00:00:00Intro
00:04:43Creativity Over Technology in Music
00:18:27Exploring Song Creation and Education
00:22:12Innovating Song Creation Process
00:33:35Recording Music for Global Audience
درباره این اپیزود
What if the raw immediacy of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska—recorded on a four-track cassette in his bedroom—could be a blueprint for today’s musicians to create without the barriers of studio costs or complex tech?
That’s the mission of RT60’s Dr. Mike Exarchos and Dr. Rob Toulson, creators of Songzap. The app blends a DIY ethos with AI technology to allow musicians to craft polished multi-track demos directly on their phones. Designed to provide access and education for those who might otherwise be put off by the technical aspects of making music, Songzap uses AI to simplify song arrangement, while preserving the raw vibe of in-the-moment creativity.
Drawing inspiration from Springsteen's bold release of a lo-fi cassette recording (Atlantic City), we explore how capturing the creative moment can outweigh the pursuit of polished perfection. We talk through the story of Wilfy Williams, a busker who went on to record a studio album with Rob, and how this journey in turn shaped the development of Songzap to meet the needs of singer-songwriters. We also turn the spotlight onto emerging artist Theanò, whose loop-based vocal arrangement approach to capturing her ideas highlights the range of use cases that Songzap can be put to, from demo sketch pad to full production suite.
Join us as we discuss creativity vs. technology, the value of pairing tech with education to elevate artistry, and how avoiding perfectionism can lead to a better final product.
If you're a music tech startup looking to tell your story in your market better, go to https://cold.inc to book a free, 20-minute call to discuss your go-to-market strategy.
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I've always thought it would be kind of cool if you could just take the song that you imagine in your head and make it a reality without having to mess around with buttons and sh*t.
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One app that's doing that in a pretty neat way is Songzap, which helps singer-songwriters capture the essence or the vibe of the song they're trying to create without having to mess around with buttons and shit.
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This is Sequence, a show where you can learn about the latest music tech through the music that inspired it.
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I am here today with Mike— Doctors, Mike and Rob from RT60.
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Nice to meet you guys and great to have you on the show.
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Nice to meet you, Tom.
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Thanks for having us.
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So, between the two of you, you're a combination of entrepreneurs, developers, musicians, producers, and I'm sure we could take a whole hour just talking about that, but we're here today to talk about your latest product, which is Songzap.
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Can you give us a quick overview of what it is and who it's for?
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Yeah, I'll dive in, okay.
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So Songzap is designed to help musicians in their creative process.
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In its simplest form, it's to help them make demos, multi-track demos on their phone.
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But more powerfully, it can help with the whole songwriting process of experimenting with arrangements, experimenting with different ways of approaching turning a simple idea into a full-blown song.
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There's some AI built in so it will listen to a simple guitar recording, for example, and then it will add layers to accompany that.
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And finally, when you've finished experimenting and crafting your song, you can bounce out everything and take it forward to a DAW.
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So it allows a songwriter to then sort of hand over to a pro studio or to a producer if they want to sort of collaborate and take these ideas further forward got it,
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So there's a ton of tools out there right now that would claim to do the same thing, right, we have to take a song from inspiration through to production.
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What makes Songzap different or, yeah, better for a songwriter?
00:02:01.587 --> 00:02:04.694
ight think for a start it is designed from the ground up.
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We didn't want to create a tool that's designed for engineers or music technologists.
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There's some very valuable products that do that, but we also think that the apps market and context is very different, where you have to work with devices that have a more limited visual arena, but they also really promote the idea of being able to do things with immediacy on the go, with quick access and with some level of tangibility on the screen.
00:02:36.039 --> 00:03:06.923
So we combined those opportunities with our history of being academics and music producers and having worked with thousands of students over the past 20 years and many music artists, and we found that a lot of the super talented instrumentally songwriters, performers can often be non-tech savvy or even technophobic and they should not be deprived from putting together ideas or prepping themselves for the studio, other ideas or prepping themselves for the studio.
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So we really wanted to design something that used those opportunities of access and tech and immediacy whilst making the design elegant, easy, not scary, for musicians to be able to put ideas down.
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So you know, to sort of take music creation from a voice memo.
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I just captured something, so I don't forget it, to the level of I can layer, I can structure, I can play to beats and I can come to my producer or to my collaborator with more structured, more fully formed ideas and that's been a big driver in our design and our and our ethos got it.
00:03:40.143 --> 00:03:49.355
So basically, you can create more fully formed demos on the go in a simple way without having to learn, you know, what a parametric EQ is and kind of a new DAW.
00:03:49.355 --> 00:03:49.919
Cool.
00:03:49.919 --> 00:04:06.442
Well, we have some very interesting tracks up today and I think one of the things that I took away from our initial conversation I think you said Songzap is kind of like a four track in your pocket or a modern day four track, which is quite apt for this first song.
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So we have Bruce Springsteen's Atlantic City from his Nebraska album.
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Do you want to, take us through why this is so significant or you?
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It's a real favorite.
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We've been using it in a lot of the course materials and educational materials that surround the ecosystem of Songzap, and the reason for it is quite a famous story but maybe for listeners and viewers who don't know, Bruce Springsteen had written this on a four-track and he carried the cassette.
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I mean the whole album, not just the track.
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He carried it in his back pocket and he was playing it to people.
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And now we know it's a brilliant piece of record production.
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But what maybe some people don't know is that himself and the team and the producers tried all sorts of things to bring it to life in a fully produced, expensive form, shall we say, including recording, the E Street Band mixing it, mastering it and doing all sorts of processes.
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And every time they found that they were going back to the cassette four-track and finding that he had a better vibe and this word is really, really important.
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Thankfully, bruce, his team, the E street band, were brave enough and confident musically enough to say that is better.
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Let's keep going back to that.
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So we got a version released into the public that took a lot of bravery in terms of accepting the lo-fi and going with a musical vibe that was possible to put down, some form of longevity, even if it was a cassette, even if there was noise and, of course, listening to it, as with Atlantic City.
00:05:41.185 --> 00:05:51.343
And the choice of the track specifically is to do with how much vibe there is in that performance, but also the backing vocals Bruce did on top of the instruments, how fully formed it is.
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And this has been part of our ethos in design, because we're thinking capture it when it's hot, capture it when you're walking out there, when you're in that special moment by the fire or traveling.
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Most of the musicians we work with and speak to for our artist series tend to tell us they never write in the clinical box of a studio.
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They tend to write ideas outside in random moments and they need to keep something like a notepad or songs up or an equivalent way of capturing that initial idea, even if they're going to sculpt it out later.
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And the story of Nebraska and Atlantic City is totally central to some of the things we wanted to give artists with our technology.
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It's a great example of creativity winning over technology and the power of the art form and, in some cases, power of limitation.
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It's very easy nowadays to make a production with 200 tracks.
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All the instruments in the world take two or three years to finish a mix and all this sort of stuff and with Songzap, we we really, as as sort of early musicians ourselves, valued from that idea of working with just four tracks.
00:07:04.797 --> 00:07:08.208
If you're going to do another vocal, you're going to have to delete the one you just did.
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So you really need to kind of get used to performing for the recording and and getting in the zone and and, as mike said, the vibe.
00:07:15.161 --> 00:07:20.740
So I think this is a great example in its purest form of technology doesn't beat creativity.
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Creativity should always win and I don't know if you've worked on productions, you know sometimes the more you add, the less you get right.
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So it's finding that place and I think Songzap designed to help musicians start with that in mind and say, look, if it can work great with a voice, a guitar and maybe an overdub, then then that's a great starting point, rather than trying to start with everything and then then in the mix trying to work out how to make it really connect.
00:07:47.029 --> 00:08:01.303
So, you know, it's fantastic that this example exists, like mike said, the bravery to put something like this out, and hopefully it's sort of an encouragement for artists to be brave, to be creative, and you know, if bruce springsteen can, can do it, then then anyone can, you know right.
00:08:01.464 --> 00:08:06.242
I think for me it's, it's a mentality, because I know I've definitely ruined tracks.
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I had a great vibe and the demo is like well, the real production has to be better.
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Right, because that's the good version of that track.
00:08:12.925 --> 00:08:33.504
And when you see something like this, a demo that was, you know, a tape sitting in someone's back pocket that basically was released and has become one of his more endearing tracks and something that's been covered I'm sure every few years a new cover of this comes out it does make you rethink that idea that everything has to be perfect.
00:08:33.504 --> 00:08:36.230
I saw bob clear mountain.
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He did a little breakdown of born in the usa and he was isolating the tracks and kind of showing you each one.
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And the funny thing is you kind of hear the synth part and there's a mistake straight away, like bruce plays a wrong note and you you hear his guitar and the anger in in, in his aggression, and the way he's playing is actually making the guitar go out of tune while he's playing and you would consider those to be mistakes and yet that that's the vibe that was captured in the studio.
00:09:05.668 --> 00:09:12.572
So I guess, to kind of bring it back to what you were saying, does everything have to become for the produced piece?
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Can SongZap even create a whole track?
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I mean, what would your advice to artists be around that whole production process?
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When we started making a lot of the user guides, tutorials and videos that we make for the website to help artists get along, I was surprised how far I got with the iPhone mic, because we have access to some incredible vintage mics that we like to use for particular things and we have a favorites for particular setups and instruments, and I was.
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You know I was pushing pushing the app as I was making demo materials, and so was Rob, and we were doing that together on some of the songs as well.
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There was a particular track where I was showing the capabilities of the groove designer in version one of the app and I recorded piano double bass and rapped over the beats just to show something that had musicality around the main groove and the structure of that.
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And then I was thinking I need to make a disclaimer on the website and say this is all done on the iPhone mic with Songza, because I felt that who would think of recording double bass?
00:10:16.524 --> 00:10:20.942
You know it sits here in my studio with the iPhone mic on a little gooseneck stand.
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You can get so far with it.
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That's the first thing I take from this.
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The second one was the speed of how I was working, because I wasn't in a perfection nearing kind of frame of mind.
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I found a space in the piano range where it was sort of in the middle of a range.
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I was playing the piano you see behind me I use the gooseneck might or the bass up and then I was actually just reading through my lyrics because they were fresh.
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They did a couple of ads.
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I did it in a tenth of the time if I was doing a proper studio process.
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So I think one of the benefits we provided with the export capabilities of SongSep is that it doesn't have to be one or the other.
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You can then export it into Adobe or give it to your producer if you're an artist who doesn't play with those things.
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Further than that, you can import that into a dough and then go through a text and go well, that vocal has a great, great vibe.
00:11:19.981 --> 00:11:26.061
So, for starters, that's the guide and it's all in time with markers.
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Everything has been done from the export from soundzelle, so let's work on the other things.
00:11:30.659 --> 00:11:34.857
Okay, can we improve on the double bass recording with big valve mics?
00:11:34.857 --> 00:11:36.301
And yes, maybe we can.
00:11:36.301 --> 00:11:46.856
But you have a reference point to try and hit and if you don't, you have a track that's already very, very, very good and of course, everything is quite separated.
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You record with headphones.
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Most importantly, it's incredible studio practice for musicians and if you bring something like that to that next stage, you're there, you have played in time to drums or click tracks, you have thought about structure and you have thought about dynamics.
00:12:02.083 --> 00:12:05.921
Those would be my three main takeaways from this process.
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So it's not an all or nothing.
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You know you could use it in four or four production if you wanted to, or just leave it as it is, or you could use it in four or four production if you wanted to, or just leave it as it is, or you could pass it on and kind of do the the studio version.
00:12:16.972 --> 00:12:27.668
I kind of like that extra bit as well about the practice piece almost, which you know studio time is expensive and you know you're not there to practice, you're there to perform and to get stuff done.
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So I think that's a good extra thing to take away.
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Plus, I think bruce would have would have probably put some sex on that track if he had songs that back in the 70s.
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If he had more tracks.
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Yeah, more than four.
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Okay, so, staying in that songwriter mode, we have a second track from Wilfy Williams.
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This one is Fireball, from his album the Rhyme and Reasons of Wilfy Williams from 2022.
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Tell us a bit more about this.
00:12:54.957 --> 00:13:03.821
So I ended up producing Wilfy Williams's recent album Rhyme and Reason, and Fireball was a real standout track on that.
00:13:03.821 --> 00:13:09.039
But this all happened really at the start of Songzap's life, I suppose.
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And a very common kind of experience as a producer, especially working with singer-songwriters, is you'll invite a singer-songwriter to come to the studio and maybe just quickly lay down five or six songs just in a couple of hours, just play them live.
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We'll stick up a couple of microphones capture what you're doing and that will serve as a sort of a starting point to have a conversation.
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So it's kind of pre-production and what I found with when Wilfy came in.
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Wilfy had just gone viral.
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Actually he's a busker.
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He'd he'd been busking around London for years.
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He's very, very well known um and Leicester Square and Tottenham Road and every now and again the if he's busking at the right time, people come out of the theatres and they hear him playing the Beatles or whatever and and they just dance.
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And it's amazing these videos of Wilfy busking to London, tube goers doing the Congo, up and down the escalators and anyway.
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So because of that sort of moment of success, wilfie wanted to produce the album.
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He played me his songs.
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They were really really interesting, good, nicely crafted acoustic guitar songs.
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But he hadn't decided where the verse ended, where the chorus started, how many choruses there were before there was a bridge, before there was a loop section, all of this sort of song structures.
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So so he was very much kind of had the song ideas but not the songs, and I'm like, well, we can't really record properly until you know when the song starts and when the song finishes, because otherwise we're just wasting studio time, which is expensive and not helpful.
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So what I ended up doing was drum programming a beat map for him to play the song, so it'd be 16 bars of verse and then a slightly different drum beat with a crash cymbal for the chorus, the song.
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So it'd be 16 bars of verse and then a slightly different drum beat with a crash cymbal for the chorus, and then.
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So it's really simple stuff.
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It's a certain drum beat, crash cymbal, a slightly different drum beat, maybe even the hi-hat would just change to a ride, but just so that Wilfy could go home and play to these drum beats and then he could email me and say, okay, now I need that chorus to be six bars longer, or whatever.
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And so I'd do that and we did that for the whole album, the whole album.
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I created drum tracks for him to play along to and actually at the same time I just built the first version of of what became Songzap.
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It was essentially a drum programmer.
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You could just which which you see in Songzap.
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Now it was basically a way of programming kick drums, snares and hi-hats.
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You could tap around and just change the beat.
00:15:37.942 --> 00:15:59.251
And because of that experience with Wilfy, it became very obvious that if we could allow a user to create a drum beat for a verse and then create a drum beat for a chorus, and then create a drum beat for an instrumental subtle variations, they could then change the length, move things around and then just play along and perfect it.
00:15:59.251 --> 00:16:06.697
And if they felt personally that the chorus needed to go on a bit longer, they could just click a button and make it two bars longer or whatever.
00:16:06.697 --> 00:16:14.529
So in a way that that experience working with Wilfy allowed me to really find the use case for for that.
00:16:14.629 --> 00:16:23.928
Now Mike was working part-time with me at that time and a few months later he he came full-time on board and the first thing Mike said was well, now you've got that.
00:16:23.928 --> 00:16:28.982
You need to add multi-track recording, right, so and and so you know, songs.
00:16:28.982 --> 00:16:31.008
That was never really intended to be a DAW.
00:16:31.008 --> 00:16:37.186
It's intended to be this sort of drum programming kind of you know, build your song beatmap, kind of thing.
00:16:37.186 --> 00:16:44.365
And then we added the multitrack and then we added some mixing and then we added, and then so it kind of revealed itself to us what it was.
00:16:44.365 --> 00:16:56.860
And so this whole project with Wolfie, who we featured on the artist video, is the embryonic phase of Songzap and does realizing what, what this product could and should be to be useful.
00:16:57.041 --> 00:17:03.585
And now Wilfy is writing his second album entirely on Songzap and we're really excited to get his demos.
00:17:03.585 --> 00:17:09.601
Just to add on this song that mike played piano on it as a session musician, I played guitar on it.
00:17:09.601 --> 00:17:16.743
It we recorded Wilfy, some fantastic Alex Reeves, who's the elbow drummer, played drums on it.
00:17:16.743 --> 00:17:21.441
You know it's a brilliant collaboration and it sort of all sparked the movement of this app.
00:17:21.601 --> 00:17:36.469
And the other point I would just add is that Wilfy and many artists who I've worked with, and Mike as well, and I'm sure yourself, there's lots of artists out there who are exceptionally talented, exceptionally committed, work all day long to be full time musicians.
00:17:36.469 --> 00:17:41.507
Maybe they don't make much money, but really they're the sort of heroes that I look up to.
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The ones that you know do it even though they don't make lots and lots of money, but it's in their blood, they're going to do it anyway.
00:17:48.060 --> 00:17:54.395
If you listen A B them against someone in the charts, there's no difference in quality.
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It's purely about whether they've got the backing, the pr, the opportunity.
00:17:58.566 --> 00:18:12.099
Obviously some people work harder than others, but but wolf is one of those that, regardless of whether he's making millions or busking to a few people in leicester square, you know he's a an absolute success story as a musician, if you ask me.
00:18:12.181 --> 00:18:27.058
So that's why it's really a valuable track it's great to see the story go from that viral kind of conga moment and busking the years to an actual release, you know, and converting that to something successful, which which is really great.
00:18:27.058 --> 00:18:37.557
Just kind of talking through what you were saying obviously in this example he was working with the producer, you know could think through song structure and that kind of thing, coming at it from the artist point of view.
00:18:37.557 --> 00:18:50.983
If I get songs up and I just want to get some stuff down but I don't know about, you know what is the bridge and the chorus, or I don't know about 16 bars versus eight and this kind of thing, is there a way for me just to kind of jump in and get started?
00:18:50.983 --> 00:18:52.907
Is there an education piece to it?
00:18:52.907 --> 00:18:55.123
How would I go about creating a song?
00:18:55.474 --> 00:18:58.724
You don't have to follow historical ways or structures.
00:18:58.724 --> 00:19:04.303
We think Songs that will come up with a basic beat segment or piece of structure, if you want to call it that.
00:19:04.303 --> 00:19:07.704
And I'm a hip-hop artist first and foremost.
00:19:07.704 --> 00:19:09.442
Quite often I care about a four-beat.
00:19:09.442 --> 00:19:16.579
I will make a four-bar beat amazingly funky, and if I have that, I know I can do the rest.
00:19:16.579 --> 00:19:24.211
And then the rest is about it's a sort of more Afrocentric way of working music, which is about looping with variation.
00:19:24.211 --> 00:19:26.136
Looping with variation and adding layers.
00:19:26.136 --> 00:19:36.380
It's totally the way to use it as well Work around one idea that you copy multiple times and then you create little variations and layers to that.
00:19:36.974 --> 00:19:44.384
In terms of the educational aspect, we have created a huge ecosystem around the app which you can access from inside the app.
00:19:44.384 --> 00:20:01.766
The app has online tutorials, user guides, even a six-part course you can take in your own time to learn about recording arrangements, song craft and so forth, in which case Songzap actually takes a backseat and it's one of the possible platforms you could use to think about those ideas.
00:20:01.766 --> 00:20:18.804
The other aspect of all this is that we do encourage teachers to use it and to teach with our freemium mode, which can do a huge percentage of what is in there in Songzap, and for that reason we have created all the teaching materials they might need, because we know how busy teachers are.
00:20:18.804 --> 00:20:29.704
We did it for 20 years in university, so we wanted to provide them with all the slides, all the presentation materials and all the course handbooks that they might need to teach this.
00:20:29.894 --> 00:20:33.356
There is one more point the artist series that Rob mentioned.
00:20:33.356 --> 00:20:48.161
We have been interviewing artists who use it Some of it people we are producing, and we keep on being fascinated by how they use it, which is sometimes very different to how we imagined they would use it, and we love that.
00:20:48.161 --> 00:20:59.902
As people who have gone through the punk DIY ethos and the hip hop ethos, it's absolutely wonderful to see people abusing it and making it work in their way and creating fascinating results so effectively.
00:21:00.604 --> 00:21:04.015
However you like to work, kind of, you can jump in, you can start.
00:21:04.015 --> 00:21:07.625
Either you could start from the beat or you maybe you could start from the vocals.
00:21:07.625 --> 00:21:12.481
You don't necessarily have to say, okay, it's going to be this long, it's going to be this tempo, has to be this time signature.
00:21:12.481 --> 00:21:19.962
You can just find a way and if you break it, then I guess get in touch with mike and rob and let them know how you're using it, kind of thing.
00:21:20.042 --> 00:21:22.256
Yeah or shows the result of the breaking.
00:21:22.256 --> 00:21:24.323
We are very excited about that cool.
00:21:24.423 --> 00:21:25.246
Well, thanks for that.
00:21:25.246 --> 00:21:39.386
So this, this final track, was really exciting to me because, one, it was a new artist I hadn't heard and, two, there's very little I can find around this, and that's always kind of really good to feel that discovery.
00:21:39.386 --> 00:21:46.049
I do look at album credits, though, and I recognized a name on the production credit, but I'll let.
00:21:46.049 --> 00:21:47.116
I'll let you talk to that.
00:21:47.116 --> 00:21:52.909
So this is exercise by teano from this year 2024.
00:21:52.909 --> 00:21:54.220
Tell us more about this track.
00:21:54.335 --> 00:21:56.522
So this is the first of two singles.
00:21:56.522 --> 00:22:12.171
The second one is Rhombus, which means is a very, very fresh artist in the scene and there's definitely a connection again to how this relates to Songs Up and the design particularly of V2.
00:22:12.171 --> 00:22:24.002
So Theanò was an ex-student at the University of West London, where I used to work, and she was on a performance and songwriting course rather than a technology course, so this is very specific to our case.
00:22:24.002 --> 00:22:26.984
She's also fearless with technology and with learning.
00:22:26.984 --> 00:22:35.902
So just a little bit of background on her she's a Greek, georgian singer-songwriter who studied classical voice, also byzantine voice.
00:22:35.902 --> 00:22:47.695
So when I first heard her demos that she sent me after I left academia, I thought this is a bit like some middle eastern psychedelic, Erykah Badu and that's a good description.
00:22:47.797 --> 00:22:50.482
There are at least five different genres in there.
00:22:51.484 --> 00:22:55.780
And she took it as a compliment, which I really really loved and I could hear she had a great voice.
00:22:55.780 --> 00:23:02.786
But, my dear, when I heard her live in front of a mic in my studio, I was blown away.
00:23:02.786 --> 00:23:16.482
It's still got goosebumps because it's one of those moments as a producer that happen now and again, quite rare and I went I'm in the presence of greatness because her voice was hitting me in an embodied sense.
00:23:16.482 --> 00:23:21.323
It was also hitting me through my headphones and it was landing so well on the beats I was producing.
00:23:21.323 --> 00:23:25.461
I was fascinated with, not only with the output of what she does, but with the way she works.
00:23:25.730 --> 00:23:32.022
Her process of making music is quite interesting and probably very characteristic of how contemporary artists work.
00:23:32.022 --> 00:23:48.357
So she has a wonderful band and they come from all over the world with very different musical influences, and she had some recordings of demos that they had made and they sounded very good performance-wise, but they sounded quite demo-ish to me in terms of production focus.
00:23:48.357 --> 00:23:57.240
But thankfully, as I'm a sample-based beatmaker, I thought you know what I really want to not be one of those producers who throws away the band and just works with the singer.
00:23:57.240 --> 00:24:11.107
I really wanted to keep the collective, the quartet in there and I chopped up and sampled every instrument, bar by bar, beat by beat, so that we could reinterpret their chops, their musicianship, in a sample-based form.
00:24:11.107 --> 00:24:54.820
And it wasn't because their playing was incredible, it was just a way looper, whatever you use it for, and because of her fantastic ear and vocal capability, she will layer whole choirs of vocals quite fantastic Middle Eastern, r&b, byzantine things and she creates these amazing structures that she then sings on top.
00:24:55.731 --> 00:25:16.463
So her process on one side is the front person of a live band and on another one is a loop-based vocal arranger and we tried to bring those things together in the studio and it was one of the inspiring parallel stories to putting a lot more of a sort of loop-based recorder functionality in songs of V2.
00:25:16.463 --> 00:25:39.958
And when we recorded Tia Ngo for the Artist series, she was making a song which is called Beholder, which is going to be the third single coming out soon, and she created it out of vocal loops and then she used the AI auto-accompaniment features to create versions of drums and bass and synth pads but then she brings to her other collaborators to put humanity and liveness into.
00:25:39.958 --> 00:26:22.285
So it's very, very central, uh the design of v2, to how this artist works and how we put the songs together in the studio with and the band, and then featured musicians, because you'll hear a lot of canoon and other middle eastern instruments and sax solos and things in there that's interesting.
00:26:22.326 --> 00:27:10.876
So basically using songs up as a sketch pad to flesh out an idea and then take it to a band to play and recreate it like that yeah, we sort of didn't realize this is what we were building, but in a way it it lends itself to the kind of ableton way of thinking where you're working with clips and you're like, well, I'll have that clip, that clip and that clip all play at once and then in the next segment I'll switch that one off and I'll have these two on and then in the next segment I'll have you know, ableton were very innovative in the way they reimagined the, the sort of the timeline of of a song structure, and we've kind of almost reworked that, but with the acoustic singer songwriter in mind, rather than it being about, you know, dropping in a beat and dropping in a, an fx sample or something like that.
00:27:10.957 --> 00:27:11.218
So it's.
00:27:11.218 --> 00:27:25.397
It's now the case where you can say, potentially, okay, this four bar chord progression, a, g, d, g, d, e, minor, whatever, I'm just going to record it once, I'm just going to let that loop forever.
00:27:25.397 --> 00:27:28.337
Then for the chorus maybe the chord progression changes.
00:27:28.337 --> 00:27:50.317
So I'll record that in so very quickly record four bars here, record two bars here, record eight bars here, and suddenly you've got like a little, you know, you got your, your sample blocks and you can construct a song quite quickly and then maybe you might go over in a sort of a more linear fashion and record a solo or a vocal ad-lib line or whatever.
00:27:50.317 --> 00:28:04.086
But it it kind of started fusing this idea of the sort of electro process that a lot of Ableton musician producers have been using but making that accessible to the sort of everyday guitarist, pianist, vocalist.
00:28:04.086 --> 00:28:14.561
That almost happened by accident, but at the same time it's a sort of a tried and tested way of making music with that, slightly different to the sort of linear Pro Tools logic kind of way of doing things.
00:28:14.970 --> 00:28:18.133
Yeah, sequencing, which is very apt for the show.
00:28:18.133 --> 00:28:23.876
Interestingly, with these past two artists, you got me thinking about this disconnect.
00:28:23.876 --> 00:28:37.027
Sometimes you can get really great live artists and that doesn't always translate to the commercial side and you know, some bands are amazing, live you just kind of never will find on Spotify and that kind of thing.
00:28:37.027 --> 00:28:42.755
But it seems in a way, songs that could help potentially bridge that gap to some extent.
00:28:42.755 --> 00:28:51.201
As you say, capture the vibe of that live experience, but use it to construct something that is production ready or you can take to a studio.
00:28:51.201 --> 00:28:54.550
Would that be a fair comparison to make or a fair statement?
00:28:54.751 --> 00:28:55.672
yeah, I think I.
00:28:55.672 --> 00:29:04.857
You know that is a real eternal challenge of making the live artists sound translate into the studio.
00:29:04.857 --> 00:29:09.141
Some artists very much say this is my live show, this is my production.
00:29:09.141 --> 00:29:11.843
They don't sound the same, but you're going to love both.
00:29:11.843 --> 00:29:18.207
Right and others sound the same on record as they do on stage and others sound great in one but not the other.
00:29:18.267 --> 00:29:33.682
If you're experimenting or reflecting is the word we would use in academia if you're reflecting on what you do, then you're improving or you're making active choices, and the only way you can reflect is by listening back right, so you create something and then look at it.
00:29:33.803 --> 00:29:34.768
It's like looking in the mirror.
00:29:34.768 --> 00:29:48.851
You create something, look at it, listen to it, change it, listen again, change it, and so the idea of Songzap is to take away that kind of oh, I'm in a studio, it's costing me x amount an hour, I've got to just do it this way and I can't stop to think about whether it's the right way or not.
00:29:48.851 --> 00:30:00.740
Do that at home and and let failure be part of your development, or let getting it wrong be something to celebrate because you've gone down a road, it didn't work, brilliant, let's go this way, sort of thing.
00:30:00.740 --> 00:30:01.442
I'm not sure.
00:30:01.442 --> 00:30:04.288
100 that uh, that it, that it.
00:30:04.288 --> 00:30:25.018
It guarantees an artist can bring their sort of stage persona to the studio but at the same time it definitely helps them to sort of just just grow, uh as, as a sort of a of a creative thinker, listener, it's just as important to learn how to listen back to how you play than to just learn to play sort of thing.
00:30:25.018 --> 00:30:30.182
We think that's definitely a huge developmental benefit of the app.
00:30:31.134 --> 00:30:34.130
And I think it goes for producers, not just for the musicians themselves.
00:30:34.130 --> 00:30:42.782
The great thing about talking about technology and creativity you end up finding things that the thing you build does that you hadn't never thought about.
00:30:42.782 --> 00:31:04.596
In that way we're in a recent event presenting uh songs up to a bunch of music technology other companies in the uk and uh, one of the members of the audience afterwards after our presentation told me the immediacy thing also goes for producers, not just for the artists, and I'm like, yeah, of course you know.
00:31:04.596 --> 00:31:37.877
I mean rob and I have been on both sides of the glass, so I guess we think of it maybe sometimes as a quite a glued process, but producers often drown the liveness or take away the liveness out of an artist's performance and creativity because we we nerd out and we get conditioned by click tracks and boxes and ways of working even compressors, you know, and producers like rick rubin when, when I read his creativity book or interviews make me always think try and delete all the things, you know.
00:31:37.877 --> 00:31:40.723
Be back in that Zen space of just listening to the track and going.
00:31:41.150 --> 00:31:42.253
Do I need to do anything?
00:31:42.253 --> 00:31:44.200
That's great production.
00:31:44.200 --> 00:31:45.413
Do I need to do something?
00:31:45.413 --> 00:31:45.796
Little.
00:31:45.796 --> 00:31:47.615
Do I need to tweak this?
00:31:47.615 --> 00:31:59.099
Do I need to just have a conversation with the artist or make them run around the block or exert themselves or connect to the feeling of when they first wrote the lyrics?
00:31:59.099 --> 00:32:09.019
A lot of those things are philosophical, and if you can make technology be quite transparent so it doesn't take somebody and goes well, you're playing this, you have an extra half bar there.
00:32:09.019 --> 00:32:11.891
We can't have that in our dough Like no.
00:32:11.891 --> 00:32:18.637
If the artist needs a half bar there and that's part of the dynamic in the story we need to find a way of being able to do that.
00:32:18.637 --> 00:32:39.863
So I think it's a great lesson for producers as well that maybe through the immediacy exercise or context that apps like songs up are also creating, let the artist go a little further, then listen to it and then allow for that liveness and that expression to to be the loudest it can possibly be Perfect.
00:32:39.983 --> 00:32:43.299
Yeah, I mean Bob Clearmountain did that with Born in the USA.
00:32:43.299 --> 00:32:50.657
So, like I said, the mentality I think seems to be half of a thing breaking out of the box and just kind of letting that creativity roll.
00:32:50.657 --> 00:32:52.717
Nice, well, we've gone through the tracks.
00:32:52.717 --> 00:32:54.308
Anything else you want to shout out?
00:32:54.308 --> 00:32:57.853
Where can people go to download Songzap and find out more?
00:32:58.073 --> 00:32:58.512
Yeah.
00:32:58.512 --> 00:33:06.220
So if you go to Songzap that's S-O-N-G-Z-A-P dot app there's everything there.
00:33:06.220 --> 00:33:28.598
There's a huge resource of tutorials, courses, blog posts, videos not just of us using Songzap, but the kind of the philosophy of recording and production from the perspective of a sort of a singer, songwriter, who maybe hasn't engaged in this kind of thing before or sees it as a as a real important step.
00:33:28.598 --> 00:33:32.211
But let's face it musicians make money out of music, out of recorded music.
00:33:32.211 --> 00:33:33.917
It's something you can't ignore it.
00:33:33.917 --> 00:33:42.883
If you, if you want to be a sustainable, self-sufficient musician, you have to engage in recording, because it's the only way you can reach a global audience these days.
00:33:43.329 --> 00:33:47.781
Equally, myself and Mike, you know, we love hearing what people are doing.
00:33:47.781 --> 00:33:54.730
We're very much trying to build not just a community, but myself and Mike are experienced teachers.
00:33:54.730 --> 00:34:00.061
We quite, you know, we like the idea of helping people to get to the next level.
00:34:00.061 --> 00:34:21.436
So we've been doing some webinars as well to help people start using the app, and we're there on social media and on email and we'll be doing more live things in the future as well to try and help people get from sort of where they're at, from voice memos, to a bit further down the creative process, in a way yeah, I'll just say, tom, thank you for having us in sequence.
00:34:21.516 --> 00:34:22.180
It's been great.
00:34:22.180 --> 00:34:24.369
Talking, technology and music.
00:34:24.369 --> 00:34:25.311
It's brilliant.
00:34:25.311 --> 00:34:27.617
Thank you for having us thank you very much.
00:00:00.179 --> 00:00:07.631
I've always thought it would be kind of cool if you could just take the song that you imagine in your head and make it a reality without having to mess around with buttons and sh*t.
00:00:07.631 --> 00:00:16.419
One app that's doing that in a pretty neat way is Songzap, which helps singer-songwriters capture the essence or the vibe of the song they're trying to create without having to mess around with buttons and shit.
00:00:16.419 --> 00:00:21.564
This is Sequence, a show where you can learn about the latest music tech through the music that inspired it.
00:00:31.751 --> 00:00:36.954
I am here today with Mike— Doctors, Mike and Rob from RT60.
00:00:36.954 --> 00:00:39.595
Nice to meet you guys and great to have you on the show.
00:00:39.957 --> 00:00:40.796
Nice to meet you, Tom.
00:00:40.796 --> 00:00:41.557
Thanks for having us.
00:00:44.859 --> 00:00:54.850
So, between the two of you, you're a combination of entrepreneurs, developers, musicians, producers, and I'm sure we could take a whole hour just talking about that, but we're here today to talk about your latest product, which is Songzap.
00:00:54.850 --> 00:00:58.548
Can you give us a quick overview of what it is and who it's for?
00:00:58.848 --> 00:00:59.960
Yeah, I'll dive in, okay.
00:00:59.960 --> 00:01:05.567
So Songzap is designed to help musicians in their creative process.
00:01:05.567 --> 00:01:10.135
In its simplest form, it's to help them make demos, multi-track demos on their phone.
00:01:10.135 --> 00:01:22.888
But more powerfully, it can help with the whole songwriting process of experimenting with arrangements, experimenting with different ways of approaching turning a simple idea into a full-blown song.
00:01:22.888 --> 00:01:30.835
There's some AI built in so it will listen to a simple guitar recording, for example, and then it will add layers to accompany that.
00:01:30.835 --> 00:01:38.564
And finally, when you've finished experimenting and crafting your song, you can bounce out everything and take it forward to a DAW.
00:01:38.564 --> 00:01:48.626
So it allows a songwriter to then sort of hand over to a pro studio or to a producer if they want to sort of collaborate and take these ideas further forward got it,
00:01:48.686 --> 00:01:56.891
So there's a ton of tools out there right now that would claim to do the same thing, right, we have to take a song from inspiration through to production.
00:01:56.891 --> 00:02:01.266
What makes Songzap different or, yeah, better for a songwriter?
00:02:01.587 --> 00:02:04.694
ight think for a start it is designed from the ground up.
00:02:11.419 --> 00:02:14.049
We didn't want to create a tool that's designed for engineers or music technologists.
00:02:14.049 --> 00:02:35.549
There's some very valuable products that do that, but we also think that the apps market and context is very different, where you have to work with devices that have a more limited visual arena, but they also really promote the idea of being able to do things with immediacy on the go, with quick access and with some level of tangibility on the screen.
00:02:36.039 --> 00:03:06.923
So we combined those opportunities with our history of being academics and music producers and having worked with thousands of students over the past 20 years and many music artists, and we found that a lot of the super talented instrumentally songwriters, performers can often be non-tech savvy or even technophobic and they should not be deprived from putting together ideas or prepping themselves for the studio, other ideas or prepping themselves for the studio.
00:03:06.923 --> 00:03:17.490
So we really wanted to design something that used those opportunities of access and tech and immediacy whilst making the design elegant, easy, not scary, for musicians to be able to put ideas down.
00:03:17.490 --> 00:03:21.627
So you know, to sort of take music creation from a voice memo.
00:03:21.627 --> 00:03:40.103
I just captured something, so I don't forget it, to the level of I can layer, I can structure, I can play to beats and I can come to my producer or to my collaborator with more structured, more fully formed ideas and that's been a big driver in our design and our and our ethos got it.
00:03:40.143 --> 00:03:49.355
So basically, you can create more fully formed demos on the go in a simple way without having to learn, you know, what a parametric EQ is and kind of a new DAW.
00:03:49.355 --> 00:03:49.919
Cool.
00:03:49.919 --> 00:04:06.442
Well, we have some very interesting tracks up today and I think one of the things that I took away from our initial conversation I think you said Songzap is kind of like a four track in your pocket or a modern day four track, which is quite apt for this first song.
00:04:06.442 --> 00:04:10.871
So we have Bruce Springsteen's Atlantic City from his Nebraska album.
00:04:10.871 --> 00:04:14.346
Do you want to, take us through why this is so significant or you?
00:04:15.448 --> 00:04:16.290
It's a real favorite.
00:04:16.290 --> 00:04:31.526
We've been using it in a lot of the course materials and educational materials that surround the ecosystem of Songzap, and the reason for it is quite a famous story but maybe for listeners and viewers who don't know, Bruce Springsteen had written this on a four-track and he carried the cassette.
00:04:31.526 --> 00:04:33.906
I mean the whole album, not just the track.
00:04:33.906 --> 00:04:37.927
He carried it in his back pocket and he was playing it to people.
00:04:37.927 --> 00:04:42.891
And now we know it's a brilliant piece of record production.
00:04:42.891 --> 00:05:00.613
But what maybe some people don't know is that himself and the team and the producers tried all sorts of things to bring it to life in a fully produced, expensive form, shall we say, including recording, the E Street Band mixing it, mastering it and doing all sorts of processes.
00:05:00.613 --> 00:05:09.930
And every time they found that they were going back to the cassette four-track and finding that he had a better vibe and this word is really, really important.
00:05:09.930 --> 00:05:18.500
Thankfully, bruce, his team, the E street band, were brave enough and confident musically enough to say that is better.
00:05:18.500 --> 00:05:20.785
Let's keep going back to that.
00:05:20.865 --> 00:05:40.083
So we got a version released into the public that took a lot of bravery in terms of accepting the lo-fi and going with a musical vibe that was possible to put down, some form of longevity, even if it was a cassette, even if there was noise and, of course, listening to it, as with Atlantic City.
00:05:41.185 --> 00:05:51.343
And the choice of the track specifically is to do with how much vibe there is in that performance, but also the backing vocals Bruce did on top of the instruments, how fully formed it is.
00:05:51.343 --> 00:06:04.290
And this has been part of our ethos in design, because we're thinking capture it when it's hot, capture it when you're walking out there, when you're in that special moment by the fire or traveling.
00:06:04.290 --> 00:06:13.548
Most of the musicians we work with and speak to for our artist series tend to tell us they never write in the clinical box of a studio.
00:06:13.548 --> 00:06:26.187
They tend to write ideas outside in random moments and they need to keep something like a notepad or songs up or an equivalent way of capturing that initial idea, even if they're going to sculpt it out later.
00:06:26.187 --> 00:06:34.480
And the story of Nebraska and Atlantic City is totally central to some of the things we wanted to give artists with our technology.
00:06:34.862 --> 00:06:43.973
It's a great example of creativity winning over technology and the power of the art form and, in some cases, power of limitation.
00:06:43.973 --> 00:06:48.783
It's very easy nowadays to make a production with 200 tracks.
00:06:48.783 --> 00:07:04.797
All the instruments in the world take two or three years to finish a mix and all this sort of stuff and with Songzap, we we really, as as sort of early musicians ourselves, valued from that idea of working with just four tracks.
00:07:04.797 --> 00:07:08.208
If you're going to do another vocal, you're going to have to delete the one you just did.
00:07:08.208 --> 00:07:14.959
So you really need to kind of get used to performing for the recording and and getting in the zone and and, as mike said, the vibe.
00:07:15.161 --> 00:07:20.740
So I think this is a great example in its purest form of technology doesn't beat creativity.
00:07:20.740 --> 00:07:29.113
Creativity should always win and I don't know if you've worked on productions, you know sometimes the more you add, the less you get right.
00:07:29.113 --> 00:07:47.029
So it's finding that place and I think Songzap designed to help musicians start with that in mind and say, look, if it can work great with a voice, a guitar and maybe an overdub, then then that's a great starting point, rather than trying to start with everything and then then in the mix trying to work out how to make it really connect.
00:07:47.029 --> 00:08:01.303
So, you know, it's fantastic that this example exists, like mike said, the bravery to put something like this out, and hopefully it's sort of an encouragement for artists to be brave, to be creative, and you know, if bruce springsteen can, can do it, then then anyone can, you know right.
00:08:01.464 --> 00:08:06.242
I think for me it's, it's a mentality, because I know I've definitely ruined tracks.
00:08:06.242 --> 00:08:10.778
I had a great vibe and the demo is like well, the real production has to be better.
00:08:10.778 --> 00:08:12.925
Right, because that's the good version of that track.
00:08:12.925 --> 00:08:33.504
And when you see something like this, a demo that was, you know, a tape sitting in someone's back pocket that basically was released and has become one of his more endearing tracks and something that's been covered I'm sure every few years a new cover of this comes out it does make you rethink that idea that everything has to be perfect.
00:08:33.504 --> 00:08:36.230
I saw bob clear mountain.
00:08:36.730 --> 00:08:42.687
He did a little breakdown of born in the usa and he was isolating the tracks and kind of showing you each one.
00:08:42.687 --> 00:09:05.668
And the funny thing is you kind of hear the synth part and there's a mistake straight away, like bruce plays a wrong note and you you hear his guitar and the anger in in, in his aggression, and the way he's playing is actually making the guitar go out of tune while he's playing and you would consider those to be mistakes and yet that that's the vibe that was captured in the studio.
00:09:05.668 --> 00:09:12.572
So I guess, to kind of bring it back to what you were saying, does everything have to become for the produced piece?
00:09:12.572 --> 00:09:16.049
Can SongZap even create a whole track?
00:09:16.049 --> 00:09:20.711
I mean, what would your advice to artists be around that whole production process?
00:09:21.240 --> 00:09:41.107
When we started making a lot of the user guides, tutorials and videos that we make for the website to help artists get along, I was surprised how far I got with the iPhone mic, because we have access to some incredible vintage mics that we like to use for particular things and we have a favorites for particular setups and instruments, and I was.
00:09:41.107 --> 00:09:49.339
You know I was pushing pushing the app as I was making demo materials, and so was Rob, and we were doing that together on some of the songs as well.
00:09:49.339 --> 00:10:05.191
There was a particular track where I was showing the capabilities of the groove designer in version one of the app and I recorded piano double bass and rapped over the beats just to show something that had musicality around the main groove and the structure of that.
00:10:05.191 --> 00:10:16.524
And then I was thinking I need to make a disclaimer on the website and say this is all done on the iPhone mic with Songza, because I felt that who would think of recording double bass?
00:10:16.524 --> 00:10:20.942
You know it sits here in my studio with the iPhone mic on a little gooseneck stand.
00:10:20.942 --> 00:10:22.861
You can get so far with it.
00:10:22.861 --> 00:10:25.985
That's the first thing I take from this.
00:10:25.985 --> 00:10:33.778
The second one was the speed of how I was working, because I wasn't in a perfection nearing kind of frame of mind.
00:10:33.778 --> 00:10:39.760
I found a space in the piano range where it was sort of in the middle of a range.
00:10:39.760 --> 00:10:49.399
I was playing the piano you see behind me I use the gooseneck might or the bass up and then I was actually just reading through my lyrics because they were fresh.
00:10:49.399 --> 00:10:51.624
They did a couple of ads.
00:10:51.624 --> 00:10:58.543
I did it in a tenth of the time if I was doing a proper studio process.
00:10:59.525 --> 00:11:08.032
So I think one of the benefits we provided with the export capabilities of SongSep is that it doesn't have to be one or the other.
00:11:08.032 --> 00:11:13.624
You can then export it into Adobe or give it to your producer if you're an artist who doesn't play with those things.
00:11:13.624 --> 00:11:19.981
Further than that, you can import that into a dough and then go through a text and go well, that vocal has a great, great vibe.
00:11:19.981 --> 00:11:26.061
So, for starters, that's the guide and it's all in time with markers.
00:11:26.061 --> 00:11:30.539
Everything has been done from the export from soundzelle, so let's work on the other things.
00:11:30.659 --> 00:11:34.857
Okay, can we improve on the double bass recording with big valve mics?
00:11:34.857 --> 00:11:36.301
And yes, maybe we can.
00:11:36.301 --> 00:11:46.856
But you have a reference point to try and hit and if you don't, you have a track that's already very, very, very good and of course, everything is quite separated.
00:11:46.856 --> 00:11:48.000
You record with headphones.
00:11:48.000 --> 00:12:02.083
Most importantly, it's incredible studio practice for musicians and if you bring something like that to that next stage, you're there, you have played in time to drums or click tracks, you have thought about structure and you have thought about dynamics.
00:12:02.083 --> 00:12:05.921
Those would be my three main takeaways from this process.
00:12:06.280 --> 00:12:07.624
So it's not an all or nothing.
00:12:07.624 --> 00:12:16.972
You know you could use it in four or four production if you wanted to, or just leave it as it is, or you could use it in four or four production if you wanted to, or just leave it as it is, or you could pass it on and kind of do the the studio version.
00:12:16.972 --> 00:12:27.668
I kind of like that extra bit as well about the practice piece almost, which you know studio time is expensive and you know you're not there to practice, you're there to perform and to get stuff done.
00:12:27.668 --> 00:12:30.277
So I think that's a good extra thing to take away.
00:12:30.277 --> 00:12:37.188
Plus, I think bruce would have would have probably put some sex on that track if he had songs that back in the 70s.
00:12:37.556 --> 00:12:38.500
If he had more tracks.
00:12:39.777 --> 00:12:40.500
Yeah, more than four.
00:12:40.500 --> 00:12:46.587
Okay, so, staying in that songwriter mode, we have a second track from Wilfy Williams.
00:12:46.587 --> 00:12:52.609
This one is Fireball, from his album the Rhyme and Reasons of Wilfy Williams from 2022.
00:12:52.609 --> 00:12:54.937
Tell us a bit more about this.
00:12:54.957 --> 00:13:03.821
So I ended up producing Wilfy Williams's recent album Rhyme and Reason, and Fireball was a real standout track on that.
00:13:03.821 --> 00:13:09.039
But this all happened really at the start of Songzap's life, I suppose.
00:13:09.039 --> 00:13:22.647
And a very common kind of experience as a producer, especially working with singer-songwriters, is you'll invite a singer-songwriter to come to the studio and maybe just quickly lay down five or six songs just in a couple of hours, just play them live.
00:13:22.647 --> 00:13:29.639
We'll stick up a couple of microphones capture what you're doing and that will serve as a sort of a starting point to have a conversation.
00:13:29.639 --> 00:13:33.779
So it's kind of pre-production and what I found with when Wilfy came in.
00:13:33.799 --> 00:13:34.904
Wilfy had just gone viral.
00:13:34.904 --> 00:13:35.989
Actually he's a busker.
00:13:35.989 --> 00:13:38.658
He'd he'd been busking around London for years.
00:13:38.658 --> 00:13:50.860
He's very, very well known um and Leicester Square and Tottenham Road and every now and again the if he's busking at the right time, people come out of the theatres and they hear him playing the Beatles or whatever and and they just dance.
00:13:50.860 --> 00:14:00.196
And it's amazing these videos of Wilfy busking to London, tube goers doing the Congo, up and down the escalators and anyway.
00:14:00.557 --> 00:14:05.802
So because of that sort of moment of success, wilfie wanted to produce the album.
00:14:05.802 --> 00:14:07.639
He played me his songs.
00:14:07.639 --> 00:14:13.105
They were really really interesting, good, nicely crafted acoustic guitar songs.
00:14:13.105 --> 00:14:25.763
But he hadn't decided where the verse ended, where the chorus started, how many choruses there were before there was a bridge, before there was a loop section, all of this sort of song structures.
00:14:25.763 --> 00:14:42.405
So so he was very much kind of had the song ideas but not the songs, and I'm like, well, we can't really record properly until you know when the song starts and when the song finishes, because otherwise we're just wasting studio time, which is expensive and not helpful.
00:14:42.405 --> 00:14:52.586
So what I ended up doing was drum programming a beat map for him to play the song, so it'd be 16 bars of verse and then a slightly different drum beat with a crash cymbal for the chorus, the song.
00:14:52.586 --> 00:14:56.634
So it'd be 16 bars of verse and then a slightly different drum beat with a crash cymbal for the chorus, and then.
00:14:56.634 --> 00:14:58.057
So it's really simple stuff.
00:14:58.057 --> 00:15:13.705
It's a certain drum beat, crash cymbal, a slightly different drum beat, maybe even the hi-hat would just change to a ride, but just so that Wilfy could go home and play to these drum beats and then he could email me and say, okay, now I need that chorus to be six bars longer, or whatever.
00:15:13.705 --> 00:15:17.523
And so I'd do that and we did that for the whole album, the whole album.
00:15:17.583 --> 00:15:27.336
I created drum tracks for him to play along to and actually at the same time I just built the first version of of what became Songzap.
00:15:27.336 --> 00:15:29.024
It was essentially a drum programmer.
00:15:29.024 --> 00:15:31.692
You could just which which you see in Songzap.
00:15:31.692 --> 00:15:35.586
Now it was basically a way of programming kick drums, snares and hi-hats.
00:15:35.586 --> 00:15:37.942
You could tap around and just change the beat.
00:15:37.942 --> 00:15:59.251
And because of that experience with Wilfy, it became very obvious that if we could allow a user to create a drum beat for a verse and then create a drum beat for a chorus, and then create a drum beat for an instrumental subtle variations, they could then change the length, move things around and then just play along and perfect it.
00:15:59.251 --> 00:16:06.697
And if they felt personally that the chorus needed to go on a bit longer, they could just click a button and make it two bars longer or whatever.
00:16:06.697 --> 00:16:14.529
So in a way that that experience working with Wilfy allowed me to really find the use case for for that.
00:16:14.629 --> 00:16:23.928
Now Mike was working part-time with me at that time and a few months later he he came full-time on board and the first thing Mike said was well, now you've got that.
00:16:23.928 --> 00:16:28.982
You need to add multi-track recording, right, so and and so you know, songs.
00:16:28.982 --> 00:16:31.008
That was never really intended to be a DAW.
00:16:31.008 --> 00:16:37.186
It's intended to be this sort of drum programming kind of you know, build your song beatmap, kind of thing.
00:16:37.186 --> 00:16:44.365
And then we added the multitrack and then we added some mixing and then we added, and then so it kind of revealed itself to us what it was.
00:16:44.365 --> 00:16:56.860
And so this whole project with Wolfie, who we featured on the artist video, is the embryonic phase of Songzap and does realizing what, what this product could and should be to be useful.
00:16:57.041 --> 00:17:03.585
And now Wilfy is writing his second album entirely on Songzap and we're really excited to get his demos.
00:17:03.585 --> 00:17:09.601
Just to add on this song that mike played piano on it as a session musician, I played guitar on it.
00:17:09.601 --> 00:17:16.743
It we recorded Wilfy, some fantastic Alex Reeves, who's the elbow drummer, played drums on it.
00:17:16.743 --> 00:17:21.441
You know it's a brilliant collaboration and it sort of all sparked the movement of this app.
00:17:21.601 --> 00:17:36.469
And the other point I would just add is that Wilfy and many artists who I've worked with, and Mike as well, and I'm sure yourself, there's lots of artists out there who are exceptionally talented, exceptionally committed, work all day long to be full time musicians.
00:17:36.469 --> 00:17:41.507
Maybe they don't make much money, but really they're the sort of heroes that I look up to.
00:17:41.507 --> 00:17:48.060
The ones that you know do it even though they don't make lots and lots of money, but it's in their blood, they're going to do it anyway.
00:17:48.060 --> 00:17:54.395
If you listen A B them against someone in the charts, there's no difference in quality.
00:17:54.395 --> 00:17:58.566
It's purely about whether they've got the backing, the pr, the opportunity.
00:17:58.566 --> 00:18:12.099
Obviously some people work harder than others, but but wolf is one of those that, regardless of whether he's making millions or busking to a few people in leicester square, you know he's a an absolute success story as a musician, if you ask me.
00:18:12.181 --> 00:18:27.058
So that's why it's really a valuable track it's great to see the story go from that viral kind of conga moment and busking the years to an actual release, you know, and converting that to something successful, which which is really great.
00:18:27.058 --> 00:18:37.557
Just kind of talking through what you were saying obviously in this example he was working with the producer, you know could think through song structure and that kind of thing, coming at it from the artist point of view.
00:18:37.557 --> 00:18:50.983
If I get songs up and I just want to get some stuff down but I don't know about, you know what is the bridge and the chorus, or I don't know about 16 bars versus eight and this kind of thing, is there a way for me just to kind of jump in and get started?
00:18:50.983 --> 00:18:52.907
Is there an education piece to it?
00:18:52.907 --> 00:18:55.123
How would I go about creating a song?
00:18:55.474 --> 00:18:58.724
You don't have to follow historical ways or structures.
00:18:58.724 --> 00:19:04.303
We think Songs that will come up with a basic beat segment or piece of structure, if you want to call it that.
00:19:04.303 --> 00:19:07.704
And I'm a hip-hop artist first and foremost.
00:19:07.704 --> 00:19:09.442
Quite often I care about a four-beat.
00:19:09.442 --> 00:19:16.579
I will make a four-bar beat amazingly funky, and if I have that, I know I can do the rest.
00:19:16.579 --> 00:19:24.211
And then the rest is about it's a sort of more Afrocentric way of working music, which is about looping with variation.
00:19:24.211 --> 00:19:26.136
Looping with variation and adding layers.
00:19:26.136 --> 00:19:36.380
It's totally the way to use it as well Work around one idea that you copy multiple times and then you create little variations and layers to that.
00:19:36.974 --> 00:19:44.384
In terms of the educational aspect, we have created a huge ecosystem around the app which you can access from inside the app.
00:19:44.384 --> 00:20:01.766
The app has online tutorials, user guides, even a six-part course you can take in your own time to learn about recording arrangements, song craft and so forth, in which case Songzap actually takes a backseat and it's one of the possible platforms you could use to think about those ideas.
00:20:01.766 --> 00:20:18.804
The other aspect of all this is that we do encourage teachers to use it and to teach with our freemium mode, which can do a huge percentage of what is in there in Songzap, and for that reason we have created all the teaching materials they might need, because we know how busy teachers are.
00:20:18.804 --> 00:20:29.704
We did it for 20 years in university, so we wanted to provide them with all the slides, all the presentation materials and all the course handbooks that they might need to teach this.
00:20:29.894 --> 00:20:33.356
There is one more point the artist series that Rob mentioned.
00:20:33.356 --> 00:20:48.161
We have been interviewing artists who use it Some of it people we are producing, and we keep on being fascinated by how they use it, which is sometimes very different to how we imagined they would use it, and we love that.
00:20:48.161 --> 00:20:59.902
As people who have gone through the punk DIY ethos and the hip hop ethos, it's absolutely wonderful to see people abusing it and making it work in their way and creating fascinating results so effectively.
00:21:00.604 --> 00:21:04.015
However you like to work, kind of, you can jump in, you can start.
00:21:04.015 --> 00:21:07.625
Either you could start from the beat or you maybe you could start from the vocals.
00:21:07.625 --> 00:21:12.481
You don't necessarily have to say, okay, it's going to be this long, it's going to be this tempo, has to be this time signature.
00:21:12.481 --> 00:21:19.962
You can just find a way and if you break it, then I guess get in touch with mike and rob and let them know how you're using it, kind of thing.
00:21:20.042 --> 00:21:22.256
Yeah or shows the result of the breaking.
00:21:22.256 --> 00:21:24.323
We are very excited about that cool.
00:21:24.423 --> 00:21:25.246
Well, thanks for that.
00:21:25.246 --> 00:21:39.386
So this, this final track, was really exciting to me because, one, it was a new artist I hadn't heard and, two, there's very little I can find around this, and that's always kind of really good to feel that discovery.
00:21:39.386 --> 00:21:46.049
I do look at album credits, though, and I recognized a name on the production credit, but I'll let.
00:21:46.049 --> 00:21:47.116
I'll let you talk to that.
00:21:47.116 --> 00:21:52.909
So this is exercise by teano from this year 2024.
00:21:52.909 --> 00:21:54.220
Tell us more about this track.
00:21:54.335 --> 00:21:56.522
So this is the first of two singles.
00:21:56.522 --> 00:22:12.171
The second one is Rhombus, which means is a very, very fresh artist in the scene and there's definitely a connection again to how this relates to Songs Up and the design particularly of V2.
00:22:12.171 --> 00:22:24.002
So Theanò was an ex-student at the University of West London, where I used to work, and she was on a performance and songwriting course rather than a technology course, so this is very specific to our case.
00:22:24.002 --> 00:22:26.984
She's also fearless with technology and with learning.
00:22:26.984 --> 00:22:35.902
So just a little bit of background on her she's a Greek, georgian singer-songwriter who studied classical voice, also byzantine voice.
00:22:35.902 --> 00:22:47.695
So when I first heard her demos that she sent me after I left academia, I thought this is a bit like some middle eastern psychedelic, Erykah Badu and that's a good description.
00:22:47.797 --> 00:22:50.482
There are at least five different genres in there.
00:22:51.484 --> 00:22:55.780
And she took it as a compliment, which I really really loved and I could hear she had a great voice.
00:22:55.780 --> 00:23:02.786
But, my dear, when I heard her live in front of a mic in my studio, I was blown away.
00:23:02.786 --> 00:23:16.482
It's still got goosebumps because it's one of those moments as a producer that happen now and again, quite rare and I went I'm in the presence of greatness because her voice was hitting me in an embodied sense.
00:23:16.482 --> 00:23:21.323
It was also hitting me through my headphones and it was landing so well on the beats I was producing.
00:23:21.323 --> 00:23:25.461
I was fascinated with, not only with the output of what she does, but with the way she works.
00:23:25.730 --> 00:23:32.022
Her process of making music is quite interesting and probably very characteristic of how contemporary artists work.
00:23:32.022 --> 00:23:48.357
So she has a wonderful band and they come from all over the world with very different musical influences, and she had some recordings of demos that they had made and they sounded very good performance-wise, but they sounded quite demo-ish to me in terms of production focus.
00:23:48.357 --> 00:23:57.240
But thankfully, as I'm a sample-based beatmaker, I thought you know what I really want to not be one of those producers who throws away the band and just works with the singer.
00:23:57.240 --> 00:24:11.107
I really wanted to keep the collective, the quartet in there and I chopped up and sampled every instrument, bar by bar, beat by beat, so that we could reinterpret their chops, their musicianship, in a sample-based form.
00:24:11.107 --> 00:24:54.820
And it wasn't because their playing was incredible, it was just a way looper, whatever you use it for, and because of her fantastic ear and vocal capability, she will layer whole choirs of vocals quite fantastic Middle Eastern, r&b, byzantine things and she creates these amazing structures that she then sings on top.
00:24:55.731 --> 00:25:16.463
So her process on one side is the front person of a live band and on another one is a loop-based vocal arranger and we tried to bring those things together in the studio and it was one of the inspiring parallel stories to putting a lot more of a sort of loop-based recorder functionality in songs of V2.
00:25:16.463 --> 00:25:39.958
And when we recorded Tia Ngo for the Artist series, she was making a song which is called Beholder, which is going to be the third single coming out soon, and she created it out of vocal loops and then she used the AI auto-accompaniment features to create versions of drums and bass and synth pads but then she brings to her other collaborators to put humanity and liveness into.
00:25:39.958 --> 00:26:22.285
So it's very, very central, uh the design of v2, to how this artist works and how we put the songs together in the studio with and the band, and then featured musicians, because you'll hear a lot of canoon and other middle eastern instruments and sax solos and things in there that's interesting.
00:26:22.326 --> 00:27:10.876
So basically using songs up as a sketch pad to flesh out an idea and then take it to a band to play and recreate it like that yeah, we sort of didn't realize this is what we were building, but in a way it it lends itself to the kind of ableton way of thinking where you're working with clips and you're like, well, I'll have that clip, that clip and that clip all play at once and then in the next segment I'll switch that one off and I'll have these two on and then in the next segment I'll have you know, ableton were very innovative in the way they reimagined the, the sort of the timeline of of a song structure, and we've kind of almost reworked that, but with the acoustic singer songwriter in mind, rather than it being about, you know, dropping in a beat and dropping in a, an fx sample or something like that.
00:27:10.957 --> 00:27:11.218
So it's.
00:27:11.218 --> 00:27:25.397
It's now the case where you can say, potentially, okay, this four bar chord progression, a, g, d, g, d, e, minor, whatever, I'm just going to record it once, I'm just going to let that loop forever.
00:27:25.397 --> 00:27:28.337
Then for the chorus maybe the chord progression changes.
00:27:28.337 --> 00:27:50.317
So I'll record that in so very quickly record four bars here, record two bars here, record eight bars here, and suddenly you've got like a little, you know, you got your, your sample blocks and you can construct a song quite quickly and then maybe you might go over in a sort of a more linear fashion and record a solo or a vocal ad-lib line or whatever.
00:27:50.317 --> 00:28:04.086
But it it kind of started fusing this idea of the sort of electro process that a lot of Ableton musician producers have been using but making that accessible to the sort of everyday guitarist, pianist, vocalist.
00:28:04.086 --> 00:28:14.561
That almost happened by accident, but at the same time it's a sort of a tried and tested way of making music with that, slightly different to the sort of linear Pro Tools logic kind of way of doing things.
00:28:14.970 --> 00:28:18.133
Yeah, sequencing, which is very apt for the show.
00:28:18.133 --> 00:28:23.876
Interestingly, with these past two artists, you got me thinking about this disconnect.
00:28:23.876 --> 00:28:37.027
Sometimes you can get really great live artists and that doesn't always translate to the commercial side and you know, some bands are amazing, live you just kind of never will find on Spotify and that kind of thing.
00:28:37.027 --> 00:28:42.755
But it seems in a way, songs that could help potentially bridge that gap to some extent.
00:28:42.755 --> 00:28:51.201
As you say, capture the vibe of that live experience, but use it to construct something that is production ready or you can take to a studio.
00:28:51.201 --> 00:28:54.550
Would that be a fair comparison to make or a fair statement?
00:28:54.751 --> 00:28:55.672
yeah, I think I.
00:28:55.672 --> 00:29:04.857
You know that is a real eternal challenge of making the live artists sound translate into the studio.
00:29:04.857 --> 00:29:09.141
Some artists very much say this is my live show, this is my production.
00:29:09.141 --> 00:29:11.843
They don't sound the same, but you're going to love both.
00:29:11.843 --> 00:29:18.207
Right and others sound the same on record as they do on stage and others sound great in one but not the other.
00:29:18.267 --> 00:29:33.682
If you're experimenting or reflecting is the word we would use in academia if you're reflecting on what you do, then you're improving or you're making active choices, and the only way you can reflect is by listening back right, so you create something and then look at it.
00:29:33.803 --> 00:29:34.768
It's like looking in the mirror.
00:29:34.768 --> 00:29:48.851
You create something, look at it, listen to it, change it, listen again, change it, and so the idea of Songzap is to take away that kind of oh, I'm in a studio, it's costing me x amount an hour, I've got to just do it this way and I can't stop to think about whether it's the right way or not.
00:29:48.851 --> 00:30:00.740
Do that at home and and let failure be part of your development, or let getting it wrong be something to celebrate because you've gone down a road, it didn't work, brilliant, let's go this way, sort of thing.
00:30:00.740 --> 00:30:01.442
I'm not sure.
00:30:01.442 --> 00:30:04.288
100 that uh, that it, that it.
00:30:04.288 --> 00:30:25.018
It guarantees an artist can bring their sort of stage persona to the studio but at the same time it definitely helps them to sort of just just grow, uh as, as a sort of a of a creative thinker, listener, it's just as important to learn how to listen back to how you play than to just learn to play sort of thing.
00:30:25.018 --> 00:30:30.182
We think that's definitely a huge developmental benefit of the app.
00:30:31.134 --> 00:30:34.130
And I think it goes for producers, not just for the musicians themselves.
00:30:34.130 --> 00:30:42.782
The great thing about talking about technology and creativity you end up finding things that the thing you build does that you hadn't never thought about.
00:30:42.782 --> 00:31:04.596
In that way we're in a recent event presenting uh songs up to a bunch of music technology other companies in the uk and uh, one of the members of the audience afterwards after our presentation told me the immediacy thing also goes for producers, not just for the artists, and I'm like, yeah, of course you know.
00:31:04.596 --> 00:31:37.877
I mean rob and I have been on both sides of the glass, so I guess we think of it maybe sometimes as a quite a glued process, but producers often drown the liveness or take away the liveness out of an artist's performance and creativity because we we nerd out and we get conditioned by click tracks and boxes and ways of working even compressors, you know, and producers like rick rubin when, when I read his creativity book or interviews make me always think try and delete all the things, you know.
00:31:37.877 --> 00:31:40.723
Be back in that Zen space of just listening to the track and going.
00:31:41.150 --> 00:31:42.253
Do I need to do anything?
00:31:42.253 --> 00:31:44.200
That's great production.
00:31:44.200 --> 00:31:45.413
Do I need to do something?
00:31:45.413 --> 00:31:45.796
Little.
00:31:45.796 --> 00:31:47.615
Do I need to tweak this?
00:31:47.615 --> 00:31:59.099
Do I need to just have a conversation with the artist or make them run around the block or exert themselves or connect to the feeling of when they first wrote the lyrics?
00:31:59.099 --> 00:32:09.019
A lot of those things are philosophical, and if you can make technology be quite transparent so it doesn't take somebody and goes well, you're playing this, you have an extra half bar there.
00:32:09.019 --> 00:32:11.891
We can't have that in our dough Like no.
00:32:11.891 --> 00:32:18.637
If the artist needs a half bar there and that's part of the dynamic in the story we need to find a way of being able to do that.
00:32:18.637 --> 00:32:39.863
So I think it's a great lesson for producers as well that maybe through the immediacy exercise or context that apps like songs up are also creating, let the artist go a little further, then listen to it and then allow for that liveness and that expression to to be the loudest it can possibly be Perfect.
00:32:39.983 --> 00:32:43.299
Yeah, I mean Bob Clearmountain did that with Born in the USA.
00:32:43.299 --> 00:32:50.657
So, like I said, the mentality I think seems to be half of a thing breaking out of the box and just kind of letting that creativity roll.
00:32:50.657 --> 00:32:52.717
Nice, well, we've gone through the tracks.
00:32:52.717 --> 00:32:54.308
Anything else you want to shout out?
00:32:54.308 --> 00:32:57.853
Where can people go to download Songzap and find out more?
00:32:58.073 --> 00:32:58.512
Yeah.
00:32:58.512 --> 00:33:06.220
So if you go to Songzap that's S-O-N-G-Z-A-P dot app there's everything there.
00:33:06.220 --> 00:33:28.598
There's a huge resource of tutorials, courses, blog posts, videos not just of us using Songzap, but the kind of the philosophy of recording and production from the perspective of a sort of a singer, songwriter, who maybe hasn't engaged in this kind of thing before or sees it as a as a real important step.
00:33:28.598 --> 00:33:32.211
But let's face it musicians make money out of music, out of recorded music.
00:33:32.211 --> 00:33:33.917
It's something you can't ignore it.
00:33:33.917 --> 00:33:42.883
If you, if you want to be a sustainable, self-sufficient musician, you have to engage in recording, because it's the only way you can reach a global audience these days.
00:33:43.329 --> 00:33:47.781
Equally, myself and Mike, you know, we love hearing what people are doing.
00:33:47.781 --> 00:33:54.730
We're very much trying to build not just a community, but myself and Mike are experienced teachers.
00:33:54.730 --> 00:34:00.061
We quite, you know, we like the idea of helping people to get to the next level.
00:34:00.061 --> 00:34:21.436
So we've been doing some webinars as well to help people start using the app, and we're there on social media and on email and we'll be doing more live things in the future as well to try and help people get from sort of where they're at, from voice memos, to a bit further down the creative process, in a way yeah, I'll just say, tom, thank you for having us in sequence.
00:34:21.516 --> 00:34:22.180
It's been great.
00:34:22.180 --> 00:34:24.369
Talking, technology and music.
00:34:24.369 --> 00:34:25.311
It's brilliant.
00:34:25.311 --> 00:34:27.617
Thank you for having us thank you very much.
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