Michael Walker: If you’re listening to this then you likely already know that being an independent musician can be a lonely road. And maybe your friends and your family don’t fully understand why you do what you do, or why you invest so much time, energy, and money achieving your music goals. And especially early on, it can be hard to find people who really understand what you’re trying to accomplish and how to make it happen. So, that’s where Modern Musician comes in!

My name’s Michael Walker and I can understand and relate to that feeling. I’ve been there myself, and so has our team of independent artists. The truth is that basically everything good in my life has been a result of music. It’s the reason I met my wife, my 3 kids, it’s how I met my best friends. And now with Modern Musician, we have seen so many talented artists who started out with a dream, with a passion, without really a fanbase or a business. And you’ll take that and turn it into a sustainable full-time career and be able to impact hundreds, maybe even thousands or millions of fans with your music. We’ve had thousands of messages from artists who told us we’ve helped change their lives forever. It just gets even more exciting and fulfilling when you’re surrounded by a community of other people who get it, and who have shared their knowledge and success with each other openly. So, if you are feeling called into making your music a full-time career and to be able to reach more people with your music, then I want to invite you to join our community so that we can help support your growth and we can help lift you up as you pursue your musical dreams. You’ll be able to interact in a community with other high-level artists, coaches, and industry professionals, as well as be able to participate in our daily live podcast, meet these amazing guests, and get access to completely free training. If you’d like to join our family of artists who truly care about your success, then click on the link in the show notes and sign-up now. 

Hyperbits: But having some external accountability in that field is the most helpful thing. Like deadlines are incredible. When I have a deadline, I just get things done. And if I don't, I keep fiddling and twiddling with stuff. So it's like having those firm deadlines is what helps me push through and sometimes also be like: okay, this section, maybe this break isn't exactly as perfect or beautiful as I wanted it to be, but it's good enough. And you can always come back to this stuff later on. 

Michael Walker: It's easy to get lost in today's music industry with constantly changing technology and where anyone with a computer can release their own music. I'm going to share with you why this is the best time to be an independent musician and it's only getting better. If you have high-quality music, but you just don't know the best way to promote yourself so that you can reach the right people and generate a sustainable income with your music, we're going to show you the best strategies that we're using right now to reach millions of new listeners every month without spending 10 hours a day on social media. We're creating a revolution in today's music industry and this is your invitation to join me. I'm your host, Michael Walker.

Yeah. All right. So I'm excited to be here today with the one and only Hyperbits. So Hyperbits is a world class producer. He's produced for industry giants like Beyonce, Nick Jonas, Tove Lo. He's been supported by some of the world's biggest artists like The Chainsmokers. He's personally been streamed over 52 million times with his music. And not only that, but he's founded one of the most popular and well regarded music production schools in the world, now teaching thousands of students in the art of music production. It's amazing that you've done this for yourself: 52 million streams, but probably what's even more awesome is that your students have been streamed over a billion times on Spotify alone. They've been supported by nearly every prominent DJ like Skrillex, David Guetta, and tons more. Hyperbits the real deal and it's been an honor getting to connect with you, man, in our mastermind group that we've been a part of for the past couple of years. In Hawaii, we had some fun conversations about life and our role here, our purpose together and how we're serving musicians. So, very grateful to have you in my life and really excited to have a conversation today for our podcast to be able to share some value with the community. So thank-you for being here.

Hyperbits: I'm super pumped to be here, man. And right back at you, dude. I've really appreciated our friendship and getting to know you. There's just some people in life that you instantly connect with and I really respect. It's kinda like: when you speak, I listen, and I'm really… What's the word, proud of you in that you've been able to create such an incredible business and the way you go about it, I think, is what's the coolest part about it, like these masterminds and bringing communities together. Life is… that's what it's all about: connecting and doing cool shit together. And I feel like I say that all the time, but I really value your contribution to the world, man. You're killing it. You're doing great.

Michael: Thanks, man! I appreciate that. Yeah, you're someone that I know… you have a very cool set up just in terms of your living environment and it's very entrepreneurial in nature. Maybe we'll even have a chance to dig into some of that today.

Hyperbits: Sure!

Michael: To kick things off, I'd love to hear, for anyone who's here, this is their first time connecting with you, maybe you could share just a little bit of background in terms of how you got started? Cause I'm sure you didn't just start out immediately out of the gate working with Beyonce and Nick Jonas and Tove Lo, but maybe there was a process through which something like that happened.

Hyperbits: Yeah. I won't go into the earliest details but, I was in a band in high school, have always been just like musical or influenced by music my whole life. I played a little violin when I was like 4 or 5 years old, picked up guitar. So music has just always been a part of my life. And then, like we're told to do, I get the college degree, go into corporate America and spend 4 years working as a pharmaceutical conference marketer. Every kid's dream, right? [both laughing] And dude, it sucked the life out of me. Truly, looking back on that, I feel like I've struggled with anxiety and maybe small bouts of depression in my life at certain points, but looking back on that era, working in a cubicle on something that I didn't care about was probably the worst few years of my life, but I'm also super grateful for that experience because it basically led me to be like: I don't care like how I do this, but I'm going to pursue something that I'm passionate about. And it's actually why I got fired from my corporate job, which is a funny story. I had just been dabbling with music production a little bit and I signed up for a school at the time. It was still running in New York city. It was called Dubspot. It's since closed down. And the first day of classes coincided with a conference that I was supposed to be the marketing manager and run down in Orlando. I told my boss a month before or something or two months before that I couldn't. I hyped it up. I was like: I got accepted into this prestigious school, I can't miss the first day of classes, it’s something that's really important to me. And it's funny in that moment, this company could have supported my dreams and made it all work. They just got angry, right? They fired me 2 weeks later. Which also makes sense. I prioritize a hobby, I guess at the time, over my job. But it's funny cause I got fired and thus was able to reset. I got to collect unemployment for a few months, so I had a little bit of bandwidth plus some savings. And I was like: I'm going to go into music. I don't care how it's going to happen. I'm just going to do it. Which, by the way, I would never recommend anyone do this. I just had that naive beginners mindset that: I could do this.

Michael: I think it's important too to acknowledge that. It seems like that's a recurring theme that I've seen from a lot of artists and successful people we've had on the podcast that they kind of had that moment where they made a decision and they went all in and just the way that you phrase it too, you're like: I'm going to make this work. I'm going to figure it out no matter what. So, I just want to give you credit for that because that takes a certain amount of courage to do.

Hyperbits: Yeah, I think you see it a lot in entrepreneurship as well, right? A lot of people say: yeah, if I actually knew how hard this was going to be, I probably wouldn't have done it. So it's really good that I didn't know. Cause it's a belief in yourself, I guess, but it also is the reality that life is short and why spend time doing things unless you're truly in love with what you're doing. And I was also super lucky and fortunate. I was young at the time. I didn't have much to lose. I didn't have a family, right? I had New York City rent to pay. That was the main thing, which wasn't the easiest thing, but I figured it out. I made it work. During that period, I really started doubling down on music. I ended up creating this one remix that a DJ played out at some festival in New York and a bunch of A&R’s at Universal heard that and reached out to me as a result of it. And they just were like: Hey, let's grab a beer. We're like right down the street from where I live. And so we just got together and we ended up deciding to work together. They really helped me in so many ways, but one of the biggest things was just that, at the time, I probably created maybe one song every month or two, and with them, they were like: the main catch here is you gotta create at least once original or remix every 2 weeks. If you want to work with us, that's the kinda structure we're going to go for. I thought they were crazy at first, but when you commit to finishing music, it provides insight into all the areas that you struggle with, for sure, but it also forces you to figure those things out. And so I went from finishing a few songs a year to, I think the first year that I worked with them, I created like 40+ songs or something.

Michael: Wow.

Hyperbits: Everything took off from there. All of a sudden, they have me working on some projects for other artists, doing some engineering work, things like that. And yeah, I guess that was like the main kickoff point. And then I started a side project called The Rooftop Boys for a little while and that project had just like a ton of success in terms of the remix world. That's what connected me with Nick Jonas. Yeah. Things started to take off from there and all that being said, once I started touring a little bit, I realized that actually wasn't the thing that I loved the most. I truly love the creation of music, which is then what led me to be like: all right, let me rethink my life a little bit. And what can I do to maybe make that more of my like full-time thing? And that's what influenced me starting a music production school. And it literally started just as 1:1 sessions with a few individual students. And then it turned into this thing, this is like 2015/2016, I was like: all right, let me just see what happens. I'm just gonna put together a class, put it out there and yeah, a bunch of people ended up signing up and I got a really good response and I've just basically been doubling down and working on that as my focus for the past 7 years. And it wasn't until this past year that I've gotten almost full-circle/full-swing back to just creating music again, and I've been having a blast. I've just been having such a good time making music again.

Michael: Oh man. That's so awesome. There's a few things that stuck out from your story. One was how, in retrospect, some of those challenging times or the things that would seem really bad in the moment, like getting fired from your job or going through issues like that. You wouldn't be who you are, you wouldn't be where you are if it wasn't for that. So I just think that's interesting. And maybe for anyone who's listening to this, who might be in the middle of one of those times or feels uncomfortable, or you’re feeling like they're struggling, it's always nice to hear; it's easier in hindsight to look back and you'll be able to point out those things and be like: Oh yeah, everything does have a purpose and you can transmute challenge into a blessing. And maybe that's even what we're here to do. That, I thought, was awesome. And also one thing I think we could dig deeper into today, because I think this is something that would be a helpful insight for a lot of musicians maybe, is just understanding the concept of quantity over quality. You mentioned how you had this period in your life where you went from creating maybe 1 or 2 songs every few months, to every other week. You had this structure and you really upped the quantity. And so I'm curious from your perspective, how would you recommend that artists who maybe are here right now, who maybe they're in a similar phase where they're wondering: what content release calendar should I create? How much should I be creating? How much should I be releasing it? And to what standard do I need to hold myself? I'm curious if you have any perspective on quantity over quality and a best practices for it.

Hyperbits: Yeah. Tons of thoughts there. I think, just having released again, I've had to relearn how to release music, right? Cause I was using mostly SoundCloud back in the day. Spotify hadn't really taken off yet. And releasing music, with Spotify and Apple Music as the focus, it actually seems like every 6 weeks is the ideal timeline to release a song. There's this hype curve that you can create where if you wait a little longer than that, things really do start to die off in terms of streaming numbers and playlistings and things like that, whereas, if you consistently are able to release a single every 6 weeks, it can keep building upon itself. That's not to say that you can't do it a little slower than that. Maybe 8 to 12 weeks, but there's something really special about that 6 week number I'm seeing. And with that in mind, I'm like: okay that means you got to create how many songs per year? I'm the worst person at mental math.

Michael: I just did the math in my calculator. It’s 8.6666666.

Hyperbits: Yeah, 8.6 songs repeating. What's interesting about that is that then a lot of people would be like: Oh, okay. So I have to create 8 songs per year. Or 9. Whatever. But the problem with that mentality is that you're now assuming that all 8 of those songs that you create are going to be your best work. It might be. It's possible, but what I've found is that for every 3 or 4, maybe even sometimes 5 songs I create, there's usually one standout and it doesn't have anything to do with, hopefully this doesn't sound cocky, it has nothing to do with my talent or my skill set inside of creating music, songs just have a magic to them. And this is like my belief that there's just something really untangible about it. I don't know why sometimes hooks work. Or why some things resonate with other people.

Michael: [in a seductive way] Soul.

Hyperbits: It's actually not my job to know. Were you going to say anything?

Michael: Oh, I was going to say soul. It's like the word to describe the wordless. It does feel like maybe that's where music comes from.

Hyperbits: Yeah. Yeah. And with that in mind, it's okay, wait a second. So that would mean I actually should be creating, 8 x 3 or 8 x 4, right? So into the 20’s. Maybe 30 tracks per year. And you don't have to release all of them, but the quantity allows you to also put a lot less pressure on every single song. It actually doesn't need to be that perfect. And if you think about it, the more time you spend on an individual song doesn't necessarily equate to it becoming better. A lot of artists, and I'm sure a lot of the people listening to this at any point are artists themselves, a lot of times the best songs happen the fastest. They just come out of you. They just appear in an hour or two. And then you're just like, what, how did that happen? You tap into this flow state or whatever you want to call it. There's a huge misconception, I think, that the more time you spend on a song, the better it's necessarily going to be. I just don't correlate those two things. There are times for sure, when you create an idea it needs fine tuning and you have to struggle through it a little bit. That happens. That's why this isn't like this firm deadline of a song a day or a song a week or a song every two weeks. You can play with it a little.

But having some external accountability in that field is the most helpful thing. Deadlines are incredible. I don't know if I'm just a procrastinator and this is my problem, but when I have a deadline, I just get things done. And if I don't, I keep fiddling and twiddling with stuff. So having those firm deadlines is what helps me push through and sometimes also be like: okay, this section, maybe this break isn't exactly as perfect or beautiful as I wanted it to be, but it's good enough. And you can always come back to this stuff later on.

Michael: Yeah, There's so much value there. The first point that stuck out was when you mentioned: look, if you want to release a song every six weeks, if you want to release 8 songs a year, then you shouldn't aim to write 8 songs in the year, but you should actually aim to write 3-5 songs for every 1 song you're expecting to actually release. That just rings true from the 80/20 rule. Everyone that I know that's like you, everyone that's successful, they understand this as a core principle of life and production and productivity in general is the idea that 20% of what you do is going to result in 80% of the results. And it's interesting how it just goes deeper. You can go to the 80/20 of the 80/20 and you can keep doing that.

Hyperbits: Yeah!

Michael: It's great to hear that applied to music.

Hyperbits: Yeah. And I feel sometimes, I don't know why, it's harder to apply this thinking maybe to your own craft, inside of music, but when I think about it in something that I'm not proficient in. something like maybe painting or writing… if I was pursuing a new craft or if anyone was, who would create better art, the person who spent 1 year on a painting, or the person who spent the entire year making one painting per day? I'm not a painter, so I can't say this with 100% confidence, but like 95% confidence, I gotta believe that the person who created 1 piece of art every single day is going to become more proficient because they're attacking different problems every single time they approach it, they learn techniques that maybe wouldn't have been applied to the one painting that they created.

Michael: It's funny you mentioned that. There's a scientific study of an art teacher who did that with his class. He had ½ of the class, basically what they were doing was creating a pot, and they had the full semester to basically get it as perfect as possible. And the other half was working on it and they could basically screw up, and their idea was that they wanted to do it as much as possible. By the end of it, it was night and day. The ones that spent all of their time trying to get the perfect pot the whole semester, their quality of it was significantly worse than the people who did it repeatedly over time.

Hyperbits: That's so cool. I got to look at it.

Michael: We should Google the actual report. Maybe someone could share that in the chat too, for anyone who's listening to this. That's interesting. That exact idea has been scientifically proven. I mean, you already knew that was true because of your own experience of having seen the difference it made when you went from focusing on quality and spending all your time and energy, which like you mentioned, doesn't necessarily equate to better output at a certain point.

Hyperbits: Yeah. But there's something really cool cause my experience is anecdotal. It's based on my life and it's based on my artist friends and my entrepreneur friends and what I've seen in the world, so to hear about a study that actually truly supports this, it actually gave me the chills. I was like: Oh, like this all just makes sense. Like it makes complete sense.

Michael: Mmhmm Absolutely. I come back to this analogy a lot cause I think it symbolizes what we're talking about really well but, if you want to get good at shooting free throws, who's going to get better at shooting free throws? The person that shoots every 2 months and tries to make it in or the person that just steps up and shoots repeatedly and aims? And you do need to have a feedback system. If you just are blindfolded and you're just shooting the free throw and you don't know where it landed or if you're close to it at all, then you actually might not get better. So actually that leads to another follow-up question going deeper into it, which is: let's say that someone's listening to this right now and they're like: okay, I'm going to step up my output, my creativity and I'm going to make a commitment this year to create what would be about 40 songs over the course of the year, and they're going to choose their favorite 1/5, and they're going to release them every six weeks. So in terms of best maximizing their growth, I would love to hear your recommendations in terms of creating a feedback system or what's the best way to learn and grow based on that so you're not just creating this in a bubble and maybe you put it out, but you have no idea what actually happened or you're not actually learning from it? How do you best plug into to be able to get feedback and iterate over time?

Hyperbits: Yeah, that's such a good question. I think the first thing that you probably shouldn't do is just post your song on a sub Reddit somewhere and just get complete strangers’ feedback because they are coming from: who knows what genres they're listening to; who knows how proficient they are in music? It might be an ANR from universal. I don't know. It also could just be someone who's bitter and angry and wants to hurt people. I'm not saying that to discredit people hanging out on Reddit. I love Reddit. I just feel like you have to trust the source. And so there's a bunch of ways to go about this. And first off, the easiest one, most of us have a friend that we just either really respect their music tastes or you're into similar genres. They don't even need to be a music producer, but they do need to be deep into listening into that genre of music, right? They live and breathe this stuff. They have the 10,000 hours of what sounds good without even necessarily knowing it. And that doesn't necessarily mean that they're always the best at providing production feedback, but they will capture the vibe or not. It might not land for them and maybe they'll get better at giving you feedback, but I feel like having just a friend. Almost like a vibe check. I have a buddy of mine that lives here in this entrepreneur house. He has a tattoo of the label that’s one of my favorite labels. They’re called This Never Happened, that lane eight runs. I hit him up for vibe checks twice a day. I'm like: yo, what do you think of this right here? Are you feeling this? And he just gives me immediate feedback and sometimes gives really good ideas. And then beyond that, I think forming an accountability group is something that can be really beneficial. This takes a little bit more work in that you have to find maybe some other producers. But I'm not talking about 10+; find 1, 2, maybe 3 people. Keep it super simple. And you can start with just a monthly meeting, maybe get up to every 2 weeks or every week, but the goal would literally just be like: Hey let's connect every week and show our music with each other and give each other some feedback. And they'll also get to know your style and preferences. It's not just about fitting into the cookie cutter example of popular music in one genre. Like they'll understand your taste and your preferences. And I do think that stuff matters. Cause you can take any idea into any other genre or space, but for someone to understand what it is that you're trying to do is just as important as the generic kind of feedback advice. So accountability groups is another one. I run a music production school. I don't care if you sign up for mine, I just care that at some point you invest in your education because those places are littered with passionate, like-minded, hungry people. And you'll learn something, but you'll connect with other people and really streamline that process of getting feedback, oftentimes, from faculty or producers themselves or other students and that can really speed up and streamline the process.

Michael: So good. Yeah. There's something so valuable about surrounding yourself with people that want you to succeed and are there for the shared purpose of helping you grow. That could be a hard thing to find sometimes. If you have people in your life that love you and want to support you and they're like your grandma: “you're so great, Bobby”. Those people might not necessarily have the best constructive feedback. They're not really there to help you evolve and grow. And they don't fully understand how to communicate some of the different things together. I just love what you guys have built and I love the ability to be able to network with artists who are going through a similar journey and help each other grow.

So in terms of output: I love the strategy that you just shared too. So for me, I was like the weird kid in high school who liked math. I like having clear numbers and targets and it's okay, cool. If you know that to break it down, you want to aim for a song every 6 weeks, and you know that you want to create 3-5 songs, or if you want to really lean into the 80/20 rule, it's 5 songs. And then I'm going to choose my favorite 1 out of those 5, and I'm going to release it every 6 weeks. I think that creates a lot of clarity in terms of creating a system and something to commit to. So putting that backbone in place, I'm curious what you would recommend. This is an interesting one. We're at this convergence of AI technology and generative music, and we've already experienced the shift from analog to digital and I know analog still has its place for a lot of people, but I'm curious based on your experience and based on you doing it right now, living it, what do you see as the biggest opportunities for artists who, maybe they've decided they've made a commitment and they've said, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to do this and they're wondering how do I get started or what tools should I even think about using in order to make something like this happen?

Hyperbits: Yeah, I will say, there's so many different routes to go down. If you're specifically talking about: how can I utilize the uptick in AI tools to help my creative output? There are a few really good tools that can help you generate more ideas. So something as simple as, I feel like most producers are familiar with Splice: huge sample pack company. They have something called SpliceSounds, which can help you generate ideas at the click of a button. There's something called Soundful which is a little bit more nuanced in that you can set a specific genre and just a BPM and also click an idea and it generates a whole song for you. The thing with those is that you're never going to get some sort of a result just from 1 click where you're like: “Oh! Hit single! Done.” [Michael laughs] To me, it's just about finding these tiny little moments inside of something that inspires you. A lot of times, that can also just be referencing your favorite artists, right? And being like: Oh man, like that was just a really cool song, and I want to create something like that. But what I'm looking for when I'm using those types of AI tools is: is there a piece of the melody or the drum pattern or the vibe that it created that inspires me and makes me excited to want to expand on that. So those 2 are really good tools. Once you get into the actual project file, maybe you've created a chord progression or something, there's a tool called Unison Bass Dragon. They also have Unison MidiWizard, which again, you can actually set the root notes of the chord progression that you've already written, and then it'll generate some melodies or basslines for you, which again, can just be really cool to hear. This is where I think things get interesting in terms of AI is that if I only utilize my own mind to write, I am limited to the knowledge that I have, which sure, you can spend a lot of time learning music, you can study music theory, all this stuff, and you can improve your skill by playing instruments, but you're still limited to your own experiences. Whereas when you're using these plug-ins or these tools, it's learning from everything, right? And now what you get to do is actually rely on your taste as your main differentiator. You can scroll through endless amounts of melody generations and presets and things like that, but something is going to happen and you're going to be like: Ooh, that was really cool. Like it's that classic happy accident, right? Like those magic mistakes that you sometimes make when you put the wrong MIDI file into the wrong instrument, or you hit a wrong note. It's like those on steroids. You're just getting mistakes everywhere and it sounds like shit for the most part, and then there's something in there that you're like: all right, I'm going to pull this out. There's also one called Pilot Plugins or something, by Mixed in Key. They also have some melody generated things which can be cool. They basically have an electronic batch of plug-ins and then one for more pop and rock as well. So those are really cool. But I'm more partial to the unison stuff. I just have had better experience, they have different genres too. But I've just had a better experience with those so far.

Michael: Awesome. Yeah. Thanks for sharing. And yeah, I know things are evolving so quickly that there's probably gonna be new tools a half a year from now, a year from now, and so I think some of the stuff that we've talked about already in terms of foundational principles and things that don't really change are super valuable to take into account, more so than focusing too much on the nitty gritty of exactly which tools, while still being valuable to know right now at the time of recording this, we are here live in the present moment, so it is nice to know: what are the tools that you're using right now to do it. Awesome!

Hyperbits: Yeah. And I'll just add one last thing to that. If you're really struggling with creative output it can be also very intimidating to just finish a song every week or whatever timeline you set for yourself. One cool thing that a lot of artists do a lot of times, maybe before they're trying to create an album or something, they'll do like a creative sprint, right? Where it's actually not your job to finish songs right now. You're just trying to create as many ideas as possible, which is a way to hack this 80/20 principle, because you don't actually have to finish any of these songs yet. Maybe you set… February is coming up. Is it 29 days this year? It's the leap year. So you got 29 days, 29 ideas. And then once you come out of that month, now it's time to start finishing them and then you'll be in that headspace of just finishing once you've just output all these ideas. And then from there you pick the best 20%-30%, whatever and try to finish those out.

Michael: Super Interesting! I know this was definitely a different mental faculty that comes into play when it comes to creative stuff versus editing and versus refining. And that sometimes they can get in the way of each other, so it makes sense that if you can carve out the window to be like: okay nothing's wrong here. It's all just ideas. I'm going to be creative and it might be messy and suck, I'm just going to generate stuff. And then you can have a different angle for coming out and being like: okay, I'm going to refine this and edit out and get to the best stuff.

Hyperbits: Yeah. And like really finding a way to love both of those processes. I think that sitting down and creating… An empty DAW in front of you or a blank guitar. I don't know if that makes sense, but if you're creating something from nothing to me, that can be such a fun little place to play, right? You're creating from scratch. It's such an inspiring, fun idea. And then a lot of people lose momentum later, but there's magic in the creation of something from nothing, but there's also maybe arguably even more magic in bringing that idea across into a full song. That's what people are actually going to hear. And a lot of times I'm feeling like: it's not almost as important what you write in that initial idea, as how you go about introducing it. How do you get to this idea? How do you play with it? How do you tweak it and change it and manipulate it as the song progresses? What tension does it create? That's the stuff that people are actually going to hear. So I feel like just acknowledging that you may love one or the other, but there's so much magic in both of them. Trying your best to find that magic and find that beauty. Cause there's just so much there waiting to be uncovered.

Michael: Oh man, I love it. What came to mind as you were sharing that was almost like on a philosophical level, life itself is this unlimited playground of creativity and potential and so much of the beauty comes from what we do with that or what evolves or blossoms out of it. And some of those decisions that the opposite of potential is the actualization of it. And you do have to have both, you have to appreciate both in order to be plugged in and continue to blossom.

Hyperbits: Yeah, my intention for 2024 is to seek magic; to look for it wherever I can. I have a tendency to just default into negativity. I don't know how I was born, maybe.

Michael: It's something about human brains. We look for risks. That's why the news usually is what bleeds, leads is because we have more mental processing devoted towards paying attention to risks or dangers because that's what helped us survive over time. It's more important to avoid the tiger that is walking in front of you than it is to go eat the berries on a bush.

Hyperbits: Yeah. It's funny cause, this is a quick tangent, but I was watching Rambo for the first time. I've never seen Rambo. This was like a month ago.

Michael: I’ve never seen it either! I feel like I should!

Hyperbits: I don't know how much you knew about this movie going into it. I didn't know anything. I've seen the trailers and see the picture of him with the massive machine gun. 

Michael: The vibe!

Hyperbits: I was ready for the shoot ‘em up 80’s Action Hollywood Thriller. And it's actually not that at all. It's actually this really somber story of someone who comes back from Vietnam and can't find his way back into society. It's actually really dark and scary, not horror-movie scary, but just how real that situation was. And this movie was actually made not that long after Vietnam. So it's actually a very timely piece and all that. I was watching it and not getting the action Hollywood Thriller and I was like: “This movie fucking sucks! This is terrible”. [Michael laughs]  I watched it and then there was this really beautiful ending scene where he's crying in his former general's arms. And I was so confused. I was like: it's going to end with Sylvester Stallone just crying? It wasn't registering and so I started Googling a little bit about it and I got onto Reddit and I started learning about it and I was like: I just watched a beautiful movie and couldn't get out of my own mind of my prior expectations and defaulting into these negative mindsets. I literally was like, okay, this is like a few days before the new year. I was like, you know what, I gotta start looking for the magic and things like keeping that open heart because I ruined that movie for myself. I'll go back and watch it at some point, but I feel like there's something in that I'm going to try to apply to everything.

Michael: Oh, man. What a great story. Thank-you for sharing that too. It's going to help me prime myself if and when I watch Rambo. I wouldn't be expecting that. And it's so funny cause that's exactly what I would expect too. It was like Rambo. He's like in the forest and he's just like fighting and killing people. I just think it takes a large degree of self awareness and self actualization to even be aware of your own thought process and be able to notice: like my expectation of this just so heavily influenced this experience of it. That's a good lesson for all of us to remember to be open-minded and have an open heart.

Speaking of keeping things open, [laughs] this is an interesting segue. I'm trying to squeeze in for it to make it work. I'd love to open up the floor to our live audience that's here right now to be able to ask any questions for Hyperbits or myself as we're here for you. I'm curious if anyone has any questions. If you'd like to come on here live, you can right click on your icon and raise your hand. I see VoZ has his hand up, so let's bring VoZ up. Hey, VoZ. How are you doing today?

VoZ: Hello, gentlemen. Doing great. Thank-you. Outstanding. One of the things I like what Michael's been doing is he's been talking about AI in a way that is trying to tear the veil, and you were doing it too, Serik, in tearing the veil of saying that it's the creator for you. No, it's a tool to enhance your creativity. You use these tools, you come up with the hooks, you come up with the lyrics, you may need a little assistance to help pull the idea out, but it's just a tool. That's all that it is. Thank-you.

Michael: That’s fantastic. Thank-you, VoZ. Appreciate the questions. So to recap, it sounds like the big question is in terms of a baseline tool set for creating music nowadays with the DAW’s, there are a lot of different options. And yeah, I'd be curious to hear that as well, in terms of: what's your perspective on the current available DAW’s? Are there ones that you would recommend over the other ones? How much do you think it matters versus just like doing it, whatever platform you're using? I'd be curious to hear.

Hyperbits Yeah, I would lean towards the latter bit of what you just said. These days, it really doesn't matter. For a while, I think Reason didn't allow third-party plug-ins, so I would never have recommended that one, but they've since allowed that. So at this point, it really, to me, boils down to what makes you feel most at home and most comfortable. Like just look at them. You can download free trials for all of them. It's kinda like when I went car shopping a couple of years ago. I just sat down in five different cars and which one felt like I already own this? I feel like a DAW is very similar. There's so many tools and so many resources for all of them. If you're a true beginner, it might make sense to stick with the major 3 which would be Ableton, Logic or FLStudio. ProTools is another option, but I feel like they're a little bit more focused on recording bands and things like that. You can create in it, but I think that the workflows in there might be just a touch behind what you can do in something like Ableton FL or Logic. I personally use Logic, but this is because I started with GarageBand and the transition was so seamless. I was like: yeah, let's just go all in on this. And if you have a friend who is already using one of these DAW’s, it could make sense to just use that one because you have an additional resource in your life. But yeah, at the end of the day, it truly doesn't matter. And the beautiful part about any one of these DAW’s, especially in this day and age is that if you're on a budget, you don't even need anything else to get started. The native plug-ins inside of any of these DAW’s are so powerful and good enough to get started. Eventually you will want to invest in some third-party plug-ins because they just are that much better and more powerful, specifically in the mixing and mastering world. If you take the Ableton limiter or the Logic limiter and set the same exact settings in FabFilters Pro L2, same exact settings, ProL by FabFilter sounds so much better. So eventually you want to upgrade, but to get started, you just use the native plug-ins and they're super, super powerful.

Michael: Awesome. I do remember. I'm a little bit rusty. It's been a while since I've been in my music production chops, but I do remember FabFilter being one that I really liked. I think there's a lot of them that have like visual EQ now, but I remember FabFilter just had the one that felt most intuitive. The design was awesome.

Hyperbits: The aesthetics are such a big part of, I feel, like plug-ins these days, like there's something called Soothe by Oak Sound that is essentially like a dynamic EQ suppressor where it's just responding to frequencies as they come up and producing them. And it's just beautiful to look at. It's like the most beautiful plug-in. I love using it just cause it looks so good. And there's actually another one. I don't think it's necessarily AI, but Waves Factory has a plug-in. I think it's just called Equalizer. What's cool about it is that you can just add it to any track and you just set an amount of how much you want to add or suppress to the sound and it automatically just responds to your music and can make things sound a lot cleaner and remove some of those harsh frequencies. So things are getting really cool in that space, and it's very fun to work with some of these tools because it also informs you about: Oh, this was a muddy area. It pulled it out. Maybe I didn't hear that at one time or something. So yeah, it's really fun to use.

Michael: That's so cool. There's this video that probably 10 years ago, when we were touring full-time we had a video producer friend and he shared this video with us. It was like a niche comedy video that was only funny to people who edit videos, basically. It was called Skip the Render and it was a YouTube video and throughout the video it was like a video tutorial, but it was a parody, whereas you would do things that just couldn't possibly happen. So for example, he would be editing a video and he'd be like: okay, like these two guys are talking here, but I want one of them to be like holding a cigarette. I'm just going to highlight him and I'm going to type in “add a cigarette” and click on the “go” button. It was like the “magic button”. And he clicked the magic button and then it would start processing and be like: it's going to want you to render the video, but you just want to click on skip the render. It just skips it ahead. And it's just magically like: now he's there and basically he does things that are ludicrous just by dragging and dropping and saying with natural language “I want this to happen”. And now that basically exists with MidJourney and with ChatGPT, you can say I want to do X, Y, Z. In Adobe, you can highlight something and just be like: I want it to look like this. And it'll automatically generate that. So interesting to think that there might be a tool like that. In fact, there is a tool like that, that maybe it's earlier on, but it sounds like it's really useful that literally: you put the plug-in on the channel and it just makes it sound good and EQs it for you.

Hyperbits: Yeah. And there's some tool by Mastering the Mix that's called Fuser, and it does a very similar thing, but in response to other sounds. So basically, you place the plug-in on the thing that you want to suppress, that you want to bring down in the mix, and then you route the side chain or the output to the other instrument. So maybe you want a classic case, piano and then vocals can vary/similar range of tonality. So you place the plug-in onto the piano, you route it to the vocal. And then you just hit learn, and it just dynamically suppresses it in response to it. Same thing with track spacer. There's a lot of plug-ins that can really help clean up your mix. Cause sometimes, you just pick similar sounds and they sound really good, but together they clash and this is a great way to give some space to them.

Michael: So cool. Hey, Hyperbits man, it's been great connecting today. Serik at Hyperbits, I'll refer to you as Hyperbits cause I think it's a cool name, but thank-you so much for taking the time to be here today. I always enjoy having conversations with you. Personally, I find it fascinating just the current landscape of music production as a whole and your mindset in general and how you live your life, I think is really inspiring. So thank-you for sharing that. And I also really appreciate what you've built with your masterclass and with your community to really help to facilitate the creative process for artists and to be able to get that feedback from not necessarily just like their grandma or from people on Reddit that, maybe trolling and not very constructive. With that, I'd love to hear for anyone that's listening to this right now who's interested in learning more or seeing the community that you've built in the masterclass, what would be the best place for them to go to dive deeper?

Hyperbits: Yeah, honestly, we'll keep it super simple. Message me on Instagram, just @HyperBits or you can go to the website and hit the contact button and shoot us an email. You can also email me Serik@hyperbits.com. So plenty of ways to connect or go to hyperbits.com and reach out there.

Michael: That is awesome. And thank-you for offering that. Sometimes it blows my mind, the accessibility; the opportunities that we have nowadays to be able to connect with people like yourself. And it seems like in a lot of cases, we don't always realize or take action on those opportunities. So I would definitely encourage everyone who's listening to this right now, if you've gotten value from this conversation, to reach out to Serik personally, just to establish contact and build a relationship. It's extremely valuable.

Hyperbits: Just say what's up. We don't even have to talk about anything important.

Michael: Awesome. We find the magic wherever it comes up.

Hyperbits: Ooh good one to end on.

Michael: 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 our guest today, and if you want to support the podcast then there’s a few ways to help us grow.

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