Michael: All right, so I'm excited to be here today with David Packouz. David is the founder and CEO at Singular Sound. He's an American entrepreneur, inventor, and musician. He went from being a partner at AEY Inc, to founding and serving as CEO for Singular Sound. It's, he has some really interesting stories.

I'm looking forward to connection with him more. He went from securing a, a nearly $300 million US government contract to supply the Army with ammunition and weapons. And he went on to now create Singular Sound and to help create products for looping and guitar music production stations.

So, it sounds like an interesting transition, so I'm looking forward to hearing a little bit more about you and your story. And thank you for taking the time to be here today. My pleasure.

David: Thank you for having me.

Michael: Awesome. So to start with, man, like let's hear your story.

So how, how did how did he get started and kind of find your way to the point that you're at right now?

David: Right. Well, since this is a 45 minute podcast, I'll give the short version. There was for people who've seen it, there was a I'm most well known for the movie War Dogs, which was made by Todd Phillips.

He's also the same director who made Joker after War Dogs, and he made the Hangover movies before War Dogs. So that's kind of his thing. But he made the movie War Dogs, which was based on my, on my experience in the arms industry when I was in my early twenties. I was 22, 23 years old at the time.

And that was back in 2005. So, good 18 years ago, a little, little while ago. But yeah. I got into that business when I, while I was in college, I had a friend of mine who I'd grown up with and he had gotten into the business through his uncle. And he asked me to join him as his partner.

And this was in 2005, right? When I. After the United States invaded Iraq and the Bush administration strategy was to hire private contractors for everything. And one of the things they hired private contractors for was to supply the troops as well as the other private contractors. And that's where we came in.

We started bidding on these contracts mostly for weapons and ammunition. Some other stuff too, like fuel and, and clothing and bedsheets and food, but, But mostly weapons and ammunition. And we started winning these really big contracts. My friend was even younger than me. He was 18 and I was 22. And eventually we won this enormous contract, a $300 million contract to supply ammunition to the Afghan National Army, which it, it was to the US Army, but they were giving it to the Afghan army because we were trying to build up a A Democratic government over there.

And to make a very long story short the, the deal kind of went bad and we got in some legal trouble. And which is all portrayed in the movie, Miles Teller, plays me from a Whiplash fame. Your audience would know it better, would know him better from Whiplash. So I thought that was cool.

'cause you know, he's, He got famous for playing a drummer in a in a you know, one one of the few music movies that becomes popular. And that he ended up portraying me in a film. And after that film, I went on to create music equipment, specifically drum machines. So it's kind of a interesting situation there.

But yeah, so, I got in some legal trouble. We were supplying ammunition that had originally been from China. We hid the fact that it was Chinese. We repackaged it. It wasn't. You know, the way they, we thought it was illegal. It wasn't, I, I don't wanna go too much into detail 'cause we don't have that much time, but, but it, it was illegal enough that we thought that we might get in trouble.

So we committed illegal acts to cover up what we thought was illegal, which probably wasn't illegal in the first place. So it was kind of that situation and anyway, we got into some trouble and I ended up we both pled guilty. I got sentenced to seven months of house arrest, which is not so bad.

I managed to avoid prison. I feel very grateful and lucky for that. I. And while I was under house arrest is how I got into my current business of making music gear. So it's an interesting transition. What happened was while I was under house arrest, I had the ankle monitor the whole thing. Of course, I, I.

You know, would have my musician friends come visit me and we would jam. But the one guy who couldn't visit me, at least not with his instruments, was the drummer, right? Because he you know, he's not gonna load up his whole drum set into his van and bring it over my tiny little apartment and wake up my entire apartment building.

So I really miss playing with. With my drummer because it was you know, the drums, what gives the beat gives the energy to the music. You dance to the beat. So I bought a drum machine to play along to just as a, an accompaniment thing. And I. But every time I wanted to change the beat, like when I wanted to go from verse to chorus, I'd have to stop playing my guitar, press a button on the drum machine to change the beat and then go back to playing my guitar.

And that interrupted the whole flow of the music. And so I thought, man, I really wish I had a drum machine that was like inside a guitar pedal. That, you know, I could just control hands free with my foot and so I wouldn't have to stop playing. And so I looked around and the closest thing I found were these like some looper pedals that would have a drum track that you could turn on, but that was just a static drum track.

It was a backing track. You couldn't like, Change the beat on the fly when you go from verse to chorus, you couldn't throw in a drum fill or, or do like a pause on pause for a drum break or anything like that. It was just a static beat that would never change. And so I'm like, well, I mean, I might as well play a beat from my phone in that case.

So I. I looked it up online and I, I couldn't find anyone who would make, who made a, like a, a real controllable, hands-free drum machine. And I did a patent search and nobody had even patented the idea, which really shocked me because, you know, most, like 99% of patents don't even get made into products. So you would think that they'd patented something this simple.

I asked my musician friends if they'd seen anything like it. They hadn't seen anything like it, but they all wanted one too. So I thought if everyone wants one, nobody's making it. This is my opportunity to move beyond the arms business and and into something I really loved, which was music. I'd been playing guitar since I was 15 years old.

It's always been a huge, music has always been a huge part of my life. I'm a singer songwriter and and I never really wanted to be in the arms business in the first place. It was just, Something that kind of fell into my lap and I took the opportunity as a, as as it was. So I hired an engineering team that was a whole challenge in of itself to find good engineers who could actually build this at a good quality.

And I struck a very special deal with them where I would pay them most of the money after I did a crowdfunding campaign. 'cause I didn't have any money left at the time. And because I had spent all my money on lawyers to keep me outta prison and But they did a great job. They built and, and the, my first product was called The Beat Buddy.

Like, if anyone's watching this on video, you see this poster behind my head. That's the beat buddy right there. As Gizmoto says in big quotes on the top of the poster, it's a genius idea. They said it, not me. And and yeah, and it did extremely well. We launched it on a crowdfunding campaign because I didn't have.

The money to pay the engineers, let alone doing the manufacturing, and we raised $350,000 in a single month. It became a, the most successful. Funding campaign for any musical accessory at the time. Since then, I think we've been beat by someone, by someone else, but they were more focused on on turning non-musicians into musicians.

So I consider that a general market product rather than a musician's product. Pure musician's product. So, so yeah, the beat buddy, it, it. We won pretty much every major gear award in the industry. We got NAMS best in show Guitar Players Hall of Fame. So, it's done extremely well. And since then we've gone into our other line of products.

We went and people wanted to use the beat Buddy with a looper. So we created the Aero Loop studio, which is the world's first looper with a with a touch screen on it and it. Shows you the recordings, the sound waves as you're recording, just like in your daw. So you're able to see the loops as you make them and as you play them back.

And it's also got both sequential and, and parallel looping at the same time. So it's got six independent tracks that can be played in parallel as well as six song parts, as we call them. Groupings of six tracks that you can go in different sequences and so you could have a full. A full composition, not just like a single loop that you play over and over, and you could see it all on this visual touch screen.

So that made looping a lot easier and people wanted to do even more with our gear. So we created the midi Maestro, which is the easiest floor. A foot controller for a MIDI controller. So you can connect the MIDI maestro to the, to the Arrow Loop Studio, or to the Beat Buddy or to any other MIDI product out there, MIDI compatible product.

And you could program the MIDI maestro. It's got six buttons on it, each with its own screen, which the screen displays, what what the function of that button is. And you could ha you have a smartphone app that you can customize what. All the buttons do, and you each button can have multiple functions.

So it's a very powerful little device that you can control. And our last product, which is the cable, I've actually got one right here on my desk, I'll just hold it up to the camera, which is our our simplest product. It's literally just a plastic wheel that you wrap your audio cables in. And I thought of this product because I was doing a show myself I was doing this little coffee house gig and Because I have all this gear.

I'm a singer songwriter. I have guitar effects, I have vocal effects, I have my beat buddy, my ale studio. I've got a lot of gear and I gotta connect them all with lots of cables. So I had like eight different cables. I had to like wrap after the show, and it was just taking me forever. They'd get tangled, they'd get messy.

People would step on 'em, spill beer on 'em, you know? And so I thought my mom, who's loves gardening, she has this big wheel that she has her garden hose on. And so I saw her using that and I meant I need something way smaller, but something like that for audio cables. And so we created the caly We just thought it sounded like cable, but cute.

You know, it's like cable, but instead of the e at the end it's an I and and that's like a little $20 device. You just wrap your cable up, takes you three seconds to wind the cable all the way up, and it protects it in transport. Also great when you're at a show and you, you have like a, a 30 foot cable, but you only have like three feet between you and your gear, you could just pull out as much of.

It as you want. And the re the rest of it just goes on the floor nicely wound and protected by this plastic case. So it protects your cables, makes 'em a lot faster to to put away as well as as well as keeps your stage neat. I. Keeps the cables from tangling all over the place keeps you from tripping on like loose cables.

So, so that's our current lineup with Singular Sound. We're working on additional products to expand the product, but pretty much all of our products have come from my and our customers requests of, you know, going through our lives as musicians. What. Things annoy us. What things do we wish we could do?

And that's kind of like our ethos at Singular Sound is we, we build we build with specific issues in mind and specific frustrations with the current state of music gear in mind and try to make it better. Hmm.

Michael: Dang dude, that's awesome. What a, what a great lesson in entrepreneurship. You know, and, and, and I appreciate how how you shared your story and, you know, it takes a lot of bravery to be able to, to share, you know, like early on mis mistake that you made and be able to like kind of own up to it.

And it sounds like it was probably a big growing, growing experience.

David: Oh, extremely. I mean, I, it was I, at the time I thought that my life was over and and you know, I might go to. Prison for like 10 or 20 years. And I, my daughter had just been born, she was an infant at the time, and I would miss her watching her grow up.

It was a, an extremely Extremely terrible time in my life. And you know, I'm extremely grateful that I've managed to get out of that and go into something much more fulfilling and much more enjoyable and making gear that brings joy to people's lives. You know, it's just something that's much I'm much happier with.

Michael: Yeah. You know, it, it is quite the the, the pivot. Yeah. I wonder if you could find a way to combine, you know, like, weapons, like with like the beat maker. So it's like on the front line they're playing the beat.

David: Well, I mean now you're giving me ideas.

Yeah. I have had people in the military. Who've like messaged me and said that they've, like the military band, have used my equipment. So not exactly the same thing, but but you know, there are people who are, you know, our men in uniform are still using my gear, but they're just using it for more pleasant purposes these days.

Hmm. That's awesome. Which I'm very proud of. Yeah.

Michael: Yeah. Awesome, man. It's like great timing too. So I, I just have been getting back into music production mm-hmm. Myself and using Ableton Live and mm-hmm. I've got like a mm-hmm. Keyboard set up here and Nice in the market for like, A looper start doing loop stuff.

So here you gotta check out. Just comes along. Check. There it is. You know, any, you know, anything that you know.

David: Aeros Loop studio that's for your audience? A E R O S Aeros, kind of like the Aerosmith, but just Aeros Loop Studio. We, we just gave it that name just 'cause we thought it sounded cool.

That doesn't really mean anything. It was just we knew it was gonna be a, a bit pricey and so we were like, We need to make it sound cool. So yeah, it's definitely not the aeros is is in the $600 range. So it's a top level looper. But you have six parallel tracks and six song parts, which no other looper does.

So you have 36 tracks per song. It's got built-in wifi, so we're constantly updating it and adding new capabilities so you can download updates to the pedal just like you would on your phone. Another first in the industry. And it's got the visual feedback, which is really huge for looping. This was something, this was something that I thought of because, Before.

So the way we got into loop, into the, into building the aeros was after we came out with a beat buddy, because the beat buddy has midi capabilities, both midi in and out. People were sending the midi clock from the beat buddy to their loopers and so that the loop would cut. At on the beat, you know, so that the loop would remain the same length as the drumbeat.

'cause if they're different lengths, then they go outta sync as they cycle around. Mm-hmm. And so it's super important if you're gonna be looping with a drum machine that you have midi clock connection between the drum machine and your looper. So I bought a bunch of loopers that people were using at the time.

I bought the, the boss Looper, the RC 300. You know, I bought Tronix Infinity, a few other loopers that people that have MIDI capabilities, they're all high-end loopers. 'cause the cheap ones don't have midi. You know, you're not gonna get MIDI capability from your basic ditto looper, right? So, but when I was using these loopers, I realized, well, first of all, I'm not a Looper guy.

Right. You know, I, I, at least I wasn't back then. Even today, that's not my main musical focus. Right. And I realized that looping is fricking hard, man. You know, you have to, like, you're pretty much not only being a musician on the fly, you're being like a composer on the fly, a like an arranger. You know, you're, you're being a producer kind of everything on the fly, and, and you have to do it all exactly in time.

And you also have to keep track of like where in the loop you are. So if you have like, If you have like a, a chord progression that's just like four chords, let's just say, and it repeats itself a few times. Let's say you, you play it four times. You know four bars, right? If you want to do another loop to it, you need to know when that first loop.

Ends, right? Because you have to line it up. And so if you lose track of where you are in that loop, if you can't remember whether you're in the second measure or in the fourth measure, you're gonna make the wrong decision of when you start recording or end recording the other loop. And. With all these other loopers because they don't have any visual feedback.

You don't really know where you are. You just have to really keep it all in your head. And that's kind of difficult. That's like a real skill you need to develop. And people do it obviously, and there's amazing musicians out there who do amazing looping with, you know, the gear that, that they have. But I realized that for me, because I wasn't one of these amazing looping musicians, I was like, Man, it would be so much easier if I just had a screen, just like on a do where I could see where I am in the loop.

I don't have to guess, I don't have to memorize, I don't have to keep track in my head. I just look at the screen and I see there I am in the loop. Especially when you're getting to more than one loop, it starts to get really difficult. 'cause like some loops are four measures, some are two, some are eight.

And you know, to be able to keep track of all that in your head is extremely difficult, if not impossible, once you get past a certain number of loops. So we wanted to make. The most powerful looper that was possible, but as well as the easiest one to use. So, in order to do that, we realized we needed like a nice touch screen on the looper itself that would display everything in beautiful wave formats.

So you could see the tracks, you could, you have little. Like timing clocks that are going round. So you see the progress of the loop. Even if the loop is super long and beyond the, the length of the screen, you see like where you are. You could also time things to go either at the end of the measure or at the end of the loop or instantly, like you could time something to, you could time a loop to fade out.

Towards the end according to the end of the loop or to or to fade in according to the end of the measure, end of the loop, there's settings for all that. You could also reverse the track so that you when it comes to the end of the track, it starts playing backwards. People love doing that and looping.

So we have a, a whole system built into the Aeros Loop Studio that just takes, it's still a very small footprint pedal, right? Like for example There's another looper that came out a bit after us called the Headrush Looper board. And this thing is the only other looper out there that I know of that has a screen on it that displays the waveforms similar to us, but they're, they do it in, in my opinion, in a much worse way.

And this, their looper is enormous. I mean, it's like, it's probably about eight times the size of the Aeros. It's got like 12 buttons and, and it's. Not very intuitive in my opinion. But we were able to design a system that we could take something one eighth the size of that and still put in more functionality and more capabilities and make it easier to use just because of the way we design the system.

So, just for example, we have a we recently released a new software update a few months ago which people could just download through the wifi, you know, which is awesome. And you can now with the new software update, if you hold down the lower left button on the Aeros Loop Studio, you have a pop-up menu.

Of all these new capabilities, these options. And it also has this big scroll wheel that you can turn with your foot and you could select which option you want on the menu and then you could choose. And so we were able, and you could customize what this menu does. So you could have one option be fade in or fade out.

Another one be reverse another one. You know, be you know, sa save the song so you don't have to, you know, bend down and touch the touchscreen and do stuff like that, or start a new song. So we designed the entire unit to be as hands free as possible, because we know that musicians hate bending down on stage and fiddling with their gear.

Like between songs, it doesn't look very rock and roll. So, so we, we designed it so that. Almost anything you could do with the, with the Aeros Loop Studio, you could do it with just using your feet and with just like a few button taps and like, the scroll wheel. And so that, so you don't have to bend down and, and you can look cool and it'll be easy and you can save your back and you're still able to do all these things that.

You would need a much normally need a much bigger piece of equipment, which takes up a lot more space in your pedal board to do, or you need a computer and no, nothing else does what the Aeros does. So yeah, it's been a very long road. We've been working on it. I. For about six years refining it and constantly improving it.

We have a a user forum on our website, on Singular Sound.com that our customers post and they post requests, and if they find bugs, they post bugs. And with the Beat Buddy section, they post beats that they make and drum sets that they make that people can download for free and put on their own beat buddy.

So there's a whole. Community of people who based around our products who are very invested in our products and who are very passionate about our products, and they're constantly giving us feedback. And because all, all of our products are updateable including the Beat Buddy and the Aeros and the mid maestro, I.

Not the Beat Buddy Mini, that's the Beat Buddy. Mini is a, a half a, a cheaper version of the beat Buddy. It's a little bit less than half the cost. But it's not updateable. It's more meant for, for students. So instead of $370, which the Beat Buddy is, it's $150 beat Buddy Mini. It's a good starting you know, good thing for starting musicians.

So that's not updateable, but all, all our. All of our other products have Updateable firmware. So we pay attention to what our customers, our community on the forum requests. And then we try to build as much of that into the next iteration of the product. Now we've been doing this for years for the Beat Buddy.

We've been doing it for nine years. It's been on the market since 2014 and with the Aeros for about, it's been on the market for about three years. So it's been a, a. Process of constant iteration and and you know, and it was so important for the aeros because the one thing I learned as soon as we released the aeros and I thought we released it in, you know, a really good state, but we suddenly got a whole bunch of complaints because apparently there's so many different ways of looping. There's different styles of looping. And so for example, there's there's the classic, standard looping, which is what I, as a singer songwriter myself. I thought that's, most people do this, is you just have a basic loop. Maybe you have like one for a verse, one for a chorus. You have maybe another loop, you know, one, one loop for your rhythm, one for your lead, you know, and some basic song structure stuff, right?

And you want everything to the To you know, want everything quantized so you can, so you set the tempo in advance or you go to the, your drum machine, your beat buddies, everything's played to that. But turns out there's all these different types of looping, which I had known a bit about beforehand, but I.

Was forced to learn about in detail once we released the aeros because so there's the, the people who like doing soundscape looping where they don't have anything quantized to any click or anything. They like everything to be ethereal and, and nothing, and nothing to be locked to itself. So things are kind of like coming in and out and they would need things to be fading.

And so one really cool thing that, that I learned that I had no idea about before we released the Aeros is, With a soundscape artist. When they close that loop usually almost every looper, what happens is when you press the button on the loop or you go from recording to playback, right? Now what the soundscape artists wanted, I.

They wanted to go from recording to, to overdub. So it'll close the loop, but it continues recording and starts overdubbing the remaining, you know, immediately instead of going into pure playback. And the reason they wanted that was because when they're doing soundscaping, they're using all these cool effects that kind of like ring out and reverberate and have all this cool atmospheric feel to it.

And if you cut the loop right there, all those effects get cut and it sounds terrible. They wanted those effects to keep on reverberating into the beginning of the loop, and so we had to create a setting that instead of going from record play overdub it, or r p o as we call it, it would go from record.

Overdub play, so, or r o p. And so we created that setting and that, that's just one of many, many examples of all these different styles of looping that we, that we were informed of once we came out with the Aeros. I, you know, very passionate community on our forum insisted that we build all these other features so that they could use it.

And luckily because it's updateable with the, with the wifi and because we've got this nice, beautiful touchscreen on it, which we can program to do whatever we want, it's not like set in stone like other loopers with printed labels on it. And, you know, you can't really change anything. You have to come out with a new product.

And, you know, that's what the, the. Model of the industry has been up until now is that if you want something new, you have to buy new gear. And we realized that's, you know, this is the modern era, you could update stuff, right? And so we just paid attention to what our customers, our community was requesting from us, and we just build it into the next update.

And I think that that's been a big secret to our success. And we've gotten a lot of You know, a very passionate community based around our products, because we listen to them and we build things based on what they want and, and need. Hmm.

Michael: Super smart. Yeah, thank you. You know, I mean, like, it, the whole, your whole story and the products you build are such a great lesson in, you know, entrepreneurship and you first starting with yourself and thinking, man, like there's this thing I'm doing and there's this, this challenge, or there's this struggle of frustration and I wish there was a solution to it, but unlike.

You know what the common thing is is just you, well, dang, like that's frustrating, but it is what it is. Yeah, yeah. You actually had the, you know, the proactiveness to actually say, you know what, like maybe I can actually, you know, change this. I can, maybe I can improve this and then I can help other people who are experiencing the same thing.

Yeah. So I think there's a lot of lessons there to take, you know, for anyone listening this right now, you Yeah. In terms of, yeah, go ahead.

David: No, I was, I was gonna say that, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. I was gonna say that the interesting thing about it is that when I came out with the beat buddy, I've had at least 10 or 15 people like email me.

Or, or when I went to the NAMM show, which is, you know, the, for those who don't know, one of the biggest I think the biggest musical gear trade shows in the world in Anaheim, California every year I had people come up to me in person. They said This happened at least 10 or 15 times, I'm not exaggerating.

And they would say, you know, Beat Buddy. It's great. I had that exact idea like 10 years before. I just never did anything about it, you know? It was just such a great, I even had one of the people, one of the product managers from Boss, with the biggest pedal company in the world, right? Come up to me and say, you know, I've been trying to get.

Corporate to build something like this for years, but they wouldn't listen to me. They had other priorities. So congratulations. You actually made it happen. And I mean, he was, he was happy. Obviously he was happy for me, but he, he, but it's amazing that People think that, that, oh, all the best ideas have been done.

I hear that all the time. Like there's no new ideas that, but it's, that is so not true. You just think that because you haven't had a new idea or, or people think, oh, this idea is so obvious if. Because it's so obvious someone must have done it. And I thought that about the beat buddy. I, I was sure someone had done it.

And to be honest, I was completely shocked that nobody had done it because I thought it was an obvious idea too. And that's, you know, they say the secret to having good ideas. Is have a lot of ideas and if you have enough ideas, occasionally some of them will be good and some of the good ones nobody had done before.

And then you have an opportunity to actually do it yourself and, and of course doing it yourself. That's the hardest part. It's No matter how easy an idea seems, it's always much harder than you think. The best example for me was I thought when building the cab Lee, I was like, this is the simplest idea in the world, right?

This is a literally a plastic wheel that you wrap your cable in, right? I'm like, this is gonna take me a few months. I'll knock it out and that'll be the end of it. And instead of a few months, it literally took me a year and a half. To get it to out the door. And it was just a lot things I just didn't know, you know, like when you're building, I'd never made any product out of plastic before and I didn't realize that when you know, there's always some warping and plastic and some issues with the molds and then it doesn't fit right, and then you have to fix it and, and you have to, you know, change the design and so it doesn't warp as much.

And, and there's just so many things that can go wrong that you just don't know. Are gonna go wrong and you just kind of have to roll with it and and adjust your expectations and just keep on moving ahead and, and don't give up, right? As long as you think there's still a good option, a good possibility of Of success.

You just, you can't give up. Of course, knowing when the right time is to give up, that's also another skill, right? Because if you are putting way too much of your time and resources into something that doesn't look like it has any ending before you could actually You know, before you run out of the, that time or resources, it's sometimes better to cut your losses and move to something that's easier to accomplish.

So that in of itself is, is a real balancing act and knowing when to keep on going after something and when to cut your losses is. I don't think there's any real solid rule of thumb there. It's just something that you have to kind of decide for yourself and think of, you know, how much, how much more work and time and money am I willing to put into this thing?

And what's the chances of success? And you kind of weigh that until and make your own decision so that that's, that's a tough thing because there's no. There's no formula for it. But but yeah, but just keep plugging away at, at an idea you believe in, I would say is the most basic, basic thing you can do to accomplish anything really.

Michael: Yeah, that, that makes a ton of sense. And yeah, there's a few things that, that I get out of your story. Like, you know, one is, you know, starting with any problem, you know, any issue or any struggle like that, that's kind of like where the opportunity exists, right? Absolute, absolutely. Looking at what, what are our biggest problems?

And if we're coming up against a problem and we're trying to solve it, and we're like, man, like this is a big problem. I can't find a solution, no one else is. Solving it. Exactly. And that could be an opportunity to be like, maybe I can help solve this, and maybe I'm not the only one with this problem.

Exactly. And then the other thing that I think is brilliant about what you've created is, is the iteration and the ability to, to, to take mm-hmm. You know, customer feedback and to co-create new ideas based on. You know, the, the advantage that you've created with the ability to quickly iterate mm-hmm.

With the screens. Yeah. You know, that's, that's something that, you know, if you're able to make changes 50 times faster and cheaper than everyone else because they don't have the hardware built into it, but you have the ability to kind of, you know, update it with software and firmware updates. Mm-hmm. I can see how that, you know, leads to this iteration cycle, feedback cycle that, you know, makes it better and better and better, faster and faster.

And for anyone that's listening or watching this right now you know, with your music careers, you, you might not necessarily think of yourself as like a entrepreneur, business owner, and oh, hopefully you do by now. If you're like listening to this podcast, we've had enough conversations. You understand like, you know, that really is a music business and you are an entrepreneur and you're serving your fans.

But this idea of like co-creation and this idea of, of bringing in feedback and actually, you know, doing things together, having a request board and having that be a main, you know, factor in terms of what you create. Super

David: valuable. Yeah. Because you don't, I think it, it, it needs to come from a place of being humble.

You know, a lot of people think that I'm the brilliant artist. I'm the brilliant inventor, you know, entrepreneur I'll, I know what needs to be done, right? But at the end of the day your, your success or failure depends on other people, right? How they react to your work and You need to, you need to approach things with an open mind and, and a sense of humbleness that you don't know everything and, and you're gonna sometimes get proven very wrong, sometimes embarrassingly wrong, and you just have to roll with it and, and just do better because that's how you grow and that's how you become better.

And, and the people who, who are, who stubbornly refuse to take in any outside feedback or requests Even if they're brilliant they, their internal reality is gonna come into a clash with the external reality of what everyone else wants. And and occasionally that artist, that creator, is super brilliant enough that it works.

Right? Like, Steve Jobs is very famous for not doing any focus groups, right? He was like, oh, the customers don't know what they want. I tell them what they want. Right? He's, he's very famous for that. And he was right. For certain things. You know, he was right you know, with the iPhone and, and things like that.

But he was also wrong. I mean, there's some there's some products that Apple failed at and nobody remembers what they are because they failed at.

Michael: It's really interesting finding that balance. You know, the classic I think it was Henry Ford who says, you know, if I asked people what they wanted, then they would've asked for faster horses.

Yeah,

David: that's a great line. And, but then he took it too far and he said, you could have any color of your model T as long as it's black. And so he refused. He refused to do it because he wanted to do, he wanted to get. To buy paint in bulk and it's much cheaper to buy it if it's all one color. And so he wants to save money, so he refused to do any other colors.

And then General Motors came along and said, Hey, you guys can have five different colors. You want a red car, you want a white car? You don't just have to have a boring black car. And they started eating his lunch and a few years later, he had to change his mind and said, you know what? We're gonna have to offer people colors because.

The market is spoken. So, yeah, there's definitely, there's always that balance. Henry Ford is such a great example. You know, he he, he had his brilliant innovation and, and showed people what was possible that people could not have imagined. But then he kind of went too deep into it and he thought he knew everything and he was proven wrong.

And if he hadn't, Been so full of himself. Right. You know, if he had been a little bit more open-minded to what the customers wanted general Motors wouldn't have grabbed such a huge share of the market. He would've, he would've made, he would've maintained Ford's dominance. So it's, that's a, that's a perfect example of this dichotomy.

This this interplay. Yeah.

Michael: Super interesting. Yeah. So, you know, this is kind of like a, a personal question for me, or maybe it's a bit of a selfish question since I'm interested in like, looping and, and figuring out my, my own station now. But you mentioned that, you know, you have like a product suite now and different products that are solving different, you know, different problems and different needs.

Correct. So I'm, I'm curious what you'd recommend for someone who, so I have a, an Ableton push three mm-hmm. That I'm gonna start playing around with for mm-hmm. Like, some of the sequencing and, and the integration with Ableton Live. Mm-hmm. And what I'm missing right now is like, you know, I have a keyboard set up, but I don't have like a.

Foot a foot station for like looping, and if I'm playing key piano, I'm not gonna be able to like click loop at the same time. Sure. So I'm, I'm kind of curious how your products you know, integrate with, with mm-hmm. Different workflows and what you'd recommend for someone who has, you know, a few pieces but are looking to add more to their setup.

David: Right. So for people who are using Ableton in general obviously you have no problem having a laptop in your shows, right? That's that some, some people, You know, their, they, their entire thing is based on the laptop. And other people hate laptops with a passion because they're nervous about taking 'em to live shows.

They think they're gonna get knocked off the table and broken. And, and I understand that. And and so we, we ha our products address both of those situations for people who are worried about the laptop and don't like having a laptop. They, you know, don't want to be seen as, you know, you know, fiddling with their laptop during a show, which is.

You know, good portion of musicians then I would recommend the Aero Loop Studio because that's the most robust, most flexible looping solution that you have in a non-top form, in a pedal form. Right now, the Aeros can't do everything that Ableton can. I would never claim that it could. I mean, you're talking about a $2,000 laptop versus a $600 pedal.

So there's definitely some hardware limitations. And of course, in the pedal we had to put money into making it robust and strong and, and having all the physical gear. Rather, Ableton is just a software program that you pay for that goes on top of the hardware that you paid way more, much, way more money for than the than the looper than the aeros you'd be paying for.

Right? So you can't do everything with the Aeros that you could do with Ableton. But you could do a lot. You could probably do most of what people want to do from a looping perspective with just the Aeros. So a lot of people have actually told us and posted on our form that they've been replacing Ableton in their live shows with the Aeros.

That may not be a good solution for everybody, and I know that I. You know, once you have a certain workflow, you kind of get stuck in that workflow. Sometimes, you know, you're used to that and, and, and you know, nothing wrong with that. You should do what works for you. So if you're looking to use Ableton, but have some hands free control, I would recommend the Midi maestro.

The midi maestro is our. Our floor midi foot controller, and it's, as I mentioned before, it's got six buttons on it, each with its own screen and and you could program it with a smartphone app that connects with Bluetooth to, to the midi maestro. What each of those buttons do. And you could also program it to have like different banks, so to speak.

We call them pages, right? So you could change the functions of the buttons depending on what what state you're in, in the, in the song. So you can have like one button that takes you to to this category of effects, right? That you, and then all the buttons on the, on the unit change to those effects.

And then you could exit out by pressing another button. And so you have. And from just a six button floor device, you have many, many more options than a traditional midi foot controller would have. Traditional midi foot controllers, you have to put like a piece of tape on top of every button and scrawl with a sharpie of what that button does.

And that's pretty much all it can do until you. Go through the very big hassle process of reprogramming it, which traditional mifa controllers, you practically had to have a computer science degree to, to program some of these things. They're, they're, they were built by computer programmers, not by musicians.

So we made customizing the midi maestro as easy as possible. That's why we made it with a smartphone app. It's all just point and click, so to speak. You can download ready made modes directly onto your midi maestro of various gear. So if you don't wanna look into the manual and look up the exact midi command of what does, what, you can have like a, like a ready ready to go mode that you just download directly into it all set up.

And of course, you could customize it all. So that would, I would say for someone like you who. Has their gear set up and just wants some hands-free control so you don't have to use your hands and fiddle with your laptop or, or other stuff. I would say the midi maestro is the product for you. You can set it up however you want, you, the functions that are important to you.

You could program it into it and and yeah, and that, that's, and it's a relatively painless process. Hmm.

Michael: Awesome. Yeah, that's pretty much a instant, instant buy for me. Awesome. In the market for it. That sounds perfect. Exactly what I'm looking for. Awesome.

David: Great. Awesome. Kaching. Well, hey,

Michael: that's why it came on the

David: podcast.

I knew it. Yeah, that's right. I sold this one unit, one at a time. Yeah. Hey, every, every dollar counts.

Michael: Well, hey, hey man, this, this has been awesome connecting with you and hearing your story. And again, I, I really appreciate just, you know, the lessons, lessons and growth and mm-hmm. And entrepreneurship and also, you know, the willingness to, you know, be able to learn from.

Learn from, you know, mistakes and lessons in the past, I think is a valuable absolutely thing. And, and being willing to like own up to mistakes and learning from them, I think is a great character trait. So, yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much for I appreciate that. Yeah, man. Absolutely. And thank you for, you know, for taking, you know, the lessons that you've had and then applying them in this way, that's, Serving so many people and, and so many musicians, everything you just talked about.

I, I'm, I'm sure there's a lot of people who are listening to watch this right now who are like, this was made for me. Like, this is something that I, you know, I've been struggled with. This is so great. So, yeah. So thanks again. Awesome. And for anyone who's listening to this right now who is interested in learning more or taken a deeper dive into any of the products that you'd mentioned, what's the best place for 'em to go to learn more?

David: Singular Sound.com. Yeah, singular. S i n g, like sing, u l a r and sound.com. And that's our, that's our website. Of course, if you can look up Beat Buddy, like your buddy that plays the beat there's many videos on YouTube about that, or aero, like the first part of Aerosmith Aero Loop Studio. There's many YouTube videos on that if you just want to go to YouTube.

But our, but we do prefer that if you're gonna buy the equipment that you buy it. On our website because we make more money that way. And we also get direct contact with the customers and we, we can you know, it just gives us a lot more opportunities to interface with our customers when they buy directly from us.

So Singular Sound.com. And I'll, I'll say just for your show right now, for the ones who stay to the end as a reward, if you use the coupon code, keep rocking. No g at the end. Keep rocking. You'll get 10% off on our website, Singular Sound.com. So save a little bit of money. Oh yeah.

Michael: Very cool. Thanks.

Thanks for doing that. Yeah, my pleasure. Yeah, and like always, we'll put all the links in the show notes for, for easy access. Perfect. And yeah, that's, that's where I'm gonna be going right, right after this, to, to go pick up one of the the foot pedal. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome.

David: Thanks man. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. Yeah.