Michael Walker: YEAAAH! Let's go. Hey, all right. I'm excited to be here today with my new friend, Trey Xavier. Trey is passionate about helping musicians craft better songs. With 28 years of experience and over 242,000 YouTube subscribers, he shares expert insights. He's a Berklee-trained songwriter and guitarist with a music composition degree, combining academic depth with real-world experience.

He's an active musician with solo projects and a band, blending teaching and performance to inspire the next generation of creators. I'm really excited to catch up with him today to talk about probably the most important thing about being an artist or musician—songwriting and learning how to express yourself and share songs that resonate not just with you, but also with a wider audience. Trey, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today.

Trey Xavier: Hell yeah. Thanks for having me on. I love hearing the summing up of my life in a short snippet like that because it makes me sound really cool, like I've done a lot of things.

Michael: Mom, Dad, hold on, come join the call.

Trey: The guy in the little square box said I'm not a failure.

Michael: Still a lot of time left to live, Trey. There's still time to throw it all away.

Trey: Yes, I can't wait. There's so much room under so many bridges for me to bring my 30 guitars and construct a shelter out of them.

Michael: I gotta say, Trey, it's been a lot of fun already backstage. You've been goofing around, and you've entered some conversational territories that I rarely talk about in such a short time. So, I'm guessing this is going to be a fun conversation.

For anyone connecting with you for the first time, could you share a quick introduction to your story? You've grown to close to 300,000 subscribers now—what's the main mission or problem you're here to solve?

Trey: I didn’t set out to be a YouTuber. At the time, it was only just starting to become a career choice. I kind of came into it sideways. I had quit the music store, was teaching guitar at a school, and I responded to an ad on MetalSucks looking for a writer for a website they were starting called Gear Gods. I figured I knew a pretty good bit about music gear and what bands were playing.

Michael: I could be a god of the gear.

Trey: I could be a god. Look, if someone asks you if you're a god, you say yes. I don’t know many things, but that I know.

That was the first step into the rest of my life. I got hired as an additional writer. I applied to be editor-in-chief, but they hired someone else for that role and brought me on for $100 a month to write one post a week because they liked me and thought I was the only other possible choice. The site was brand new, and we were defining what it was.

I stuck around, did more work than they were paying me for, and suggested we start a YouTube channel. They were indifferent, but I set it up with an email address and everything. I made a bunch of garbage videos, uploaded them, and then saw people doing gear reviews. I thought, "I can do a gear review." I borrowed a guitar from a student and a camera. It was primitive times, but I had fun. It combined things I liked and was good at, and I figured that out quickly. I was hooked.

I started doing whatever I wanted on the channel, and it took off. We started making more money from YouTube than the website. Eventually, it grew to the point where I realized I didn’t want to be an employee anymore. I was still just a hired gun, despite doing everything. I eventually became editor-in-chief when the other guy left, but I was building an empire I didn’t own.

At NAMM 2020, I made a proposal to my bosses and bought the whole property—Gear Gods, the website, the YouTube channel, all of it.

Michael: Let's go. That's awesome.

Trey: Because it was either that, or I was gonna quit and go solo, more or less.

That's been my life since then. So, from the part of the story that's relevant to what we've got here—I mean, the rest of it, if you want to know my life story, it's not really that interesting. I started playing guitar at 12. It's not that interesting, but I'll tell you anyway. I'll summarize it real quick.

Started playing guitar at 12. Didn't really take it all that seriously until—I actually originally wanted to be more like an actor. And then I got completely hooked on music. I went to Berklee because, well, I was from Boston, so it was a hop, skip, and a jump. But also because John Petrucci went there, and Dream Theater.

I was a Dream Theater stan—I mean, I kind of still am. I wanted to learn everything I possibly could about how music was constructed and formed so I could do it better. I didn't care about getting a degree or being academic about it in that sense. I just wanted to learn more.

I remember actually bugging my guitar teacher—and actually my cello teacher. So for a while, I started on the cello but never really got anywhere with it. For some reason, I played it through ninth grade. I would bug my cello teacher about music theory. I'd be like, "Can you teach me something like music theory?"

And this poor guy—an amazing musician, incredible cello player, played in a symphony or whatever—didn't really know much in the way of theory. He could play anything off the page with feeling and everything, but he was like, "Sorry, I'm here to show you how to play the thing so that you can get up on stage and do it."

That was kind of when I realized, "Oh, I want to go a lot deeper. I don't want to just know technique. I want to see what the bricks are that hold this house up." So I just followed that down the rabbit hole and learned as much as I could.

Went to school for it. The classes I took were all a mishmash because I was like, "I want to learn about this. I want to learn about this." It wasn't like a program. I studied jazz for years. I did jazz harmony and took ear training—just whatever I thought was going to help me increase the richness of whatever music I wanted to make.

Actually, it's been sort of a theme throughout my life that I like to increase the flexibility of whatever I'm doing or creating. I want to be able to do whatever I want to do with no limitations, which is actually sort of the antithesis of creativity in a way. Because you can't be creative without limitations—that's literally what it is.

So I think I inherently fight that. The more knowledge you have, the fewer limitations you have—a little contradictory in a sense. But nonetheless, here we are. I've built a level of knowledge about music, songwriting, and composition that I'm actually fairly happy with.

And I have a ton of fun making music now. I've gotten to a point where I'm always having a great time creating music. So that's pretty good. I'm happy with that.

Michael: Yeah, that's kind of an important part of it, right? Awesome. Man, that's really cool. It's a very interesting background and perspective.

It sounds like even when you were at school, you put together all these different pieces that really gave you that foundation or flexibility to express yourself in a lot of different avenues.

One question that came up for me, just as you were sharing your story—especially as it relates to that early stage when you were just building this YouTube channel—you had this idea. And back then, YouTube probably wasn't really what it is now, and the idea of being a YouTuber probably didn't even really exist.

I'm fascinated with that stage of creativity. I'm just curious to hear your mindset. Because clearly, now it's evolved and blossomed into such a beautiful community and thing that you've built.

But it's so easy to overlook that initial seedling that you planted and where you were at that point. And I think a lot of people listening to this or watching this might feel discouraged because they're in that initial stage of their life or career. They don't have 300,000 subscribers. They want validation, but they don't have it yet.

So I’d love to hear—what was your mindset at that point? And what would your advice be for someone watching this right now who has big goals or dreams but is in that stage and wondering what they should be doing to move their career forward?

Trey: Well, I'm of two minds about it because if you were to follow the same mindset that I had at the time, it's not really conducive to success—it was a disaster. I had no strategy, no plan, no consistency, partly because of indecisiveness in a sense. I mean, I was within a sort of framework because, like I said, at the time, it wasn't really mine.

It was a little freeing in the sense that I was getting paid one way or the other. I wasn’t depending on the income from YouTube, so it was more of a free-for-all. I could try a bunch of different stuff, and I wasn't going to starve if something didn’t pop off. I think even a modicum more strategy than I had at the time would benefit you greatly—not just on YouTube, but across the entirety of social media and your career, whether in music or any kind of content creation.

And that's to have consistency across everything you do. At the time, I was creating through trial and error. I don't want to say "persona" because that makes it seem like it was constructed—it wasn't really like that—but the essence of what I would do on the internet. And I did that by putting my own take on things that I saw.

I would see other people, like my buddy Fluff doing gear reviews—I didn’t know him at the time—or like Ola Englund. I’d think, Cool, how are they doing it? And then I’d try something similar, but what’s the Trey version? What does that look like?

I think that's a really good way to approach it. Just like when you're learning music, you start off as a clone of your favorite musician. But after a while, you gain skills, and then you think, Okay, what now? What am I going to do that's actually me? How am I going to make something original instead of just doing covers?

So I wouldn’t necessarily imitate what I did on YouTube because, in terms of having success and putting up big numbers, what you really want to do is narrow the focus of what you do rather than broaden it. What I've done on YouTube is very, very broad.

And basically, like... two and a half, two—what year is it now?

Michael: 2092.

Trey: I'm 75 and just a brain floating in a jar. I completely shifted the focus of what I did on the channel entirely, which is also not really recommended. So, if I were starting the channel today, I would not do gear reviews.

I would be doing songwriting and music-making content, which is something that I always put into everything. Even in a gear review, I would make a demo. I would maybe write an original song or at least record one with a piece of gear. That was the part that I liked and actually cared about. And now, that's all I do, and the gear has sort of switched roles, right?

Previously, it was a gear review, plus I was showing you a little bit of how to use the gear to make music. Now, I am showing you how to make music, and the gear is just there. Figure out what it is that you actually want to do. Think of it like it's what you're gonna have to do for the rest of your life, more or less.

Do you want to do original music? Don't try to do something else and then slide it in sideways. Do original music over and over again. Do just that. Make it incrementally better. Think about iteration, right? You make something, and the next time you do it, you just fix the things that didn't go right the first time. You're refining it.

Don't try to do everything. Don't try to do almost anything else except for this one particular thing. I always use the example of hydraulic press channels because it's so pure. All they do is put stuff into a hydraulic press and squish the crap out of it.

If you're like, "I want to see something get crushed, I want to know what's inside a grandfather clock," you go to a hydraulic press channel. That's all they're gonna have. If you went there and they did a meme review or a "get ready with me" or—what else do people do?—or even if they did a review of different hydraulic presses, you wouldn't watch it.

Now, imagine what your channel looks like when someone visits it. Are you putting up a united front of stuff that's yours and that's you? It's okay to be a bit repetitive. That's fine.

It's not just about people's expectations, though that’s something to take into account. You might think, looking at big channels, that people will just watch whatever person X is doing. Some people get away with that if they're personality-based channels. But for the most part, people come to see something specific.

You want to be able to not just give them that, but also create something you're proud of—something you actually want to make as much as possible. Of course, you always have to make concessions. If you're going to make it your job, or even just something you put a lot into, you're going to have to do some stuff you don't want to do—editing, whatever.

People say authenticity is the most important thing. People can tell instantly if you're faking it or if you're just making something for clicks. It's actually easier than you'd think to just be yourself. People really like it when you're the most yourself.

The hardest part, I think, is picking the thing.

You're like, "Okay, I'm a musician." Well, what are you gonna do with that? I see a lot of people complaining, "Oh, I'm an artist. I wasn't put on this earth to make content." Well, content is just pointing a camera at the art that you make.

If you're an artist, it's just pointing a camera at whatever it is that you do. That's the content part. If you're a painter, your art is the painting. The content is a time lapse of you painting the painting so that people get insight into how you made it. And that's also interesting.

You could argue that the time lapse is also a piece of art. But even if it's just content, then so is an art gallery—it's the presentation of whatever it is that you do.

You don't have to go and do silly dances and lip-syncs on TikTok. That doesn't have to be the content you make.

So, that's my advice. If YouTube is what you want to do, it's okay to be narrow. I don't really like the word "niche" because that implies that there aren't a lot of people who will like what you do, even if it's not typical. And actually, it's sort of the opposite. Instead of thinking of it as a niche, think of it as unique.

You niche.

Did I just make up a word?

Michael: Oh.

Trey: Write that down. You niche.

It's a you.

Keep playing. Give me some inspirational music.

You are you. You niche.

There's nothing more unique than a you niche. Fit yourself in that you niche. Let them come to you.

Niche.

And it's actually about the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

Michael: Man.

Trey: It's a Nietzschean niche. So anyway, I'm—

Michael: I feel like we could maybe just scrap the rest of the conversation and just go deep into this.

Trey: Actually, this is kind of a little meta example, though, because a lot of people think that they're gonna strike gold at the surface. Unlikely. Same with songwriting, okay? If you write one song and it sucks, all you've done is step one. If you got it right the first time and you wrote the all-time banger, and you want to go out batting a thousand—great.

I can't say that it's never happened, but the likelihood is so very, very small. And also, who cares? Write a hundred songs, and you'll have some that maybe are pretty good. And then maybe you'll get one or two that are out of this world. And then you still have to write a hundred more. Same with anything that you do.

A lot of people, you see these stats, like, "X YouTuber that now has a hundred million subscribers—they were under a thousand subscribers for their first hundred videos" or whatever. And it's like that with music too. The quality of what you do is gonna improve as you go. But you'll also hit those magic moments where you come up with new words like "Uniche."

Think about any artist that you like. Do you like them because they're like someone else? Do you like their music because it's the same as a different one? With some exceptions, that actually can be true. For example, I like Owl City because The Postal Service only put out one album.

But generally, right? You like things because that's the only place you can get that thing—whatever it is—even if it's kind of similar to something else. So there's something that you do that nobody else does. Triple down on that. Get better at it, refine it, sharpen it to a razor-thin point, and poke it into people's brains.

Michael: Uniche is good. It's a good word.

Trey: Boom.

Michael: Be Uniche. But spelled like "you," like the word "you." Be Uniche.

Trey: You niche.

Michael: How many layers does this have?

Trey: At a certain point, it's just a dumb pun. But I have seen ones in the same vein.

Michael: I feel like there's an onion—there's gotta be at least ten more layers of this dumb pun.

Trey: Like an ogre.

Michael: Like an ogre.

Trey: Layers like an ogre.

Michael: I don't know why, but what came to my mind was the answer to the question of the ultimate meaning of life. And the answer is 42.

This is great, man. I mean, there's a lot of really good stuff to unpack there. And it sounds like the main point you really want to drill down on is that in order to build a brand that gains traction and really resonates, you need to have consistency.

You need to be willing to keep showing up. And you have to be unique. You have to be yourself, but also get specific—have a channel where there's something special about it. Something that isn’t the exact same as everything else. Because if it’s the exact same as everything else, then people would just go there, and there’s nothing that really stands out.

Yeah. I mean, I'm curious—it's interesting hearing your story and how, in hindsight, if you knew what you know now going back, there are a lot of things you’d do differently. You kind of stumbled your way through consistency and discovering who you are, and eventually, you found that thing that really worked for you.

But I'm wondering, for someone that might be watching or listening to this right now—who is an artist and feels like they’re floating around in the ocean a little bit, trying to figure out, "What is that thing that makes me unique?"—if they feel like they’re just the same as every other musician and don’t even know what sets them apart, do you have any recommendations, ideas, or exercises? Any ways that someone could gain that self-awareness? Or do you just recommend they do stuff and see what feels good?

Trey: Well, all art and creation of any kind is trial and error, no matter what. Sometimes, if you are too academic about what you're doing, as I have been at times, you think that you can learn your way into being good at something. That's kind of impossible. I think you need to learn, of course, and learning broader concepts—anything from music theory to song structure—things like that are incredibly helpful and important. But if you're not applying it all the time and trying stuff out to see how it works for you, it's completely worthless. You can't just think a song into existence.

Is it Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, where Indiana Jones slides into the library on a motorcycle and tells the kid, "You want to be a great...?" What is Indiana Jones?

Michael: Explorer.

Trey: What's it called when you dig up old things?

Michael: Good question. Uh, it's not scavenger... archeologist?

Trey: You want to be a great archeologist, you’ve got to get out of the library. And that's also true of music or art of any kind. There's a balance, right? To find what you are, you have to try a bunch of different things—not just stuff that's already out there. You don’t have to just go, "Oh, am I into salsa music? Is that my jam?" And then try playing salsa for a week to see if it sticks. You can do that—it's exploratory. Awesome, do that kind of thing. I love doing that. But at a certain point, once you've reached a certain level of basic musical competency, you have to try stuff that no one's ever done.

As a creative person, I think the most bare-bones definition of creativity is that we’re adding to what already exists. If you write a song, you are putting notes, words, and rhythms into an order and combination that has never existed before. Every single song—every one of the 50,000 songs that gets uploaded every day to streaming services—is a completely unique fingerprint identity that hasn't existed before. If it’s not, then it’s a cover.

So, you're going to have that instinct and drive to create something new. Otherwise, you're not a creative; you're not an artist. That's what drives me day in and day out. I wake up, I start working on music or something like this wild setup of music creation things, and I just try to make something that didn’t exist before—until I can’t stay awake any longer. It gets worse over time. It’s a long, dark rabbit hole of being a creator, a creative artist, anything. But that drive has to be there. And you will look at what exists, and you’ll go, “I can do that better. I can take this and add to it somehow. I can see what's missing, and I'm going to add to it.” Or to completely create something 100% new from scratch. I mean, sort of, you know, unless you're going to invent new instruments or a new way of dividing the frequency spectrum into X number of new notes that have never been used, you're probably not going to make something completely new. But more or less...

Michael: You can play the same four chords, but it's how you play 'em.

Trey: It's how you play them on what instrument. Oh man, the last video I put up is ruffling some feathers because I made the claim that metal is not a musical style. I did that for the same reason we’re talking about right now, which is that if you think of things as being prescriptive—things like style, genre, whatever—as being prescriptive, like you have to do them a certain way or it has no value, then you probably won’t actually make anything groundbreaking and new. Then you're more or less just a glorified tribute band or artist.

So, to find who you are, you have to actuate it. It's going to be trial and error. Luckily, as I mentioned in my songwriting course, in the section about writer’s block, if you make something that sucks, that’s fine. It's great. You still have to make the thing that sucks. It never has to leave the folder on your desktop. Nobody has to ever hear it but you. But you have to make a bunch of garbage, probably. I mean, you don’t want to think at the time that it's garbage. It might only be in retrospect. But you have to constantly throw things against the wall. You gotta try all kinds of crap.

I do a stream every Tuesday where we roll dice to write songs. Okay, so it's very rarely like what I would say I want to write. Like, I don’t wake up in the morning inspired to write, you know, whatever tempo and style I roll for. We also roll for topics that are user-submitted. A few weeks ago, the topic was just "fucking dragons, man." And the way it was phrased was supposed to be like, "Just like, it's about fucking dragons, man. Like, you know, like dragons and shit." But I chose to interpret it literally, and I wrote a banger about owning dragons—about somebody who wants to own a dragon, you know, like Donkey from Shrek. That's not going to become my whole persona, but that was a great example of having just a, almost like a tracer bullet, you know? Ever see how a tracer bullet works? They're illegal, so you probably haven’t seen them in real life, but in TV, you see them. You shoot and there's this trail of white phosphorus, so you can see—not just when you miss, but you can see how far off the target you were.

So, writing a song that's maybe not 100% what you want is like a tracer round, because then you see, "Oh, that is exactly this far off from what I want to actually do," right? So don't be afraid to try a bunch of stuff. Think about your life and who you are, where you're from, and what it is that actually makes you who you are—that is not the same as people around you. I think most artists feel disconnected from their surroundings—where they grew up, the people around them—in some way. And that's because there are things that make us different from everyone else.

Like, I think that creatives and artists are always, to some degree, societal outcasts, because if we weren’t, we wouldn’t feel the need to improve everything all the time. That's what we're actually doing. We're looking at the world and seeing what needs fixing. And those differences are what people actually love in the art, in what they consume.

So, it could be anything. If we think of a baseline idea that we're all working with, more or less, 12 notes and four beats, plus or minus a bit, there’s like a limited amount of musical things you can do. I mean, music is hard to make, but it's not that complicated. You know, you make a lot of choices with the availability of those things, but all the other things around you—the artistic profile, the lyrical content, visuals, the way that you play the music—all of that stuff is really what makes it. And those are the things that you can finally hone and craft to be the most you that it could be.

Finding your identity is a lifelong journey. Like, I’m 40, and I still don’t really know musically. I have a lot of things that I think I do that are unique, but the format in which I want to do it is always changing. This outrageous setup that I, um, that you can only kind of see—that includes this pink guitar back here. I've spent the last year building a live looping EDM setup so that I can do more or less improvised, on-the-spot full EDM arrangements with a MIDI guitar and play synthesizers with my MIDI guitar pickup. And two years ago, if you'd have told me that’s what I was doing, I would've been like, "Yeah, okay, bro."

So, yeah, just stick your hands into the clay without a thought of what you're going to make, and you will eventually become yourself.

Michael: Shit, man. Some really, really good stuff in there. Yeah. So to recap, what I’m hearing you say is that there's not really a way to shortcut or get over the fact that you actually need to bite into the apple to know what it's gonna taste like. You can theorize about it, you can talk about it, and sometimes that’s interesting, but ultimately, at some point, you have to actuate it. That’s an interesting word. I don’t hear that said very often. I love that word—actuate it into existence—and that discovering who you are is a process of throwing yourself into the fire, putting your hands into the clay, and seeing what sticks, what resonates with you. And it’s through that process of trial and error that you ultimately find what it is that makes you unique.

Trey: I love that I invented a word. Pulled it completely out of my ass, and now we’re—like, how long until Webster’s picks it up? Today’s the 5th of December, 2024. I give it a year. A year until we’re in Webster’s. Okay, three months until we’re on Urban Dictionary. A year to Webster’s. Let’s go.

Michael: I’m thinking tomorrow. Tomorrow, you’re gonna be driving down to Disneyland, turn on the radio, and hear it.

Trey: Unique New York.

Michael: Dragon mother.

Trey: I mean, it’s a great example of why you’ve just got to jump in. There’s a certain amount of intention—actually, a lot of intention—that you have to use when you create, but you can’t premeditate all of it, or even most of it. When I sit down to write a song, if I think about what I want it to be, it’s not gonna come out the way it should, you know? There’s a lot of impulsivity in creativity, and you see the connections much more readily when you’re in it. There’s a huge disconnect between premeditation, intellectualization, or an idea of what you want and the execution. Because so often, I’ve had this idea of how something was going to be, and I was sure. Then I sat down to try to do it, and it absolutely did not work, and it certainly didn’t work the way I wanted it to. Actually, here’s a great example: The song Mary on a Cross by Ghost and Buddy Holly by Weezer have a lot in common. They sound very similar in a lot of ways. When Mary on a Cross was blowing up on TikTok, and actually Buddy Holly also had a little micro-viral spot where people would work that do do do do do do lick into it, I was like, "I’m going to make the most viral video of all time combining these two songs." And I shit you not, I spent a week trying to make a mashup of the two. I probably way overcomplicated it, but long story short, I couldn’t do it. I was like, "AHHH!" I probably got in my own head about it or whatever. It seemed like it was going to be so easy. I look just like Buddy Holly, and you’re Mary on a Cross.

There’s so many crossover potential moments, and I could not work them together into one song, and I failed. So that’s an example of even what should be a really easy, simple mashup, I couldn’t get it done, but in my head, it worked so well. So, I think if you have an idea and you have a sort of intellectual understanding of a thing, an academic view, you should immediately get your hands into it and see if it works. If you’re not doing that, the learning part is actually worthless. You might get some sort of intellectual high off of knowing a thing, but if it doesn’t have a functional purpose, then it’s dumb. So, for example, in my songwriting course, I talk about a lot of these kinds of ideas, but the majority of it is me actually writing a song and talking about it as I’m doing it, right? I’m demonstrating the thing that I’m talking about and talking about the thing that I’m demonstrating, and showing how it’s like, you know, what ideas are useful and what ones aren’t. Because that’s the thing: we learn a lot of stuff so that we can be complete human beings, right? Like, I don’t use long division every day, but if I didn’t know that long division existed and how to divide things, and the concept, I would be very limited in my thinking. Same with, like, history or whatever. Like, I’m not thinking about, like, Abe Lincoln’s famous speech, which I’m, uh, the Gettysburg Address, is that right? Right? On the daily. But nonetheless, like, the knowledge of that, you know, informs certain ways that I think and act, even if I don’t know it consciously. And that’s the same with music stuff. But try recklessly. Like when you’re writing, when you’re practicing, try things with absolute reckless abandon, even if the chances of it sounding bad are like 85 to 90 percent, or even 100, right?

A lot of people won’t try things because they don’t like to fail. Failure isn’t just a guarantee; it is the vast majority of what I do. I would say more often than not, I’m failing when I’m making something, and you probably will too. And that’s fine. The world doesn’t have to see the duds or hear them, but you have to make them, and you have to not care. Because every artist that you look up to, all of your favorite musicians, also fail daily, struggle with things that you think they’re masters of. I say this in my course too: Paul McCartney has probably 5,000 little song ideas on his phone in his voice recorder, and 4,900 of them are stupid as shit and will never see the light of day.

Michael: New one that he didn't write about, having sex with a dragon.

Trey: Time. And he, of course, that's the one that he missed out on. He doesn't know that that's the...

Michael: That's true.

Trey: Hey, you niche, fuck a dragon, please, whatever, it's... I think people want these guarantees or something, but you can't know. You can't know what you don't know, right? All music and art making is exploration. So, fuckin explore.

Michael: So good, man. It reminds me of that quote, man plans and God laughs.

Trey: Yeah.

Michael: It sounds like what you're saying is that really, you have to try, you have to put yourself out there and you have to be willing to suck, to suck and embrace it and go for it until you have a few of those things that don't suck.

And so, Trey, man, it's been great connecting with you today. And we've definitely ventured in some territory that I don't go down very, very often. So it's been a lot of fun and, you know, I know that you created some really amazing resources, both in the form of your channel where you provide tons of amazing content.

And also, you’ve referenced, you have a course for songwriting as well. So, yeah, I'd love to hear for anyone that's here right now, that's interested in exploring more, whether that's the YouTube or maybe you could share more about the course as well. What would be the best place for them to go to dive deeper?

Trey: So, I actually have a few courses. The website is howsongsaremade.com. I've got, yeah, not bad. And I snatched that right up. I have my sort of big course, which is called Complete Rock and Metal Songwriting. And it is sort of rock and metal-focused, but actually, it could be applicable to more or less any style.

It's mostly about core songwriting fundamentals. And I cover more or less all parts of creating a song, everything from writing guitar parts, programming drums, writing lyrics, melodies, harmonies, keyboard parts, bass, etc. And it's 15 hours long.

And it's pretty thorough.

And of course, you get to watch me write a whole song, soup to nuts. Then I have How to Actually Write Lyrics, which is my lyrics course. Focusing entirely on writing lyrics. A bit of philosophy, but for the most part, it's just techniques for how you can actually write lyrics better right now.

A bunch of tricks and stuff to get yourself going, get your hands in the clay, as I said, right away and improve your lyric writing by tomorrow. Then I have another one that's a little more niche, called Making Symphonic Metal with Free VSTs, and it's just about, it's exactly that. I show you how to take all the free plugins that are out there for orchestral sample libraries and how to turn them into Dimmu Borgir and Septic Flesh-style symphonic metal bangers.

Here I sort of shot myself in the foot in this interview talking about how being academic and learning stuff only will get you so far. And I think that's definitely true. But what I think most people find is that they get to a certain point trying stuff and then they need a little bit of insight into how to do something that maybe their favorite artist does, and they want to know how they can do that.

They want to get a peek behind the curtain, under the hood, and figure out how it's done so they can do not just that, but the next thing—build on that as well. So that's why I made those resources to help people just get better at writing songs so they can write things that are not just quote-unquote better.

Better is subjective, whatever. I want you to be able to write what you want to write without having to really struggle. So, howsongsaremade.com.

Michael: Awesome.

Trey: Thank you.

Michael: It was good stuff. I mean, that's what we're here for. I appreciate it. And to the point you brought up around the value of biting into the apple and the value of courses and training education, it reminds me of a concept of the map and the territory, and I think the line is like, the map is not the territory, but I feel like it relates well to what you're talking about right there.

Right there, which is that, having a course or having the education or knowledge, it's really like having a map that goes on top of the territory and the territory itself is actually the land. At a certain point, it doesn't matter how much you read the map, you've got to set foot, you’ve got to actually go do the thing. But having a map can certainly help you save time and energy and know where you're trying to get to.

And you can learn from other people who've charted the territory before. But you have to be willing to take that step yourself so you can explore and go deeper down it. So, I'm very grateful to you for being here to share a little bit of your map and the territory.

And definitely would encourage folks who resonated and want to dive deeper to go check out the course and materials. We'll link everything in the show notes. And Trey, thank you again for being on the podcast today.

Trey: Thank you so much for having me. This was a great time.

Michael: Absolutely. YEAAAH!