Adam Hasslert:
I do think there's opportunities within AI to help you learn, and be like a producer that you're working with. Can you make this beat a bit more punchy, or could we elaborate on chords, what could be a really good chord progression for this verse or something like that?

Michael Walker:
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All right. So I'm excited to be here today with Adam Hasslert. So Adam is a product focused entrepreneur and CEO of Soundation, which is an online tool for making, recording, editing music, beats and audio from your browser. In addition to helping create that software and being the CEO, he also is a DJ. He's been a member of several bands, as well as founding and running several successful software companies over the years. And Soundation is on a mission to facilitate musical creativity around the world. And we were just talking about this a little bit backstage, but just how there's Google Docs for collaborative file generation.
These online cloud collaborative tools have been changing the scope of what we can create together, and it just seems like we're behind the curve when it comes to DAWs, or at least we were until we have some smart people like Adam who are helping to create collaborative tools to be able to, on the internet, take advantage of the ability to collaborate in real-time. So Adam, this is kind of a long-winded intro, but thanks so much for taking the time to be here today.

Adam Hasslert:
Of course. Of course. This is what I love to talk about. It's what we're focusing on every day here at Soundation.

Michael Walker:
Cool. So maybe we can start off just by hearing a little bit about your story and just how you got started with Soundation, and where it was born out of?

Adam Hasslert:
It's actually a quite old company. It was founded in 1999, but back then, they were recording samples and selling sample packs, and they were doing it quite well. I think a lot of the sounds was in GarageBand when that came out, and also I think some of the samples have been on some Beyonce song and stuff, but it didn't really figure out the business model. They didn't come up with the Splice subscription model and the people funding the company finally sort of, okay, either you come up with a new business plan or a way to make this profitable, or we'll have to find another way.
And as you said, I was a DJ in my teens, and then I've played in a bunch of rock bands, and then I've built a few companies, and then a friend of mine who knows the people financing this said, "Hey, wouldn't this fit you?" And I was like, "Yeah." I have music, but then also building companies, which is what I love to do. So I started with the company without any team, so I built a team from scratch. And back then, it was actually DAW built in Flash, which it's not used anymore. Maybe you know Flash.

Michael Walker:
I remember the old school games that you'd play on the website that were Flash-generated.

Adam Hasslert:
Yeah. So we've rebuilt the entire studio, a lot with help from Google actually. Google have teams working with how do you build really good and performant web apps. So we were one of the first companies to try out web assembly threads, which is how can you use more of your CPU in the web app? And I think that's also what's been holding this space back a bit. The DOS required quite a lot of CPU, and before, web app could only use one core in your CPU, but now with web assembly threads, you can use up to six cores, so you can do much more, add a lot of more effects and use much more channels and stuff like that. So I think that's why it's coming now, but also if you look at VSTs, I think they were built in the '90s, and that hasn't really changed much since then, and it's built for desktop apps and not for the web. So I think it's coming, and we are at the forefront of this, which is quite cool.

Michael Walker:
It's super cool. So maybe you could share a little bit about, if someone who's listening to this is completely new to Soundation and the tool and the mission behind it, and the vision, could you share a little bit about what exactly is Soundation, and what sets it apart from a traditional DAW on your computer?

Adam Hasslert:
Yeah. So Soundation, you don't have to download anything. You just log in to our website, a bit like using Gmail or Google Docs. I often compare it to Figma today. Maybe you've heard of that, a design tool. So you just log in, and there you can invite someone and you can collaborate in real-time. You'll see the cursors moving around. So there's some professionals, about 10% of our users actually have a desktop DAW on the side, so they record audio, and they use their VST plugins on their desktop DAW, and then they drag it into our DAW to work in real-time and become creative together. Normally when people collaborate with desktop DAWs, they have to bounce all the stems in a zip file via Dropbox, and it takes forever, and you cannot really become creative together. So about 10% use it for that. 80% use our tool to learn how to produce music, so that's our biggest target group certainly.

Michael Walker:
Cool. Man, it's so interesting. And maybe you could dive a little bit into just the vision or the pros and cons of having a collaborative tool and maybe that movement. From my perspective, it seems like the collaborative tools is really the future for apps, being able to co-create in real-time, kind of like how we're here right now recording this on Zoom live, but if we were... It used to be that you needed to be in the same room to record an interview, but now you're in Sweden, I'm here in Orlando, and we're recording this in real-time together live. It's insane. But imagine if the way that this was set up was that I had to record a video and say, hey, nice to meet you, and then send it to you, you had to watch it, and then record your own video and send it back and go back and forth.
It doesn't have that real-time collaborative effect. So it sounds like what you're saying is, right now we're on the verge of having that real-time... In fact, that's... So maybe give me a quick scope of the current status of... You mentioned that what some professionals will do is record in a DAW with maybe some more souped up resources on their computer, and then they'll be able to drag it and then collaborate in real-time from there, but it would be interesting to hear the current status of that real-time collaboration, and maybe a timeline of when do you think that everything's going to move entirely to a real-time collaborative model?

Adam Hasslert:
Well, we do have some challenges, and I think the biggest challenge is the plug-ins. There's millions plug-ins out there, and the first question I get from someone who already produces music is, okay, can I get my plug-ins in? And I say, sorry, we can't. We have started working with Reason Studios. Maybe you know them. They have also the DAW Reason, but they're really great at building plugins. So we've integrated one of their wavetable synthesizer called Europa, which is quite a heavy plugin. And so we've integrated that into our studio, and now anyone can try it out without even having to create an account, and then if they like it, they buy it. Also, I think the plugin business could really profit from this. I think the biggest growth opportunity for plugin businesses is to webify their plugins. If you want to share a preset with your friend today, that's more or less impossible.
So I think that's sort of the biggest challenge. We also have a challenge when recording audio, the latency, because we don't have full control of how much latency you will get in the web browser. So currently our focus is more on sample-based music production. So I'm not sure when it's going to fully replace the desktop DAWs. I think there's going to be some time where you have it in parallel, and you will find a new user just getting started can do just fine with ours, and especially if you're not recording that much audio, or you maybe use another app to actually record it, and then you can come a really long way with our app.
But I definitely think that the desktop DAWs are looking at this too. And I've talked to them, and most of them think that of course we have to look at the web, and it's coming, the winter is coming. You have to look at it. So it's hard to say it's going to be five years, then everyone will have both the desktop DAW and the web DAW, and within 10 years, maybe you won't use a desktop DAW anymore, because Google and Mozilla and these companies are also improving the browsers a lot, so they will crack the latency issues with recording audio, and also the performance regarding raw memory and such things.

Michael Walker:
Super interesting. I guess it's a similar issue of trying to figure out... If we were on Zoom right now, or if we were trying to play or write a song together, it'd be really cool if we were able to play in real-time and be able to play in sync. And I guess when we're at a point where we can do that, then we'll be at a point where we can also record that in real-time and sync over the internet.

Adam Hasslert:
With that aspect, if you want to record audio at the same time in sync, we have some physics in the world that we can't change, the time it takes to send a signal across the Atlantic. There is actually a company here in Stockholm called Elk Audio, who has some hardware so you can actually record audio in sync. I don't remember how many miles it is, but it's over country borders, which is really cool. But that requires hardware. But anyway, I think our users, it's more like they're producing together. So the latency that you get doesn't affect you that much, because you don't know that it is latency. You are moving one region over there, and I see it maybe a half a second later, but I don't know when you moved it. So for us, the latency isn't really an issue.

Michael Walker:
That makes sense. Maybe it's similar to how we're having a conversation right now, and technically there's probably a short delay between what we're actually saying and what we're hearing, but for all intents and purposes, the experience of what we're having is almost real-time.

Adam Hasslert:
Yeah, exactly.

Michael Walker:
Cool. So based on what you shared, it sounds like the primary user-base for the software are people that are actually learning how to become a better producer, how to create music. And gosh, samples and the evolution of sample-based music creation has evolved so much and it's become so important that, it makes sense that having a tool like Soundation, even granted that there's challenges and there's a timeline towards potentially getting to a point where it can be totally real-time in sync, recording audio at the same time, but even without that, because of the evolutions with sample-based production, you can do so much online.
So maybe you could share a little bit about, now that you have... I mean, I know you've worked with a ton of musicians. You've really helped coach and help a lot of artists be able to use Soundation. What are some of the most common challenges or things that you see artists struggling with when they first come to Soundation? What kind of brings them to the tool?

Adam Hasslert:
Well, challenges for someone who hasn't produced music at all, we can actually record each session. And so on Fridays, we normally take some time to look at new users, how they use the actual tool. And some users, they just click on everything, and nothing works. So we've build get started guides on, do you want to record audio, do you want to play a synthesizer, or do you want to do that? So that's one pro of being a web app, that we can measure everything and see how they're actually using it, our product. I think we're probably one of the more advanced audio web DAWs, so we of course have that issue that they don't understand how to use it. I think it's way, way easier than if you started with one of the desktop DAWs.
But yeah, I think that's often the learning curve on how to use it and how to become proficient in it. And then we have our hardcore users, and they're asking for more advanced features, so that's what we're focused on building. That's also a great thing. We have a community of users where we can get feedback instantly, and we do surveys each month and get about 10,000 answers. So we can ask them, do you think we should build this or that, or how do you feel the new feature is working, or what do you have issues with?

Michael Walker:
Very cool. So it sounds like what you're saying is that one of the biggest challenges when artists are first getting started, and it's not just related to Soundation, but just in general with production, is that they don't know the technical aspect of, how do I use this tool? Especially with a desktop DAW, there's so many settings, there's so many tools and things that can feel easy to get lost. And that's an interesting angle, and one strength that it sounds like you really have is, because of the web-based nature of the software, and because of the interactive collaborative nature of the service that you've created, you actually have been able to create a really great getting started experience and create education and help teach them how to get started from scratch and how to create high quality music in using the tool.
Very cool. So if we were going to zoom out a bit and look at, let's say that someone's listening to this or watching this right now, and they are a musician who maybe has dabbled a bit in DAW stuff, they've either used GarageBand, or they've used Logic, or they have, and they're not super proficient, but they'd really like to hone in this skill of being able to create higher quality music on their own, and they're just discovering Soundation, what do you see as the three to five major steps or a path that they might want to consider to become more successful as a producer?

Adam Hasslert:
Well, it kind depends also about what kind of music they want to make. We have a samples library, and when someone starts making music, they often just use samples. And that's the easiest way to get started, but then you start learning how does virtual instruments work, and how do you do automation, and how do you get these synthesizers to actually do what you want, so we also create video tutorials, and not just around our studio, also about how do you create colorful chords, or we've done a series on recreations.
So we took Bad Guy by Billy Eilish, and recreated that in our studio, and a video explaining how it's built and why, but then also we have a template. So you can go to our websites, and you can look at Bad Guy or the Stranger Things theme song, and you can open it up and actually get the project loaded in your browser. You don't even have to create an account to do that. So we're looking a lot at how do we reduce friction. Last year, we focused a lot on zero friction access, as we call it. They don't have to sign up, and they can listen to your song and give you feedback. We're doing something, maybe not regarding this question, but in the same theme, we're now building embed. So you can embed our studio to any website. And since it's a Web DAW, we can customize how the DAW works for each and every website. So now actually any website can get their own custom DAW with their content that they want to show on their website.
So we're working with a small Irish company who is really good at producing sample packs. They're working with Native Instruments and a lot of companies, and they are selling sample packs on their site, and now we've integrated our studio into their site, and all they have to do is add a snippet of code, just like when you add a YouTube video, but now you're actually getting a full web DAW into your site, which is quite amazing, I would say.

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That's super cool. Yeah. As you're sharing that, a few ideas are popping up around... For anyone who's listening to this right now as a musician, imagine if you had a page on your website that embedded this tool even for your fans or for other people, and you say, here's the project templates for all my songs. Have fun. Go ahead and remix this, and here's how I create your own spin on it.

Adam Hasslert:
Yeah. And we can also disable export. So the songs that they remix for you, they're actually sent to you instead of the actual user, so you can control the rights and so on. So it's quite...

Michael Walker:
It's a cool idea. It seems like one of the smartest things, especially around the electronic world, has been around how many remixes they do, having different DJs remix songs, create different versions of it, and there's definitely something about you're remixing something that already exists and creating your own spin on it, creating something new that kind of has this viral network nature to it. And so you creating this platform for music artists to be able to create templates, one click templates to be able to have people generate their own unique twist or spin on stuff, really interesting. Same thing with TikTok.
I know that one of the trends is, what are they called? Duos, where basically the artist might have a video of them singing one of their songs, and they might have to be singing the harmonies, and then TikTok will do a remix of it, and then you'll sing the lead vocal on it, and you'll basically have this side by side video of you harmonizing with the artist. And so it's a really cool direction, enabling and empowering people to be able to share these templates and resources. And like you mentioned around the plug-ins as well, just being able to in one click, be able to share these settings could save so much time and energy.

Adam Hasslert:
Yeah. Yeah. No, it's really cumbersome. Just moving my preset from one laptop to another, it's so much hassle that I don't do it. So I think that's... And people are used to the workflow that they have, and they're fine with it, because they don't know how it could be if it was actually webified. So I think that will also get many more people to actually start producing music. I've had some friends, they started with one of the top DAWs, and they tried to learn it, and they gave up, and then six months later, they tried again, and on the third time, that's when they actually got hooked sort of, because it's so much to learn. It's like going into a cockpit and like, oh, which knob should I use first? And I think we can improve on that area a lot too. I think we're easier to learn than the more professional DAWs.

Michael Walker:
Very cool. Yeah, makes sense. The one thing you mentioned is around creating a frictionless experience, just making it a streamlined as possible. So I geek out about technology and about stuff like this, so hopefully I'm not taken to sound like too much of a side tangential rabbit hole, but one thing that I'm personally just blown away by right now, and I think it's going to be a crazy year for AI, and in particular the new ChatGPT tool that's just come out is insane, and prompt-based generation of creative work, in particular DALL-E with image generation is wild. We've been using it a lot for creating cover art for artists. And ChatGPT now is just like, it can write emails and text messages, write marketing ads. It's insane. And I'm curious, it seems like one [inaudible 00:25:13] of having this sort of collaborative web-based approach is that maybe you could feed it into a prompt-based AI engine as well, and I'm wondering if that's something that you've considered or you might be exploring in the future as sort of like, what if... To make it even more frictionless when someone first logs into it.
It's like, what do you want to create? And there's a text bar line, and they just type in, I want to create... You're able to give it a prompt, and then it generates the session for you, and it generates maybe some of the instrumentation, and even some of the beats or things like that, but you can remix it and you can tweak it, you can make it your own, but it kind of gives you the starting point. I'd be curious if you think that's possible, or if you think that's something that the tool might be able to incorporate eventually, and maybe even referencing, you could say, here's three of my favorite artists or three of my influences, and then it might be able to pull training data from those songs as well?

Adam Hasslert:
Yeah, we're looking at AI of course. And if you look at LANDR, and there's a few others using AI to help you with mastering. So there's already a bit of AI, but I think also more stuff will happen. Although our customers, they want to learn or they want to create music. It's not like they want to buy a self-playing piano. They want to buy a piano to actually learn. But I do think there's opportunities within AI to help you learn, and be like a producer that you're working with. Can you make this beat a bit more punchy, or could we elaborate on chords, what could be a really good chord progression for this verse or something like that? So we want to follow what our customers want, and they want to learn how to create music.
Then there's other areas within music, like if someone wants to buy music for their YouTube commercial or an ad where, I think there AI will play a big part, and I think that could change that market quite a lot. But the creator software market, I think it will be a part of it, but there's also how do you teach an AI. ChatGPT, they're working on all the internet, and you look at images, it's quite easy to scrape the internet for images, whereas within music and samples, all of that is locked in behind paywalls. And there's of course free sounds and stuff like that, but to really make it work really well, you have to have billions of data points to actually teach an AI to do a proper job.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. It's interesting. My first thought is that they might be able to scrape it in a similar way to the way that they scraped images and just the internet from a standpoint of YouTube videos or something, and then obviously there's a bit of a gray area of should you be able to train this AI with this. And even with the way that ChatGPT and DALL-E is set up, there's a question mark there. It's like, should they be able to do that? But it's an interesting point too. I think that... I personally feel this, and I've heard this feedback from quite a few creators, and it's just this this underlying piece of fear around being replaced maybe from AI, or this resistance to, well, computers can't do what I do, or they can't replace what I'm doing. They're creative, but there's a human element to it. There's something that can't be replaced. And especially as artists, our artwork is so personal to us, and it's supposed to be an expression of who we are, it feels almost like it's cheating to use something else to come up with the artwork, I think, but-

Adam Hasslert:
I think it's also depending on what is the goal here. Because I think if you could make a song like Justin Bieber, if it's not Justin Bieber who's actually marketing it or performing it, I don't know. I don't think so many would actually listen to it. You have to build up the brand around it. It's much more than just the actual music. And then I think that AI will take a really long time before they can make that really quality music. But if you're working on making music to sell YouTube ads, then you might be in the risk, I would say.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. There's a meme that I saw that I feel like hit the nail in the head pretty well around AI, which is something along the lines of, AI isn't going to replace artists, artists using AI are going to overtake artists who aren't using AI. And I think that IA, at least in the short term, is going to 100% be an incredibly powerful tool that's going to save a lot of time, it's going to help generate ideas, it's going to give you a starting point, but the people who are going to be most successful with it are the people who understand the creativity on a higher level, the people that understand the concepts that you're teaching, as for producers, because they know the right prompts to ask, or they know the right questions.
And it seems like a DAW or any tool, even this piano or whatever, it's meant to be a channel or a bridge to translate our thoughts or our ideas into some sort of creative expression. And so anything that can remove friction from that bridge, that can help turn the idea or creative thing into that expression is going to get us closer to a state of being plugged in or being able to create. And it seems like that's really part of the core of Soundation. It's about removing that friction, about making it easier than ever for you to be able to take your creativity and be able to express it. I'm going to pull myself back, stop rambling on AI stuff, but I'm interested-

Adam Hasslert:
No. But if our users want to learn how to produce music, AI could definitely play a big role there. How can we use AI to help them achieve their goals? I think that's how we look at it, definitely.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. And that totally makes sense. That's probably going to be what drives it more than anything, is how can you serve and pride value, and what are people looking for? And I guess there is a little bit of that, like you brought up earlier... What was it? Henry Ford said something like, "If I listen to what people ask for, they'd be have faster horses," or something like that. So there's a little bit of that too, but it definitely seems you've built an amazing platform by focusing on serving people and figuring out what do they want, and having that interaction, and I'm sure you'll keep following that to keep providing more and more value.
So what do you say for anyone who is listening to this right now, and is looking at getting started with Soundation, what do you recommend as a starting point? Maybe what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see that are common to new artists who are coming in? I've already personally jumped in, started using the tool. I think it's super cool. And so I think everyone who's listening to this right now should dive in, because you could even do it without even creating an account. You could just go check it out. But I'm curious to hear what are some of the mistakes to avoid, or common things that are just going to give them a better experience as they get started using Soundation?

Adam Hasslert:
I think maybe if you want to learn, you should look at some of our great videos, which is more around if you want to recreate a song, or if you want to learn how music is actually built up. And so I think definitely check out our videos. I think then it's more up to you on... Because I don't know if there's any common mistakes that they make. I don't know.

Michael Walker:
There's something we can dig into there, I think, based on what you just shared, this idea of creating recreations of songs, using that as an initial starting point to create their own music. I know for me personally, when I was touring full-time, one of the best, fastest ways I grew was by listening to my favorite songs and literally just recreating them as close as I possibly could, and then using the foundation that I created to create new stuff from that. But I think there's something so powerful about that idea of standing on the shoulders of giants and recreating something that exists, and then creating your own remix of it. So maybe we could talk a little bit about that idea around remixing and maybe how someone could, as quickly as possible... If someone wanted to decrease the amount of time for them to achieve mastery around producing their music or growing and learning, what are some tips for [inaudible 00:34:37] to decrease the time?

Adam Hasslert:
No, but you can drag in any audio into our studio. So drag in the song that you like, and then you'll try to recreate it with our instruments and our samples. There's actually one video about Daft Punk, and Frederick in our team, he actually goes through three of their songs and how they use these old albums and sampled some of it and how they stretched it and added effects on it. I think dragging that song and try to recreate it with our virtual instruments, I think that's a great way to learn. I think that's how I learned to play guitar back in the old days. I went and bought these books. This was before all the tabs and chords were available. And you sit there with your guitar, and you learn Sweet Child O' Mine or Jim Hendrix or whatever it was, and you practice.
So listen to your favorite songs and try to recreate them. Of course we have some pros to do it for you, and they can give you really good tips, but then it's about on your own learning it and understanding what happens when you turn on an LFO or whatever you do. There's so many abbreviations, so it's quite hard to actually get started. But yeah, I think that's a great tip, but then I think one really good tip is to learn piano, learn to play piano. I think some of the best producers that I know of, they're quite skilled at playing piano. They've learned it the hard way.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. Piano is one of those things where just, if you can play piano, you have such flexibility with a MIDI keyboard to be able to play, and so many different instruments. That makes a lot of sense. And it is interesting too just this nature, I know as artists, a lot of times we feel like we want to be totally original and we don't want to be like anyone else, and oh, my music, it doesn't sound like anyone else, and the truth is that we don't live in a vacuum. We have experiences, we have influences, and you can't get away from it. And you certainly don't want to just copy someone else and not do anything that's unique or creative, but it seems like there's almost a DNA type of aspect, the same way that we exist because of two humans coming together and turning separate DNA into new DNA that has traits and pieces of different ones.
And so if you can do what you're saying, using a workflow and Soundation where you pull in the audio from one of your favorite songs, and then you learn how to recreate, it's kind of like you're getting the DNA or different traits. Heck, maybe you even have two different songs that you do that for, and then you combine the two projects into one new project where you have a few different sounds and samples. And so it's literally different DNA coming together to create something that's familiar, but also unique because it's its own thing.

Adam Hasslert:
Yeah, but every chord has been played before, and then what happens is that new genres pop up, which is mixes of old genres. So I think I shouldn't be that worried about sound like someone else, as long as you can make it your own and you can get your feelings across so someone who understands you. So I don't think you should be super worried. Of course you want to make something that feels you, but that's coming from what you have done and what you have listened to and what you have experienced in your life. So I think the best way is to learn from listen to what other people have done, and then learn from that, and then make it your own, twist it, then tweak it sort of.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, certainly. For sure. Because then you learn from someone who's invested potentially tens of thousands of hours, and you have that as a starting point, versus having to invest those tens of thousands of hours yourself first to learn from scratch. Cool.

Adam Hasslert:
No, but I remember when I was a kid, I was listening a lot to my dad's old albums, Dr. Hook and Paul Simon and these kind of guys, and that's inspired me and shaped my own music and what I did when I was playing more in bands and stuff. And you can hear that from other artists too, like this band has listened a lot to Beatles. And it's not a bad thing, it's just that you can see where they got their inspiration from. And if you ask any top artists, of course they have people they have been in inspired by. It's nothing to be ashamed of.

Michael Walker:
Totally. Kind of having that shared DNA. Awesome. So when it comes to Soundation, you described a few of the workflows or some ways that people can use the tool. One primary one is to develop their music production skills in a low friction, easy to get started. There's education, there's videos that basically help you learn how to develop your creative tool in your brain to be able to actually create high quality music. You also mentioned that there's a workflow maybe for more professionals that they've been using it where you can actually use it in conjunction with DAW on your computer to record things, and then pull it in. Curious if there are any other things that jumped in your mind in terms of common use cases, or some of the things that have been most valuable ways that you've seen people using the tool?

Adam Hasslert:
I think a lot of, especially our core users, they say they've found lifelong friendships. It's like they've made... A bit people gaming, then you find people that you often game with. And that's a really great way to actually learn. We see a lot of people on our community, can you help me with that FM synthesizer you create, then tweaking that specific kind of sound? And then being an online DAW, they can jump into the project and do it for them real-time. So I think it's also a community of users who are passionate about the same thing, often the same genres, and they become friends. And there's actually been a podcast on YouTube with old time Soundation users, and they talk about the good old times when they learned, and some of them have moved on to FL Studio or Ableton, but they come back and hang around and they do some stuff in our studio too. So that's also a great thing about being a collaborative web DAW, that you can create communities around it too, which is really awesome.

Michael Walker:
That is super cool. Its almost like, of course. One of the benefits, one of the core things about having a collaborative platform is that there's a lot of people collaborating on it. And you hear this a lot where... On one level, there's been a lot of studies around what really makes people happy and fulfilled, and it turns out that it's not really money to a certain extent. We need a baseline. It's not really a lot of the things we might consider, we'd think would be important. And it actually turns out the number one thing is our relationships, and it's the communities that we're a part of. And so it sounds like one of the biggest benefits of the Soundation platform is really the community and the memberships and the interaction that's happening between people.
Very cool. So I think we're about ready to wrap things up for today. So this has been a fun conversation. I feel like we've been able to dig deep into a few different areas of the future of music collaboration, and I just think what you've created is really cool. So thank you for being a part of the podcast and sharing some of the lessons that you've learned. And the platform is super cool as well. I'm looking forward to being able to share that with our community, because I think it's also a way that we can connect our artists with each other and be able to collaborate together. And for anyone who's listening to this right now or watching this, who is interested in going and checking it out, what's the fastest, easiest way for them to go to get started with Soundation?

Adam Hasslert:
Yeah. Just go to Soundation.com, and then jump into templates or into our beat maker, which is like a sequencer where you can just add sounds really easily. You don't have to know how a DAW works. So I think that's definitely the easiest. And if there's any companies or artists out there who wants to do some sort of collaboration, they can just reach out to me at adam@soundation.com, and we'll have a look at it of course.

Michael Walker:
All right. Very cool. And so just to recap, so Soundation, basically kind of like Soundnation, but without the N, dot com. And we'll put the links on the show notes for easy access. And yeah man, this has been a lot of fun talking, geeking out a little bit about this stuff, and I think what you're building is super cool as a collaborative platform. So looking forward to staying connected and hopefully collaborating with what we're doing with Modern Musician as well to be able to bring the community together.

Adam Hasslert:
Definitely. Thanks.

Michael Walker:
Hey, it's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value out of this episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about the guest today. And if you want to support the podcast, then there's a few ways to help us grow. First, if you hit subscribe, then I'll make sure you don't miss a new episode. Secondly, if you share it with your friends or on your social media, tag us, that really helps us out. And third, best of all, if you leave us an honest review, it's going to help us reach more musicians like you who want to take their music career to the next level. The time to be a modern musician is now, and I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.