits, the Ramones and The Cure, and I've gotten a look at what those records look like at a computer. And let me tell you, it's not near a grid and there's a reason for that stuff. And it's the same goes whether you want to get into the technical stuff. I can. I mean, I always tell the story the first night before I worked with Dillinger, I didn't sleep like a punk kid. I'm not a, and you got to realize I grew up with those guys. So it's not even like I'm coming to this like, oh God, these guys are gods.

(00:59:53):

I knew Ben when he looked like a piece of all metal trash when he was young. It's like, these are not people. I was scared because they're so much better than me. And then you realize, no, it's just feel Chris Penny playing to the click track is going to have push and pull. That feels good. You don't just line it up, you listen to it, you feel it. And he already has sons, so you barely need to do anything anyway. And that's the thing you learn over and over and over again is like, yes, there are some records that are fully on the grid that can sometimes feel good and that works for certain people's things, but the vast majority of this is developing a standard of emotion, not a standard of we all have had. That guy is like, that's a little late. It's like, well, yes, the bass playing a little late sometimes sounds a little bigger. And for a slow sludgy song, it makes it sound even huger. Well, I shifted up 30 milliseconds onto the thing and it's like, oh yeah, well, there's the lack of emotion that you were looking for. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (01:00:57):

I definitely have noticed it. And with some of the best artists I've worked with, the one thing that has been, I guess we didn't talk about it, but they relied on me to keep the standards up for the recording technical end of it, but they weren't happy until the emotion was right. And those were the best records I was involved with. So I think you're absolutely right about it that there deed to be emotional standards, do you feel it or not? And it's that simple and you can't really teach it either. That's why it might be a little elusive to some people.

Speaker 3 (01:01:40):

Yeah, I mean, I think the way you teach it is by zoning in on it and noticing what they call it in creative studies are trained, noticing that you're trying to find correlations. Last night I went out with this girl CLCD sound system, and it's like she's a good musician and we noticed, I hate improvisation, she loves it, but when LCD does it, it does it right? And so I'm writing down all the ways they're using improvisation like, oh, this is how a band can do it and actually pull it off because dude, it's stunning when a band that has a four minute song could jam for three minutes and the bar is empty in the back. That's a rare thing.

Speaker 2 (01:02:20):

That actually is a very rare thing.

Speaker 3 (01:02:22):

And so I'm like, okay, so what is it? Okay, so what I noticed us is all the improvisations, were enhancing the emotion that was already there in the pre-mark recorded thing. They're taking it to a more intense place, and that's what made people want to stay. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:02:35):

That's got to be pretty cool because I fucking hate improvisation too.

Speaker 3 (01:02:40):

Same, I think I know from listening to you guys enough that all three of us are very compositional people who like a well composition thing, not a fucking happy accident that just happened to jam out real cool dude. And it's like,

Speaker 2 (01:02:53):

Dude, nothing I don't fuck with. That's nothing worse than metal dudes jamming.

Speaker 3 (01:02:58):

Oh my

Speaker 2 (01:02:58):

God, thousand percent. Thousand percent.

Speaker 5 (01:03:01):

That is a fact to be etched into stone and forever passed on to generations

Speaker 2 (01:03:06):

Metal, people should not jam, just don't do it.

Speaker 3 (01:03:09):

I think there's an interesting thing that I see with a lot of the stuff you guys talk about too is that there is now science in this. For so long we thought the brainstorming session was God's gift to everything. And that started in the fifties when the guy who Don Draper was based on wrote this book about it and he actually wrote three books about it. And every nerd read it and decided, you need to jam and you need to brainstorm. You need to have these mind jams. And now what we really see is, so Cal Newport talks about this in this book called Deep Work where what you really want is this hub and spoke method where you go work alone, then you bring your work to the group to get further inspiration and criticism, and the group will tell you either one, this is not right, or two, they'll be like, Hey, have you heard this? Maybe you should add this to this. And that's how things improve. But really we do our best creative work in solitude where we return to people with feedback. I talk about it in the book like that Th Rice Vampire Weekend, all these bands. I actually interviewed this band who I think made a great record called Publicist UK on relapse. They did their record without ever having met, and it was all

Speaker 5 (01:04:16):

What also I thought interesting is you mentioned MIT in that how they do that.

Speaker 3 (01:04:19):

Yeah. So MIT building 20, which is one of the most creative places, it's Noam Chomsky. Everybody considers the greatest political nerd of linguistics. They built the place around that idea of the hub and spoke method. That's where KPort kind of took it from.

Speaker 2 (01:04:34):

Interesting.

Speaker 3 (01:04:35):

So I mean literally you can get better creative results by not jamming. It's fine to jam after somebody has the initial idea, but I'm sure you guys have seen this, most great bands, it's usually somebody who sits alone, figure something out, then brings it to everybody instead of just being like, well, I guess we should play a riff and fart around for four

Speaker 2 (01:04:55):

Hours. The practice room environment is not conducive to communicating well or creativity in my opinion.

Speaker 3 (01:05:03):

Yes. And the other thing is too is that one of the things I say, I think I even said it on a blog I did for URM, is that most people don't also know the rules of that. For one, you should first not critique anything and see where it goes. Two, you are never allowed to tell somebody their idea's dumb and things like that. But then three, after you've decided, okay, we pursue this idea, then anybody can say any comment. None of that, don't tell me how to play my instrument on. Don't tell you, tell yours. That's the fastest way to a music that no one ever wants to hear.

Speaker 2 (01:05:33):

God, that stresses me out. Just thinking back to that, the worst. The worst. So one more thing I wanted to talk about, which I think is a message again that appeals to the musicians and producers in the audience is the concept of shoving 20 pounds of crap into a 10 pound bag. And can you talk a little bit about the idea of trying to cram too much grabbing information into a song, and I would call it dick moves. I like that my band used to call those dick moves when we would just try to throw the ear too much ear candy in.

Speaker 3 (01:06:09):

I think when you break down any genre of music, you start to realize there's only so much they could take. You brought that first Slipknot record. I think that's one of the few records that sometimes it's always at the brim of there being too much and Iowa too. And there's this thing that rhythm bass accompaniment accomp you being guitar sense in most things, whatever's playing the courts and a melody. And it is so hard to get more than two melodies. I challenge people all the time. I'm like, okay, show me a song that is three melodies going at once that you think is really well done. And I think of all the times I've challenged musicians to do it. Somebody came back with one a month later to be like, ha, ha ha, I got you. It's just

Speaker 2 (01:07:00):

Like I found the one.

Speaker 3 (01:07:01):

Yeah. Oh, I found the exception of the rule. Wow. It's a rule. It has an exception. Thank you. People do not think about I'm one of the best observations is that every really great band, we're not just talking about the band that made one. Two cool records, bands that stand the test of time. There is usually a member who just stays the fuck out of the way the whole time. Even Radiohead's drummer did nothing interesting for so many records. It got interesting around Hail to the Thief, but the bassist largely are like, those guys are pretty crazy. We're just going to hag back here and serve them. And people think of it as like, oh wow, no, that's so wild. It's like even the songs where the drums are wild, then you're like, oh, look. Well, the guitars are staying out of the way for that point or whatever. And it's like there is such a balance of knowing to turn and say, somebody needs to get the fuck out of the way right now. And man, it's so hard to figure out who's going to do that because usually if everybody can play well, there's a lot of ego in the room and learning that, I think you really have to go and do that trained noticing thing of listen back and say, really? Is this what you actually like when everybody's vying for the attention?

(01:08:11):

Like an exercise I do a lot is when the drummer is doing a certain thing and I'm like, tell me your three favorite drummers. I'm like, cool. None of them do that. So why are you doing that?

Speaker 2 (01:08:20):

Well, it's interesting you say that because I was immediately thinking even in the PAGs of music and technical music, if you listen to the top bands in that genre of notes upon notes, like a dream theater or something, their shit is still arranged super well to where they're not stepping all over each other. And when it's time for the guitar solo, they support the guitar solo.

Speaker 3 (01:08:49):

And actually that's a great example because there's very few bands that if you talk about them on a surface level, people are like, oh, dream theater is so indulgent. Dream theater is really fucking calculated. And that calculation is knowing that that's staying out of the way. And the other thing I just noticed too is when you see who gets hired for sessions all the time, it's the people who don't put their ego. Honestly. I used to have one of my favorite drummers of all time, guy I grew up playing. He's played in all these huge bands. He used to be my session drummer. He was eager to do it. We're good buds. I couldn't have him do it. Every time somebody tried to change something, he'd be like, dude, you don't know what you're talking about. And do that whole thing. And it's like everybody, people, they'll always tell you that play consistently in great bands that they do. It's like they know when to get in the way and they know when to stay out of the way. And that is the most crucial skill there is in writing good songs. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (01:09:41):

Well, everybody go pick up processing Creativity, the tools, practices, and habits used to make music you are happy with by Mr. Jesse Cannon, where can they pick it up?

Speaker 3 (01:09:53):

Processing creativity book.com has all the links for everything. By the time this is out, the audio book will be out too. After Audible stops telling me my cover is too weird. But yeah, that place has all the links.

Speaker 2 (01:10:09):

You're doing an audible version.

Speaker 3 (01:10:11):

I did an audible version and they've given me a lot of shit about the copyright infringement on the cover. I intentionally picked a fight with copyright, but that's probably another story for another time.

Speaker 2 (01:10:23):

I love Audible.

Speaker 3 (01:10:24):

Yes, say it Same.

Speaker 2 (01:10:26):

I consume so many books by listening to them. So that's just great to hear that there will be a version.

Speaker 3 (01:10:34):

Awesome. Yeah, it's definitely the way I read the most.

Speaker 2 (01:10:37):

Yeah, same here. And guys in the crowd, if you look at the show notes for this episode on our website, all the links to Jesse's books, podcasts, studio blogs, all that are in the show notes. So there's a lot of stuff. You're a one prolific dude, man. Oh,

Speaker 3 (01:11:01):

I appreciate that. Got to stay busy. All three of us do now. We're all slackers.

Speaker 2 (01:11:09):

I feel like one.

Speaker 3 (01:11:11):

Well, that's what keeps us going.

Speaker 2 (01:11:13):

Yeah, I have imposter syndrome, so I definitely feel like a slacker, but whenever I go back over the year and I look at how much got done, I'm like, nah, I'm just insane.

Speaker 3 (01:11:28):

We, we'll have to talk some time about the imposter syndrome thing. I actually got free therapy for it one night in a bar from a therapist who specializes in it, and it was so interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:11:38):

Maybe I'll come on noise creators and talk about imposter syndrome.

Speaker 3 (01:11:41):

That's what we should do, actually.

Speaker 2 (01:11:43):

Okay.

Speaker 5 (01:11:43):

Is that what it's officially called? Because I just call it mental disorder?

Speaker 2 (01:11:47):

No, it's called, no, it's called imposter syndrome. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:11:51):

Ah, that's what it's called. I'll have to look that up because I've been suffering from that for a very long time.

Speaker 2 (01:11:55):

It's very common among high achievers and creative people.

Speaker 5 (01:12:00):

I can't relax on the weekend. Yes, exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:12:03):

Yeah, it's super common. It's the feeling that people are going to find out that you're faking it or that you're not as good as they think you are. Like that's,

Speaker 5 (01:12:16):

Oh no, I don't have that. I am associating,

Speaker 2 (01:12:18):

Oh, you're awesome.

Speaker 5 (01:12:20):

No, no, no. Don't mean it like that. I mean, when I don't do something, I feel like I should be doing something. I feel the urgency of the moment, the external pressure, there's always, I don't know if I'm sitting around, I'm thinking about here's what I should be doing right now and I'm not. So

Speaker 2 (01:12:39):

I don't know if that's imposter syndrome.

Speaker 5 (01:12:41):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:12:41):

That's imposter. Imposter syndrome is when you literally don't feel like you get a gig and you don't think you're good enough for the gig.

Speaker 5 (01:12:56):

It's like a self-doubt kind of thing.

Speaker 3 (01:12:58):

Yes,

Speaker 2 (01:12:58):

Kind of. Yes.

Speaker 3 (01:13:00):

Usually stemming from something in your past where, so for me, mine all stems I dropped out of high school and how many people would like,

Speaker 2 (01:13:10):

Damn, you are one educated high school dropout. Holy shit.

Speaker 3 (01:13:14):

I mean, I also dropped out of high school, I worked at WFMU, which is the top freeform radio station, and one day they're like, so Gastro de Souls plague. And my odds counselors, you go to that, you get kicked out of high school. I'm like, I'm going to go engineer the band. I did well on my GED, that was that. But I always feel like a thing because I hang out with Harvard graduates and my best friend won a Pulitzer Prize. It's like, I feel like a fucking moron sometimes from that,

Speaker 2 (01:13:44):

But you're obviously not because defined by the people you spend the most time with.

Speaker 3 (01:13:51):

What's funny, I remember you guys talking about that on the Brian Hood episode, and there's a thing in the book that I'm starting to not believe that one, I think the Internet's a hack, and I think what you guys do is a hack for that, is that when you get to hear all these amazing brains in your ears all day, you can hack that you're the product of the five people you spend the most time with.

Speaker 2 (01:14:09):

Oh, well, yeah, I agree with that. However, you can hack it, but I do think that it's very true. That doesn't mean it's not hackable, but I definitely think it's true, and I've noticed it in my life when I'm around more negative people who don't believe in themselves or think big, I start to think less big.

Speaker 3 (01:14:34):

Agreed.

Speaker 2 (01:14:36):

Or what I got with Joey and Joel as partners, I felt at home because they think as big as I do, and things moved quickly and I kind of started to feel myself again. And I feel like there's a lot of truth to it. But I do agree that even if you are surrounded by shitheads, you can hack it by taking in the right information and replacing them. But that

Speaker 3 (01:15:04):

We

Speaker 2 (01:15:04):

Should talk about on noise creates.

Speaker 3 (01:15:06):

Yes. Okay. We're going to do that.

Speaker 2 (01:15:09):

Alright, cool. Alright,

Speaker 3 (01:15:10):

Excellent. Well dude, thank you guys. Well, thanks so much

Speaker 1 (01:15:12):

For coming out. My pleasure. That was really fun. The Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast is brought to you by STA Audio. Sta Audio creates zero compromise recording gear that is light on the wallet only. The best components are used and each one goes through a rigorous testing process with one thing in mind, getting the best sound possible. Go to stem audio.com for more info to ask us questions, make suggestions and interact. Visit urm.academy/podcast and subscribe today.