ill Gates:
It's hard to take it in, but these are cliches for a reason. They're cliches for a reason. It's because that is ultimately the truth of getting what you want as an artist. It takes intention, it takes focus. It takes a written goal setting and a timeline with sub goals on it. It takes accountability. It takes diligence, and you just got to keep showing up.

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.

Michael Walker:
All right. So I'm excited to be here today with Dylan, aka ill Gates. So Dylan is the CEO and founder of Producer Dojo, and I pulled this from your website, and this is probably one of the most impressive intros or descriptions that I've ever seen. ill Gates is a bass dropping, educating oscillator, modulating space genius from the future. That's pretty spectacular. I love that description. Is a world touring producer and DJ who's collaborated with Clozee, Excision, Beats Antique and Star Wars.

Michael Walker:
Star Wars, have you heard of it? So he's also the founder of Producer Dojo, which is a training camp that is set up in a really cool way. I checked out your website and the way that you just have the progression system, it's basically like all these different belts and it's really a place to help producers to collaborate with each other, to learn how to tour and getting started with thoroughly build a successful music career and have the mentorship that they need in order to improve.

Michael Walker:
So I'm really excited to talk with him today and just explore some of the new opportunities that are available as a musician today with the ability to be able to create things in a home studio, especially if you're in the middle of a pandemic or something and you can't go on tour and you have to stay home for a year or two.

Michael Walker:
It's pretty, pretty incredible some of the things that you've created. So thanks so much for taking the time to be here today.

ill Gates:
Hey, it's a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. I'll try to live up to the hype. That was quite the intro.

Michael Walker:
Well, you know what, as soon as we hopped on this call today, I came in here and he was thumping his new group. He's got a new song coming out. When's the release date?

ill Gates:
Yeah. Those were for other releases, the ones that you heard me mastering. That was some work for the label, but I myself have two full lengths. And then about 10 singles that are not on the albums coming out. I've got the second single from my new album, The Arrival, which comes out the day after we record this. So I don't know when you're watching this, but the date that single drops, it's called the Future featuring Jordana and Mimi Page. And that drops on August 20th, 2021. And there's a video from Adam Hatch, who is an animator from Adult Swim, where we are all comic book superhero is battling AIs in a virtual world.

Michael Walker:
So it was basically a glimpse into the future when we all become comics and battle AI.

ill Gates:
Totally. It's a good time. It's a good time. I'm really excited for that video. I've been doing music videos for a lot of the songs because when I perform, I do audio video sets using a combination of Serato and a software called a mix emergency, which has made by Inclan. So that kind of little indie company with where one guy in New Zealand makes a software and it is fantastic. It allows you to sync your visuals with lip sync accuracy. And if you scratch a record, you can watch the word come in and out of your vocalists mouth on the screen.

ill Gates:
It's fantastic. So it allows me to either hire out people to produce music videos or chop together, my own music videos, and then everything is perfectly synced and there's lyrics and vocalists on the screen and stuff. Actually, I make these performance videos where I do finger drumming routines on the MPC or the middy fighter or whatever.

ill Gates:
And this software also allows me to cut back and forth between like a web camera set up at the gig. So you can see my hands making music live. But actually over the pandemic, I was deejaying my performance videos from YouTube. And it was, it was pretty funny to be deejaying videos of yourself performing, but whatever, I'll go for it. It'll be fun. It was a very, very meta moment. I don't know if I'll do that live, but it was certainly good for a chuckle during the pandemic lockdown sets.

Michael Walker:
For sure, man. That sounds incredible. Yeah. And that brings up one thing that I think is really incredible about what you're doing is that you really have both sides of the coin in terms of... I mean, right now you've got new music coming out and you're about to head out on this what, three, four month long tour around the world, which is awesome. But also you're taking everything that you're learning and you've built this community and this place that you're able to share and to really educate and to help other producers and musicians as well, to be able to thrive.

Michael Walker:
One kind of intro question that I'd love to start with is at this point having both been through, I'm sure a lot of ups and downs yourself that come with being an artist and starting out in obscurity and not building up a very successful music career, but also working with other people and seeing a lot of the same challenges, the same patterns, mistakes, things coming up, I'm wondering what are some of the biggest mistakes or challenges that you see musicians struggling with right now when they're just getting started with their music careers?

ill Gates:
Well, there's a great variety of challenges, but I think that really the main one is recognizing what is the engine of your progress and what you should prioritize, right? Because there exists an infinite amount of potential creative strategies you can employ. There's a functionally infinite amount of music technology you can employ.

ill Gates:
It's so easy to get caught up in these different techniques and these different tools, but learning all of the techniques and accessing all of the tools is not actually the problem. The problem is a psychological problem and a self cultivation problem.

ill Gates:
When you can recognize that you're the only one stopping you from making a hit record today, and that it's really about getting into the mind state where you can just let it flow through you rather than trying to make it happen, and really develop your ability to flow, to stop thinking, to stop worrying about how other people are going to perceive your art, and to just put one foot in front of the other and allow the momentum to carry the process to completion.

ill Gates:
Getting out of the way of that happening is far more important than learning every aspect of every tool. When you focus on leveraging your strengths and channeling the music from another place rather than on focusing on your weaknesses and on trying to strategize the theoretical music that you're going to make, it becomes much more natural and much more effortless.

ill Gates:
So I've developed some different techniques for teaching people this ability, and I've also adapted some learning that I've encountered from other artists and other creativity educators to really help people to realize that the priority should be getting out of their own way and should be focusing on their resolve, cultivating grit, and really developing the kind of vision that's going to get you in the studio for 10 hours a day when you're trying to finish an album, rather than procrastinating on YouTube or endlessly organizing sub folders of samples or obsessively collecting VST plugins and stuff.

ill Gates:
I think so much of it comes down to being really intentional with your focus. And that's something that is so compromised in our social media age. Do you have these devices and feeds that are engineered by teams of psychologists to captivate your attention and give you everything that you're even a little bit interested in.

ill Gates:
It takes more than just curating your feed to be tailored to just your exact interests to get what you want. It's not going to come to you. The thing that you need is not next if you scroll down. The thing that you need, it has to come from putting your phone down and really focusing, getting out a pen and a paper, writing your goals down, putting them onto a timeline, creating some accountability with a third party, ideally, and putting yourself in a position where you've made a commitment to your art.

ill Gates:
Because really in my opinion, the only reason to make art or music or whatever is because you have to. If you're strategizing and you look at the statistics, the odds are not in your favor. Most people fail, but you're not most people. If you really sit down and recognize that it takes a continual maintenance effort to overcome the inertia and gravity of just being human. And people think that those who are successful, they just wake up and just magically perfect art comes out of them.

ill Gates:
But it's not like that. It takes intention, and it takes work every day on yourself. It takes work on your ability to focus, on your ability to power through and to sustain discomfort. It might look effortless when you look at the successes of those that you would emulate, but I can tell you from experience of generally the more successful someone is, the more privately tortured they are.

ill Gates:
When you sit down and you really take inventory of yourself and ask yourself how badly do I want this? Do I need this? Once you have made your peace with your drives and your ambitions, and you've found what really matters to you overall, it's much easier to go for what you really want and to avoid what you want right now, because those two are often at odds, and that's really far more important than plugins or scales or anything else is really making that commitment to yourself and sticking to your guns and getting it done.

ill Gates:
We've all heard this a million times, but because we're not really listening, it's hard to take it in, but these are cliches for a reason. They're cliches for a reason. That is ultimately the truth of getting what you want as an artist. It takes intention, it takes focus. It takes a written goal setting and a timeline with some goals on it. It takes accountability. It takes diligence. You just got to keep showing up.

ill Gates:
Community is one thing that really helps that because the struggle doesn't weigh half as much when it's shared still. That dojo kind of made itself out of that truth, that shared truth. And it originally just started with me teaching on Patreon, but the community that formed around that were like, "Hey, we really believe in this. We want to make a website."

ill Gates:
It's unwieldy getting all of your content off of Patreon. I have a music class that I do every week and in five weeks, it's number 250. That's just one of my classes. There's workshops going back 10 years. There's templates. There's all kinds of stuff.

ill Gates:
So really, it's just too much for a system like Patreon. So the community asked, "They were like, "Hey, we'll build a website on Spec. You can pay us back. That's what happened. And really it's just like the people in the community love it so much that they keep bringing in the right people. It just keeps growing and growing and growing. But as much as I would love to take credit for everything, I couldn't do it without all of the members and without my partner, Dave, and without that just shared vision.

ill Gates:
It really helps. But it's been amazing working with all these incredibly talented people and watching them grow, watching their careers blow up. And it's got to the point where there's too much amazing music to put out on my record label. We're going to have to start some sub labels or something, but it's a good problem to have.

Michael Walker:
For sure. That is definitely what I would call a high quality problem. Cool, man. Holy cow. There's so much goodness and wisdom in what you just shared. It sounds like what you're saying is that one of the biggest mistakes or issues is really just focusing on the wrong things, and kind of going for the shiny object or going for the quick fix when really it's not those things that are the most important. It's really about going deep and getting clear on your own vision and your intentions or goals. I mean, putting down your phone, putting down your newsfeed and really getting clear, looking inside and figuring out what is it?

Michael Walker:
So I guess one followup question that came out, because I resonate so much with what you're saying about getting out of your own way and allowing it to come through you, allowing you to channel this thing. He even knows where that comes from. I think a lot of the greatest musicians of all time, they speak to the same thing. It's like the music comes through and it's almost like they don't even take credit for it. It's like a higher power that comes through them.

Michael Walker:
Then the flip side there's also that feeling of stretch and growth and hard work and perseverance through the challenges, through the struggles and kind of this like fighting uphill battle that also is required to be successful. So I'm wondering how do you know the difference between the resistance that comes up that's really just sort of fear versus knowing like, "Okay. I'm in the flow right now. I'm actually aligned and I'm channeling it through me"?

ill Gates:
Yeah. I tend to compartmentalize my time where I started out just calling them daytime and nighttime sessions because that's what they fit into my schedule. But some people call it woodshedding or working on your chops or just good old fashioned practice. But making electronic music, I mean it takes practice and stuff, but it's much more about preparation and study and organization really, than practice.

ill Gates:
But when you're writing or composing a piece of music, I like to try not to do anything that is going to derail me from my objective of getting a track done that day. Let's say your dog just died and you want to make an art therapy song to say goodbye. If you start that song the day it happens and then you don't finish it, and then two months later you come back to finish it. Are you going to be in the same mental state to really finish that thing properly?

ill Gates:
No. You want to basically get the emotions out in one piece because really at its core music is emotional communication through sound. It's creating an emotional space, right? For you to be able to execute that communication cleanly, it's a good idea to get it out while you're in that particular emotional state.

ill Gates:
So I found over time that if I focused on the smaller pockets of time, these nighttime sessions, they wouldn't necessarily occur at night, but they'd be like prep sessions where I'd be practicing my finger drumming, or sound designing a bunch of drums for later use, or watching YouTube videos about a new plugin I was interested in, or creating and saving a bunch of synthesizer noises.

ill Gates:
Or it's just sitting down on the piano and coming up with a bunch of chord progressions, or what have you. Anything that's not related to the achievement of an individual tracks completion, I would compartmentalize that. And in those sessions, I would do the real hard work and grinding and make things difficult for myself and challenge myself and push, push, push.

ill Gates:
But when I'm writing, I try just express myself in the most direct way possible. To avoid the temptation to pretentiously get caught up in details. Just because you've got your favorite tool in your hand, and you're using it correctly, it doesn't mean you're making progress, right? It's very important to be direct and be clean and be simple and elegant in the way you achieve your objective of expressing whatever emotion is going into a piece of music.

ill Gates:
Then later you can always make it more complicated. And later you can do the finishing because it takes about 20% of the effort to get a track 80% of the way. And then it takes 80% of the effort to get it that last 20% of the way. And the meticulous mixing and testing it on different sound systems, and perhaps you'll rearrange it, perhaps you'll replace some of the sounds that you've made in a hurry using the stock plugins of your DAW. And then later you're like, "Yeah, but if I used my hardware synth, maybe I could make that same bass riff better and run it through a real compressor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."

ill Gates:
So I generally try to do things in the simplest, easiest most direct way while I'm writing and focus on the larger picture and focus on the emotional communication. And that's really where that effortless mastery is important is in those sessions where you're just channeling, you're not overthinking everything. You're not trying to flex.

ill Gates:
Then in those nighttime sessions and in your mixdowns and in your sound design sessions, that's the time to really push yourself and to really try and push your sounds and try and get things as good as they can get.

ill Gates:
But usually when I'm writing, I'll write sometimes like in a hotel room. I mean, some of my best songs I wrote on a hotel TV set. Just plugging the RCAs for my sound card into a hotel TV and just do the mix on a hotel TV. But sometimes it's a vibe. You're jet lagged. You get home from a gig on the East Coast and everybody else is asleep and it's just like, "All right, let's go."

ill Gates:
Sometimes those are the best sessions but when you look at the history of music, it's replete with examples of people making incredible records that are a hit using the most modest technology and the most minimal ingredients. Some of my favorite songs are basically just a drum machine and swearing. But doesn't mean they're not great. I like listening to really, really complicated elaborate music too. I like listening to classical music and stuff, but sometimes you just need some bad words and a bang and 808.

ill Gates:
So really, it depends. But there is always that potential for you to have that amazing, simple idea that just comes together on its own. I mean, I've written tracks that were huge hits with my fans in an hour. I wrote one that I released in half an hour. What I call timer beats. It's like a way of drilling and practicing where I have like a workflow. I use this app for training that they use for training athletes. It's called seconds pro where you can put in a high intensity interval training exercise. I'll go sit down and run this again and again,

(Ill Gates!):
Job sample launchpads for five minutes. Make several sequences for five minutes. Add beats, plus buildups for five minutes. Make a drop for five minutes. Fill out the group for five minutes. Arrange and automate for five minutes.

ill Gates:
And I'll just do that over and over again. If you have half an hour, you can make a beat. I mean, it takes a lot of time to prepare what I call the palette, which is like a set of sounds that are roughly mixed and perhaps there's a knob to change the kick or change the snare or whatever so that you can adjust it. And then each sound, each song has, or each timer beat has its own specific identity that is not reused where there'll be some sound categories I call the spark. The spark is like the inspiring start to the process.

ill Gates:
I keep a folder of sounds that when I hear them, I'm like, "Oh my God. I have so many ideas." So if you start from one of those all the time, you don't have to wait to be inspired.

ill Gates:
You just have a big folder of inspiration on tap. And then there's the face, which is the main... In a pop song, this would be like the bumper sticker chorus hook that you repeat that people know. "Hey, have you heard that song? Yeah, it sounds like this. The lyric that says that." That kind of easily describable thing, that's like the main face, but usually there's a spark to get the process going.

ill Gates:
Then you want to arrange the whole song around the face. But if you literally just have a sound that's a spark, have a sound that's a face, take a template, or I call it a palette because template implies that uses the same one every time. And that it's the default when you load your daw, which I don't recommend. I'll just say, "Okay. Here's my spark. Here's my face. Here's my palette. Half an hour, go." I'll put out tracks like that, that I mastered it later. That's about it.

ill Gates:
I've had tracks like that be hits with my fans. And then I've had other tracks that I spent a year or two years on hundreds of hours that a lot of my fans are like, "Yeah, I can take it or leave it." You got to recognize that that's hard work does not necessarily equal value. We have this idea that when you're working this resistance to taking the easy way, to take into direct way where you're like, "Oh, yeah. I mean, I could do it that way, but that's the easy way. I am a fancy producer and I do not do such things. I'm going to take the fancy way so that people can look upon my work and remark at how fancy I am."

ill Gates:
We all do it. We all do it. It's just one of the many ways that we get in our way. Even just last month I was releasing a couple of different singles and I released this one on Obscure Records, a curator compilation. I had a single on that. It was a pretty awesome single, I thought I had vocals from the Ragga Twins. It was a collab with one of my dojo members, Galactic Groove, who came over and we made it. I played at parties, people would love it.

ill Gates:
Then I had another one, which is a remix I did for fuel board, top 100 rapper, 42 Dugg who did a track with EyeOnEyez who's another fantastic dojo member. He's a mysterious masked trap and rap producer. Last time I worked with him, we did a music video for my Gucci mane remix with him, and it got past 3 million plays on YouTube. So I took that one real, real seriously. And then after I had released these two, like the week after I noticed that I had achieved 6 million total place on SoundCloud.

ill Gates:
I was like, "Well, that's a milestone." And it made me think. I was like, "I should make a beat to celebrate. It made me think of that line from How High with Redman And Method Man, where they're like 6 million ways to die. Choose one. So I was like, "Hey, I wonder if I could find a piece syllable somewhere else in that vocal and chop the piece syllable onto the beginning of ways and make it say 6 million plays instead."

ill Gates:
I did that and made a drum and bass track. I was like, I'm going to make this the loudest, most of obnoxious song in the world. And it's going to have the 6 million plays sample, and it's going to be just of obnoxious loud and really like a jump up drum and bass track. And it's going to be totally cheeky and silly.

ill Gates:
I released the track less than 12 hours later. It was out graphic design and everything. I spent maybe two hours on it. And that track just blew up on my SoundCloud in comparison to the other tracks. I mean, I admittedly did not release it on Spotify, which is where most of the places for the other tracks were because of the clearly illegal sample from How High by Method Man and Redman. I'm not trying to infringe upon their copyright or anything, but that track that I made in two hours was a bigger hit than the other ones on SoundCloud, despite all my best efforts.

Michael Walker:
Oh, what's up guys? So quick intermission from the podcast. I can tell you an awesome free gift that I have for you. I wanted to share something that's not normally available to the public. They normally reserve for our $5,000 clients that we work with personally. This is a presentation called Six Steps to Explode Your Fanbase and Make a Profit With Your Music Online. And specifically, we're going to walk through how to build a paid traffic and automated funnel that's going to allow you to grow your fan base online in the systems designed to get you to your first $5,000 a month with your music.

Michael Walker:
We've invested over $130,000 in the past year to test out different traffic sources and different offers, and really see what's working best right now for musicians. So I think it's going to be hugely valuable for you. So if that's something you're interested in, in the description, there should be a little link that you can click on to go get that.

Michael Walker:
And the other thing I wanted to mention is if you want to do us a huge favor, one thing that really makes a big difference early on when you're creating new podcasts is if people click subscribe, then it basically lets the algorithm know that this is something that's new and noteworthy and that people actually want to hear. So that'll help us reach a lot more people.

Michael Walker:
So if you're getting value from this and you get value from the free trainings, then if you want to do us a favor, I'd really appreciate you click on the subscribe button. All right. Let's get back to the podcast.

Michael Walker:
That's incredible, man. I mean, there's just a bunch of nuggets that you just dropped there. I love the way of describing the concepts around the songs like the face and starting with the spark and having the palette, having the tool set that's available there, so you can just be creative.

Michael Walker:
I mean, there's two big things that I would love to dive in with you specifically. One is I just want to get a little more clarity for myself and for everyone who's listening like exactly Producer Dojo is, and the templates, and the tools and, and how to plug in there. And then secondly, diving into taking the musical creation, and actually building a community, building a tribe and growing a fan base around it that sustains you is obviously a big stumbling block for a lot of people as well.

Michael Walker:
It's not just like, "Okay, the music, but how do I actually build a community around it? So let's start with, could you just share a quick, in a nutshell, what is Producer Dojo and what are the resources that are available to anyone here who's like a music creator?

ill Gates:
Okay, cool. So Producer Dojo is a record label and coaching community where that has grown around the materials that I've presented over the years. My mom is a teacher and my dad is a pro guitarist. So I was steeped in both worlds. And I also am from Canada. Way back when I was first getting my toes wet with touring, I had the option of either spend all of my money that I made from my gigs flying home for three days and then fly back out, or I could find something to do with those three days in the middle of the week.

ill Gates:
So I decided why don't I teach some workshops? I started teaching workshops and very quickly learned that that was something that I was abnormally good at. So people really liked them. Promoters really liked them. It gave me a great way to connect with other producers and to figure out what to do while I was on tour for those middle of the weekdays.

ill Gates:
So over time that grew to the point where there was a lot of demand for these workshops. I decided to film my workshops and put them online. Once I did that, an online community started to form around it, and that really blew up. Then all while I'd been making templates, sound packs, et cetera, as well as being an avid poster on all kinds of different message boards. Ghost produced for a bunch of different people, including that Star Wars gig was like... it doesn't say ill Gates on any of that.

ill Gates:
I'd had my hand in all these different aspects of the business. Because I'm just really into helping people and sharing my knowledge and stuff. Its just come back so much like helping people and being cool to other people in the music industry is definitely the winning strategy guys. That's definitely the winning strategy. I just love sharing my knowledge and stuff with people. And people just hooked me up with great things all the time because I'm always hooking everybody else up with great things.

ill Gates:
So it comes back big time. Because it's a two-part question, how do you build your business? You build your community and business by helping people and making their life better through your art and anything else you can share with them to make their lives better. That's how you make people want to help you and want to help your career.

ill Gates:
So that kind of grew until this community had formed and then the music coming out of this group of producers was so awesome that I was just like, "Wow, we need to start a record label." So I had started a record label initially just for the people I was teaching because I was really proud of them. And I was like, "Yo, music schools should have record labels." So you can see how good the music education is.

ill Gates:
What bigger flex as an educator than to have awesome music on a record label made by the people you taught. Right? So I was like, "Yeah, let's just start like that." But then I was like, "Yo, this record label is getting pretty dope. I got to start putting my music on this record label too." So now with the singles leading up to this album and this album, it's just like... That's partially why it's called The Arrival is like, "I'm on this record label now too."

ill Gates:
It would start as kind of a cool like, "Hey, let's put out some student music because they're good. And I'm proud of them." Now, I have other outside artists on there. We've got a release coming with Herbalistek from Tokyo. They're like this really insane, like sound design, free form bass music act that just makes you like, "What is everybody else doing?" It's one of those artists. So I'm pretty excited to be working with them.

ill Gates:
Then we did the Gucci mane thing and the other 42 Dugg thing. We've got a whole bunch of really exciting music going from there. And then we're working into like a scoring work where we're kind of tackling projects as a team and producing albums with vocalists as a team. And really we're taking the music a lot more seriously. So the label started as kind of like, "Hey, it would be cool to put out some student music." But now it's like, "I'm all in on this shit now."

ill Gates:
It's where all my music is and I've been really hands on about it. So it's primarily a record label, but it grew out of this coaching community and the coaching community, I have like a bunch of people that are called senses that have all been trained by me personally and are intimately familiar with all of the work that's in the dojo, because it's crazy. There's so many workshops and the weekly download. We're coming up on weekly download number 250 in five weeks, which is crazy. Because each one of them is at least an hour to two hours long. And there's sounds and all kinds of stuff that I made for my hardware that's in Ableton format now.

ill Gates:
Anything you could ever want. If you want to learn about vocals, there's like a six part series on vocals. If you want to learn about deejaying, there's like an eight part series on every aspect of deejaying. So it's kind of like Netflix for producers. And that's separate from the dojo. That's the weekly download. Dojo members have access to the weekly download, but the weekly download is just like this huge archive.

ill Gates:
So the dojo is the community that grew up around that material and the record label. But a lot of my teaching materials are available as teaching materials through my producerdj.com marketplace. And if you go to illgates.producerdj.com, you can get a lot of this stuff just as a la carte products. So it's a lot to unpack, but the dojo is basically, it's a results oriented community.

ill Gates:
I think there's not much point in getting a diploma from a music education facility. If you're not like, what are you going to show to your fans? If you just want to make music and get fans and make a living as an independent musician, what good is a diploma? If the stuff you've learned helps you actually finish music, then yeah, it's good. But the creditation doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is how good is the music you're making, right?

ill Gates:
So to advance through the belts in the dojo, they're all personal achievement benchmarks where like you've written tracks that are increasingly challenging and that are increasingly consumable by the public. And then when you start getting your first gig and your first releases on the label, we all celebrate. We have like prizes every month and stuff that we do.

ill Gates:
We have the remix, your life challenge, which is an ongoing habit tracking challenge where we've gamified personal discipline and you get one point for each daily goal, five points for a weekly goal, et cetera. We bring in sponsors to give away fabulous prizes. For example, a couple of months ago, we gave away a Native Instruments Maschine Plus to one of our members who was making great improvements in their life and in their music.

ill Gates:
We have a party every month and we celebrate and we give people awesome tools. Even if you don't win, you're totally winning because it's like, "Aw, I became disciplined and made lots of progress on my goals for nothing." It's like, of course, everybody wins. Right? So yeah. It's really fun. It really gets results. There's lots of very talented artists that have taken my courses. People like Beats Antique, Illenium, Chi Jones, Minnesota, Mimosa. I mean, all kinds of artists have studied my material. Seal uses a bunch of my stuff. But yeah, it's a great community and there's a lot of materials of all kinds like templates, sound patches, et cetera.

ill Gates:
So if you just want to check it out, theweeklydownload.com is the most affordable and easy way. And that gets you access to the, probably by the time this comes out 250 different episodes, sound packs, et cetera. We have all kinds of different guests on who share amazing things. So The Weekly Download is the place to start. That's five bucks a week. Actually, I was getting pirated. One of my friends was like, "Oh, your Weekly Download archive is getting pirated, dude. You should go check it out."

ill Gates:
I went to the site and the first comment was like, "Hey, this was 53 gigs, and most of it's broken. There's some weird torrent for a TV show that nobody asked for. I was like, "Okay, sweet. Let me scroll down." And the second comment is, "You guys should just buy this. It's only five bucks a week. You can go to the loud live classes and get all of them, and everything works. It's the best training deal on the internet."

ill Gates:
And that's what they said on the pirate website when they could get my for free. So I was like, "Okay, that's pretty sick. So that's theweeklydownload.com. That's the most bang for your buck, like 250 sound packs and lessons and everything for five bucks a week. It's pretty gangbusters and it just gets better and better. Then the dojo is kind of like it's pretty much application only at this point because there's too many people and it gets to be a lot to manage.

ill Gates:
And that's kind of more growing into basically my studio of producers who work under me on various projects. So it's kind of morphing to that. Once you get to be a black belt or whatever, you could still access the work opportunities. I'm basically working with different film scoring houses and record labels and stuff where we post these gig opportunities, and then all the members of the dojo will take a crack at it and the best ones get accepted for these gigs.

ill Gates:
It's hard to compete with. If you're going to someone who's scoring films and they have three dudes with the amount of ideas and the diversity of three dudes, and then you post the same gig to the dojo and you can have 150 talented people of all different kinds who make all different genres of music will take a crack at it. It's tough to compete with that. Right?

ill Gates:
So that has been really kind of opening up. I think about how did Michaelangelo and Leonardo DaVinci and Andy Warhol and all those people, how they did it? They got a team of people. That's how they did all that amazing stuff is they had a team of people with a shared vision and everything. So the dojo has been morphing from like... It's been morphing more into a record label and production house, but the coaching is... The materials are still there and I still do the classes every week.

ill Gates:
There are lots of senses that can train people, but I don't really try to make money off of the other senseis training and stuff. Because it's just like the margins, aren't that great.

ill Gates:
It just doesn't make sense. If you want to really make money from educational material, you just sell digital courses or sound packs or whatever, where you don't have to have all this human time and management to pay for. The Weekly Download makes more money than the coaching community by a lot because there's way less moving parts and it's just output only.

ill Gates:
So that rocks. And especially now that we're up to 250, it's a real no-brainer in terms of it being a good deal. It's becoming easier and easier for the momentum of that to kind of carry things along. But the coaching community is still there. And a lot of the art and music that's been coming out of it has been great. Yeah, it's a whole lot of fun and a lot of the members are setting up their own careers and starting to sell their own sample packs and stuff at the producerdj.com marketplace where people can get their artist name dot producerdj.com. And they can still anything like teaching time, merch, show tickets, sound packs, stems, music, et cetera. And all the accounting is done by the website.

ill Gates:
Let's say you and I do a collab and we have a single and I want to give 10% to our mixing engineer and I'm going to get 45% to you and 45% to me. You can put all those splits into the site and then it splits the money at the point of sale. So you don't have to like chase anyone around for money or whatever. And then the site only takes 10%. It's as cost-effective as Bandcamp, but with like way more features because we built it without investors. So we don't have to answer to some dude from wherever who lent us millions of dollars.

ill Gates:
It's all built by musicians for musicians. No investors, no middleman. It's not open to the public yet, but it's popping off. People are using it. People are making money and I can't wait to launch it properly. We just got to do a couple legal things to make sure that somebody starts selling Brittany Spears remixes to RIAA not going to burn my house down, stuff like that. Yeah. We're just doing a couple of legal things and trademark things.

ill Gates:
We finally got the Producer Dojo trademark that we've been waiting on for so long because there was a dojo productions that used to be a rap label. And then I guess the guy's girlfriend owned the trademark for it and she hated him and they broke up. She was trying to get everything she could out of this trademark. She wouldn't give him his trademark.

ill Gates:
So I talked to the guy and he's like, "I can't do anything, man. She's my ex. She hates me. I don't know what to do." But his music was pretty dope too. I was like, "Aw, man. I don't want to be at odds with you." He's like, "I know. My ex-girlfriend is mean." So we finally got the trademark office to be like, "Yeah. Dojo Productions and Producer Dojo are separate things. That's cool."

ill Gates:
They don't see it as the conflict anymore, but it took so much lawyer time. Oh my God, it was so boring. But it's done. So we're going to have a pretty seductive podcast soon, which is going to be exciting.

Michael Walker:
Wow, man. Holy cow.

ill Gates:
Yeah. Sorry for these long answers, dude. short answers with me.

Michael Walker:
No, it's fantastic. Yeah. I feel like you're the Energizer bunny who can just keep going. It's all great stuff. I mean, keep it coming. Yeah. That's super impressive. I mean, what's so cool is I love the movement that you've created. You really created this community and it feels like... Like you said, it's by musicians for musicians and there's really a lot of authenticity, I think that comes from that approach. So it's really, really cool. And I think it's great that it really is so organically built up around these workshops that you started doing yourself on your off days. So let's move on to the second part of the question, which I know is a common question that a lot of people are asking because there's so much revolution, there's so much change just because of the internet and the different things that are available nowadays.

Michael Walker:
But also there's a lot of challenges in terms of how do we actually stand out in the sea of information and the sea of music that is the, the internet today. So for anyone who's listening who maybe they're at this point where they've invested a lot of time and energy into honing their craft and they have maybe an EP of songs that they feel really proud of, that they've recorded and they're ready to start growing an audience and start to turn into a career. What would your recommendations be for them when they're just getting started out?

ill Gates:
Okay. You should definitely read the book, How To Make It In The New Music Industry by Ari Herstand. That book has some of the best and most current advice for musicians of all genres, about how to deal with just... I mean, deal with a lot of the misconceptions based on kind of how things used to work and then also really understand what would it takes to find your own lane and all this. But I was having a conversation with a friend of mine the other day and he was like, "Yeah it looks like AI is just replacing all of these tasks in music. How worried are you about this?

ill Gates:
I don't think you should fear AIs with music because as much as people do connect with the music, they connect far more with the individual than they do with the music. There are lots of people who do not have a presence as an individual or as a brand and have incredible music that will just stop you in your tracks, but they can't get anybody to listen to it. And then there are other people who make hot garbage, who are what really vibrant individuals that people connect with on social media. And they have tons of fans.

ill Gates:
So I hate to be the bearer of what you don't want to hear, but as much as it is all about the music, it's not really all about the music, it's all about you and how you can make people feel, right? Because people, they're not listening to you for you. They're not listening to your music for its merits. They're listening to your music for how it makes them feel. And they're connecting with you for how you make them feel.

ill Gates:
And if you want people to care, you've got to make them feel good. This is true when you're trying to open up job opportunities in the music field, whether you're trying to get a book or you're trying to get in with a management company or an agency or a promoter or whatever. It's true when you're trying to get fans. It's true throughout your life. You've got to learn how to make people like you.

ill Gates:
One of the best ways that you can do that is by making yourself useful and by being a thoughtful and cool person. I get so many people who are like, "Okay, I've got this demo. How do I get all the email addresses of every blogger in the world?" You could do a reverse Google image search, which is a very good technique where you take an album cover for our relevant artists and you can put it into the... You drag the actual JPEG into the search engine of Google images. And it'll show you where that JPEG appears on the internet. You can learn which bloggers are in management companies and blah, blah, blah, are involved in an artist you like.

ill Gates:
But even if you have all those email addresses and you come up to us people with palms out and you're just like, "Hey. Here, check out my mix tape. What can you do for me? What can you do for me? What can you do for me?" That shit is annoying. Nobody wants to help you when you're just walking around with and people close their ears. They closed their inboxes. They're done. They're done with that. I get so many promos that I have no interest in listening to, and I'll never listen to them because it's clear that that person only cares about what they can get out of me.

ill Gates:
When you get anywhere in the music business, you're going to encounter lots of that too. And that's just how it is. I don't think it'll ever go away. But the people who I end up hooking up, I end up listening to their demos, et cetera are people come up and they're like, "Hey, I like what you do. I'm picking up what you're putting down and how can I help?" 

ill Gates:
Sometimes we'll figure out like, "Oh. Hey, I need to get such and such a video edited or maybe I need someone to help me promote a show when I'm coming to a certain town or maybe we just need some help at the dojo doing any number of tasks, graphic design, or putting together spreadsheets, doing research. There's 1,000,001 things that everyone in the music industry could totally use your help with.

ill Gates:
And this is true even of fairly established record labels managers, et cetera. They're all taken on interns all the time. You see a lot of people that are acting like unpaid intern is just like the most criminal thing. And it's so exploitative and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, there are times when it is, but if someone's running a really cool record label, that's like a closed shop, and I want to get their attention, I'm not going to be like, "Hey, when are you going to put on your record label? I got a demo. I have a master. It's really nice. Look at the color. It's a picture of me. I got my sunglasses on. When are you going to put me on a record label?"

ill Gates:
I'll be like, "Hey, you guys are really dope. I've been listening to your music all the time. I love the way you did this, that and this." So you show them that you actually give a shit and that you know what's going on. Then you say, "Hey, I want to help you in any way that I can. Is there anything that you could use my help with?" That might end up meaning you have to do a bunch of work for free and whatever. But through doing that, you'll get to know if that person is worth investing any more of your time and energy, or if they are just trying to exploit you.

ill Gates:
Especially if you're just interning to get a foot in the door, you can just bail at any time. You're not going to get marked on it. It's not like for school, you can just be like, "You know what, that was rude. I'm out of here. You can do that at any time." When you help people to make connections, you make way better and way more meaningful connections and other people are going to want to help you. Right? I mean, for me, that's really been the real ticket.

ill Gates:
I have really just this giant archive of... If someone's like, "Hey, do you have any racks I can use in my DJ set with Ableton?" I'm like, "Sure, here you go." And they're like, "Oh, can you help me out with my template?" "Yep." "Any advice for how to mix this turndown?" "Yeah, sure." I have been teaching and helping people for so long that they're like other artists, even established artists, I'm like, "Hey, do you want all the contact instruments I made with my fetishistic collection of modular sense? Would you like to use those in your songs?"

ill Gates:
Even pretty established artists are like, "Oh, fuck yeah. Thanks, dude." And then next thing you know, they're playing my record and hooking me up with press or whatever. You you just got to help people. And organically one thing will lead to another. Stop trying to get some kind of social media hacker shortcut because it's whack. It's not about shortcuts. It is a marathon.

ill Gates:
The sooner you start thinking of it as a marathon and the sooner you start playing the long game, the further you'll go. But this whole instant gratification like shortcut, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. It might sell shit that you see in Instagram ads, but it's not really how the music business works.

ill Gates:
And the people that you see where someone walks them in, they paid their dues, man. People are just taking some kid off the street and walking them into some multi-million dollar music career. Hell, no. Those people have paid their dues. They've hustled. They've put in the time. Because you have to prove yourself that you're worth someone giving that opportunity to you.

ill Gates:
There's no magic fairy in a suit going to be like, "Hey, kid. You got talent. With your talent and my business smarts, we'll crack this industry like an egg." So really just focus on how you make people feel, make people feel good, learn to make people like you. Stop trying to trick them. Stop trying to take shortcuts. Be useful to people. Pay your dues, help people out. Being a cool person and being helpful, opens all the doors.

ill Gates:
There's definitely promotional strategies and stuff, but people will call anything hacking because it sounds sexy when you're talking about it. But even your tour hacking thing, it's like, you're going out there, you're meeting people. You're making them like you. You're being nice to them. You're making them care about your band, and you're putting in the work. Yeah, it's a strategy. And calling it hacking is successful. Is it like a successful way to communicate this? But you're not cheating. Everybody's trying to cheat. You can't cheat. It doesn't work. It doesn't work.

ill Gates:
You do get people like Tekashi69, who just exploited every trick in the book to get to the top. Are people really listening to his music all the time? I know people who are say they're fascinated by the train wreck, dumpster fire of his life and just the phenomenon of him. But are people really listening to Tekashi69, like cool people? Are they really listening to Tekashi69 all day? I don't know. I don't know.

Michael Walker:
That's so good, man. You're so on point. There's an energy shift that anyone can feel when someone is just thinking about me, me, me, me, me, me, me. What can I get? What can I get? What can I get? And there's an instant inner energy shift that happens when someone is really focusing on how can I provide value? How can I help? How can I be of service? It's like the flood gates really open up when that's the approach that that comes out.

Michael Walker:
So I think that you are an excellent example of that principle in action. So I really appreciate you being here, sharing all of these lessons that you've learned. For anyone who's listening or watching this right now, what would be the best place for them to go to connect more and to learn more if they want to dive deeper into Producer Dojo?

ill Gates:
Okay, cool. So there's a few different places, but if you want to know more about my music, my tour dates, et cetera, you want to connect with me, ill Gates, the artist, illgates.com. If you want to learn more about producer dojo, go to producerdojo.com. And if you want to get access to the best collection of my training materials at the most affordable price, go to theweeklydownload.com. So those are the three. So there's my training materials, just in and of themselves, which are at theweeklydownload.com.

ill Gates:
There's the record label and community, which is at producerdojo.com. And then there's me, the artist, which is at illgates.com. And then the marketplace site where the members of Producer Dojo vend their own products, and you can buy just one-off products as opposed to getting subscription access to the full weekly download, that's producerdj.com.

ill Gates:
And the idea behind producerdj.com was like you could have one URL on your business card rather than like Facebook slash this, Instagram slash that. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you think about the old days, if you're a blacksmith, your name will be John Smith, or if you're like a carpenter you'd be like Jane Carpenter, right? So if you're a producer DJ, you get artist name dot producerdj.com. That's the URL that you get for your profile. It's a place where you can get your fans, everything that they need, and then you can sell any product that you want, and you can configure it in any way that you want. That's the big project that I've been working on towards for a decade. And the community has been helping me to build. So if you want to just check out that project, my profile is iLL Gates, illgates.producerdj.com. But illgates.com is me. Producerdojo.com is the community and record label, and theweeklydownload.com is my collection of educational materials.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. Cool, man. So we'll also throw out the links in the description and the show notes so that you guys have easy access to it. Yeah, man. Thanks again. I always appreciate when I can talk with someone like you, that just cuts all the BS and just says it like it is and speaks to really the foundational truth of where success comes from. A lot of times you need to dig deep, right? It's not easy. It's not necessarily the sexiest thing, those things that are, like you said, cliches for a reason. So I appreciate you being a source of truth and really helping to build this community to help artists, because I think there's a big need for it. And that's why the movement is happening in the first place.

ill Gates:
And thank you for having me on. It's an honor to be on the Modern Musician Podcast. I'll see you out there. I'll see you. It's really cool. It's really cool what you're doing. It's clear that you're on the team of musicians everywhere. I feel like when musicians go out in the world, they know you're cheering them on and that's rad, man. It's good to have people like you in our corner. So hey, on behalf of musicians everywhere, thank you for everything you do.

Michael Walker:
Thanks, man. That means a lot. I really appreciate that.

ill Gates:
Word up. All right. Lots of love. Thanks for listening, everybody. Have a nice day.

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 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, when you leave us an honest review, it's going to help us reach more musicians like you who want to take the music career to the next level. The time to be a modern musician is now, and I'll look forward to seeing you on our next episode.