Chris SD:
Somebody who is twice as lazy as you, has the upper hand, if they know something important that you don't. Music licensing is exactly the same way. It's knowing what other people don't know and then of course, doing those things that puts you to the head of the pack.

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 slowly getting better. If you have high quality music, but you just don't know the best way to promote yourself so they can reach the right people and generate 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. What is up everyone? I'm here with the one and only Chris SD from Sync Songwriter. Normally what I see Chris, he's halfway across the world on his sailboat somewhere. So it's rare that I see him in-house like this, but hey, man, how are you doing today? Welcome.

Chris SD:
I'm doing great, Michael. Thank you so much for this. This is great. That intro that you just had on there, we're going to hire you guys to do that for us from now on. That looked great. It'd be even better if it went two minutes long, because it looked so cool. It felt like I was a real rockstar there.

Michael Walker:
Okay, everyone, we're going to go back to the intro. We're going to loop it for two minutes straight though.

Chris SD:
Nice.

Michael Walker:
Awesome.

Chris SD:
Yeah, it's great to be here and, yeah, it's for the sailboat, just so you guys know really quickly, we're going to be talking about sync, right? We're going to be talking about licensing your music to TV and film. And one of the cool things that is amazing about working in music licensing, is you don't have to tour. You don't have to get up and get together with your band or whatever it is. You can produce music from home and you can get it into TV and film, and get paid really good money. You can build your reputation online with the fans that see you on your show.

Chris SD:
They'll shazam your song when you're on a show that's got a million viewers, that's the kind of fan-building you can do and you build your reputation in the industry. So I'm a huge fan, had a lot of success in music licensing. I'm telling you all of that to say that I get to sail around on my sailboat with my family and it's currently down in Mexico. It's going to be really hot in the summer there, so we're doing some traveling further north, but you can absolutely do that kind of stuff when you're licensing your music. Looking forward to jumping in there and answering any questions you guys have. Just before we hand it back to Mike here, I just want to say that I started off as a music producer, was fortunate enough to win some awards and all of that.

Chris SD:
And my whole mission is to help any songwriters and you guys need to be heard. You need to get your music out there. There are amazing songs that are lost, right? Everybody and their dog has an album out and there's one amazing way to get your music out there, obviously besides what Michael teaches, which is incredible, which completes what I do in sync, but sync licensing, you probably have heard of it. It's a popular thing. It's a great thing. So looking forward to talking to you about that today and answering any questions that you've got to help you get your message out there.

Michael Walker:
Thanks, man. Yeah. I'm super excited to dive into it. And, yeah, one way that I got to introduce the event was just talking about how Einstein's quote, "Everyone's a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, then it could think it's whole life it's stupid." But as a way to illustrate though, there's all these different areas of expertise and there's things like music licensing where I have no idea. I don't have any experience within that. So I'm so grateful to be connected. I remember the first time that we met at a Jeff Walker event and who would've thunk that five years later, we'd be here right now doing this to a few 100 people. And it's just so cool. I so appreciate you and the platform you've built, and the ripple effect that you've made by teaching sync licensing, which is such a huge opportunity for artists.

Michael Walker:
And it's something that's so complimentary to all the other stuff that you guys are going to be learning today. And if you're looking to significantly shorten your learning curve and to significantly increase your odds of success in the world of sync, then you're in the right place right now. So I'm super excited to talk more about it. So let me do a proper intro to you. I have this nice bio that I already put together. I already know how much of a badass you are, but just so everyone else knows. So Chris SD is an award-winning music producer. He's worked on five albums that have won Juno Awards which, if you're not from Canada, it's basically the Canadian Grammys, so it's a pretty big deal. Along with seven nominations. And he started Sync Songwriter so that he could reach musicians around the world and help them specifically with what he talked about around sync licensing.

Michael Walker:
He has a five-step process that allows you to get your music synced successfully. And his students have had their music's license and TV shows, movies and ads on networks. You've heard of ABC, Fox, HBO, NBC, Netflix, Hulu, et cetera. So this is a man who is not just teaching you from theory, but based on real-world experience, real-world results. So I'm super excited to dig in today and, Chris, maybe to start out, there's probably quite a few people here who've connected with you before, or maybe you're in Chris's community, but for anyone who this is the first time meeting you, maybe you could introduce yourself quickly and just share a little bit about yourself and how you got started with Sync Songwriter.

Chris SD:
Yeah. You bet. Thank you for the pre-intro then. That was awesome. So basically I'll keep this in a nutshell, right? Because we want to jump into how you guys can do what you do in music licensing. So essentially, being a music producer in the studio, I work with some bigger rock stars and stuff like that. And I also work with indie bands and working with indie bands, we would put our blood, sweat, and tears into records, right? So obviously I was donating time to them and I believed in the music, and we would just work really hard and put out what I thought was an amazing record, something that was really great. And every time, almost every single time, it would go off into the ether and crickets, nothing would happen. A lot of musicians nowadays, I would venture into the 90 percentile of musicians, the same thing happens too.

Chris SD:
You're all jazzed. You're all excited. You're doing your record. You're producing, you're at home or in your local studio, and then what happens? How do you get it out there? What do you do with it? You spend time and money is time. And it's just not a pleasant experience if it happens over and over again. So I was trying to think of how can I help this one record that I'd produced? And I'd heard about this thing called music licensing. And it was back when it was just getting going. It was just starting out. I thought, "Wow, I've got some positioning in the industry. I'm pretty well known. This should be a cinch. Should be really easy. I'm just going to call up these people called music supervisors that I just learned about, and I'm going to help get this record out there."

Chris SD:
So I did. I started cold calling and name dropping wherever I could just to help the record out and whatever, and nothing. It was just super difficult to connect with these music supervisors. So what I did is, I actually got together with some music supervisors and said, "Hey," I started going out where they went out and I bribed and cajoled, and whatever I could, to say, "What are the ways that people can get their music to you? And specifically me, I'm trying to reach you. Just in general, what are some of these things?" And they basically gave me the whole backstory to what they do, how they do what they do, and how to reach them and make them listen to you. Because they get thousands and thousands of submissions all the time. And if you don't hear back from a music supervisor if you send something, that's totally normal.

Chris SD:
So fast forward, I decided that I needed to help artists do that. And I had some success starting to help them get their music into TV and film, that gave them money. People end up in the charts with one good placement, just like that. So it's really very simple, very straightforward. You get paid in the thousands of dollars and then you build your fan base and then you build your reputation by the fact that the supervisors are saying, "Hey, you know what? It was so easy working with them. I could do this again with them. They're an easy call." Right? "Hey, do you have something else like this?" And that's how the syncs go consecutively, one after the other. And the super cool thing about licensing your music, is you can use the same song. So you got one song, you can license it multiple times.

Chris SD:
It doesn't have to be a different song for each thing. You can have the same song, 10 shows, four movies, and three ads. Okay? So that's very cool. If you got one hit or one really strong track, you can make that happen over and over again. So then I decided I needed to reach more songwriters, move from Canada to Los Angeles. My wife and I got pregnant with our daughter there, and I just decided I'm not going to spend 12, 14-hour days in studios anymore, I'm going to help musicians get their music into TV and film, and that is how Sync Songwriter came about.

Michael Walker:
Oh, good. What I love about licensing, or at least one of the things that sticks out, is this idea of taking this asset that you've already created, right? You put your blood, sweat, and tears into your music. A lot of people here might have an album or two albums that they've invested a significant amount of money. The quality of the music is not the problem and you can take this asset that you've already created and you essentially repurpose it in a way that provides more value to this whole other industry that's different from the music industry. And so I think that's such a peanut butter and jelly sort of way to look internally and see what is the valuable assets that I've created already, that I can repurpose and that I can leverage more? Same thing with NFTs now.

Michael Walker:
I think that using your music, you've already recorded, putting them in NFTs. That's like a whole other conversation, we'll geek out about it. I think that's like the keynote for a presentation that we'll wrap up with. But Chris, so one thing I want to lead or intro into is, I know you had mentioned, I wondered in our green room, you're talking about how there's also this big need when it comes to licensing, I would love to maybe have just a snippet of really the core foundation of success with licensing, so that people could understand at a high level. But I know that you mentioned how important it is to really dial in their production, especially as it relates to getting their songs synced and licensed. So maybe you could introduce a little bit about what you had in mind for presenting today.

Chris SD:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Thanks, Mike. So I was thinking about how I could be most valuable to you guys in the short time that we have. We could talk all day, two days, we could talk a week about this stuff. There's a lot to know and there's a lot to understand. The thing is, it's not complicated, right? So it's not something that you have to go to school for and get a law degree on. It's just things you have to know. Now, somebody who is twice as lazy as you has the upper hand, if they know something important that you don't. Okay? Now that's why education is so important. I'm not talking about general education, but just knowing things and understanding it. Music licensing is exactly the same way. It's knowing what other people don't know and then of course doing those things that puts you to the head of the pack.

Chris SD:
So don't think of it like an easy button. Don't think of it like something where, "If I know this thing, then I'm going to just magically get these results," and so on. Life's not like that. You guys know that. What it does do though, is it puts you from the back of the class, to the front of the class, right? Or I should say the middle-back of the class. Sitting in the back of the class, where I used to sit, honestly, in high school, people in the very back, are either going to go to jail or they're going to become Steve Jobs. There's some creative people in the back of the class, but you don't want to be in the herd. You don't want to be stuck in the herd. Okay? There's a benefit to that sometimes, not a music licensing. You want to stick out the crowd. The ways to stick out of the crowd, are earning the trust of music supervisors, for one. All right?

Chris SD:
The other way is to get a music library or a licensing agent to believe in you, and you sign to them and let them do the work. Now, the small disadvantages of going with a library and a licensing agent, is that you've got to give away a chunk of your revenue, right? That's a big one. The second big one is that they build their reputation on the back of your music. What that means is, that they're the ones who always get the sync placement. So let's pretend Mike's the studio and I'm the licensing agent. Mike calls me up and he's got, "Chris, I've got this movie. Do you have something for me?" I'm like, "Yeah, Mike, of course. I got these 10 songs. I'm going to send them to you. Check them out. Let me know what you think." So Mike gets them, decides to pick one.

Chris SD:
They go into a spotting session. The show runners agree, "Hey, that's a great fit for this scene." Boom. Mike calls me back, "Chris. That was amazing." So Mike's the music supervisor on the project. And, "Chris, that was awesome. Dude. That's great. I'm going to send you the check." And I'm like, "Great." I call you up because I signed you, you're the artist. I've got your music and I call you up and I say, "Hey, I got you a sync placement." And you're like, "Whoa, awesome." You're out, going for dinner. You're calling your friends and you're, "Tune in at this time. We're going to watch it." It's great. It's awesome. You get a check in the mail. You watch it on TV or wherever. If it's an ad or maybe even go to the theater, and you see that, and then, then what, right?

Chris SD:
What comes next? What do you do? You phone me back up and you say, "Chris, that was amazing. You've got me the sync placement. So now what? How do I get more?" And I'm like, "Just hold your horses. I'm working on it," which I am, I'm pitching around. The reality though is, Michael calls me back up and says, "Chris, we're working on a new movie," or, "on a show where we got these five shows. What do you have?" And I'm like, "Okay, what's it about?" And all this other stuff, Mike tells me and I'm like, "Great." So I go to my roster of thousands of songs and I pick the best ones for me. The best ones that are going to get me the sync because I'm taking a chunk of musicians' income off each one. Now I'm not saying that licensing agents are evil, they're just doing their job, right?

Chris SD:
They're not going to look at you, the musician, and say, "We got one placement with you. I'm just going to pick you from now on for..." There's no reason, no motivation. So they go into their big roster and they pick another one, and then I call Mike up, "Hey, I got 10 songs to you, Mike." Mike says, "Awesome. That's great." And then they pick one and he's loving on me. He's like, "Chris, you are amazing. I'm going to keep calling you." You didn't get the sync that time. I got the sync. So you do not build your own reputation in the industry by going that route. And that's a big one because the people who succeed, the musicians who succeed, going through music supervisors directly to the source, are the ones who have a reputation.

Chris SD:
The first sync is the hardest but once you get that first sync under your belt, you gain that reputation with them. You know how to work with them. You understand the lingo, you understand how everything works. They can trust you. They can trust you as an indie songwriter. Now, you might be saying, "Why don't they trust me? And if I send stuff, I'm just writing at home." Imagine a situation... One example, you submit a song. It goes to the music supervisor, music supervisor does the whole thing, puts it in the show. And then out of the woodwork, your bass player, or whoever was in the room at the time, sees money signs. And they say, "Hey, I was in the room. I co-wrote that." And out of the woodwork, they come and then the music supervisor now can't use the song, it's already been put in the show. They lose their job.

Chris SD:
They don't like you. It's not good. And these nightmare situations happen and there's other variations of that. So they have to look at you like a pro, and that's one reason why they like licensing agents and libraries, because they act as a filter. They act as a quality control and they act as a business crossing Ts, dotting Is kind of thing. So in your situation, if you want to get connected with music supervisors, you have to learn how to earn their trust. So that's one big thing that I show people how to do. Okay. So the second big thing, we'll jump into this now, the biggest pitfall. So when I was thinking about how do we spend this time on the most valuable nitty gritty stuff that you guys can get off this call and actually do? This is what it is.

Chris SD:
So the biggest pitfall that musicians have in sync licensing is their music production. And the thing about it, it's the simplest thing to avoid. Because the hardest part for you guys is writing the songs, coming up with the... Whatever, you guys are the magicians. You guys are magic that way. You've got the creativity to do that sort of thing, to come up with these amazing songs that people love. So producing your song is, if you screw it up, you can just go back and redo it. If you get into a garage band or you're in a million dollar studio, it doesn't matter. If you have a bad day in the studio and you come back and you're like, "Oh, man, I can sing that better," Or, "That's a weird bass sound," or, "I need to reprogram my beats." No one's there, you can fix it.

Chris SD:
You can't fix a bad song. So the problem that happens in sync is, let's pretend you wrote the best song in the world, or at least best song for 2022, 2023. You submit that song and the supervisor puts the track on and they play it. They start listening to it. If the production level is not above the threshold, if the track doesn't sound like everything else that's getting into TV and film, then out it goes, onto the next track. They don't even listen to it. They don't even get into the song. It literally could be the biggest musical event of the year and it's not going to happen for you if you don't have your music production chops down. Now, it doesn't mean, like I said, you have to go to recording school and learn to be a great producer and all that, that stuff takes practice and there's ways of doing these.

Chris SD:
In fact, recently just finished a little mini course on how to produce your music for sync. You can absolutely learn it. It's not rocket science. I was a producer forever and it's not about the latest gear, the little tweaky things that you do, knowing all the tech stuff, it's what's between your ears, okay? It's what's between your ears that matters. So I want to deep dive on two of the most important things. So there's several things in music production that we can do, but we don't have time to cover them all, but I'm going to dive into two of them. So the first one is you want to make sure that you have build in your song. That's a pretty straightforward one. So what that means is, you want to make sure that your song takes the listener to different places as the song is going and builds the intensity of something.

Chris SD:
Now it doesn't mean that you got to start with an acoustic guitar at the beginning and end up with a big orchestra at the end, or anything like that. It's nothing to do with that. That's a part of it, but it's not really what I'm referring to. It's just like in anything. Think about how I'm talking right now. I'm using inflection. I'm using some emphasis in certain places. I'm trying to pause, not thinking about doing it. I'm talking like you guys do normally, but we are creatures of communication and my voice goes up. And when I'm saying a certain thing and it drops. When I finish a sentence, I didn't there paused. We all know it's not the end of a sentence. All of those things are musical, right? They're all music. Music is an emphasis of what we already communicate with. If you listen to someone speaking, it's music.

Chris SD:
So we have learned to enhance that and make that into a much more incredible art form. So always think about it in terms of making a point. You're making a point with your music. Now it's not to say that if you come up with a super catchy beat and one little guitar riff, that you can't get it into TV and film. You've heard ads like that. It's like a 15-second, 10-second thing, ... whatever. And it just loops and repeats, and then it's over. So that's just for a quick candy. That's like having a lollipop and that feels good. But if you want to get into real filming situations in shows where there's a scene, they want to build the drama on the back of your music. You need to have build within it. So the way they cut music into scenes, is they don't take your whole song and use the song from start to finish unless you have an end credit, right?

Chris SD:
So if you don't have an end credit and they use your scene for, let's say it's a couple and they're having a falling out, they're sitting in a park, it's snowing, just making all this up, and they're talking, your song will come in as an instrumental, usually underneath, nice and quiet. And of course, the camera's moving towards them, getting closer. Maybe it's an establishing shot and then it starts to pull in closer to them as they're discussing things, that's build, that's visual build. And the intensity of their voices go up. The intensity of the situation starts to come to light. That's build, right? Your music has to build with that drama. It's got to follow that, and support it, and also propel it. Music is actually arguably more important to the emotional response in a show, or movie, or ad, than the visual.

Chris SD:
Without the music, it's nothing. So your music has to do that. Now you say, "Chris, they're only using 45 seconds or two minutes of my song." The sound editors going to be chopping the music together and condensing your song, truncating it. They're going to grab a bit of the verse here, going to grab some pre-chorus. They're going to maybe a chorus, and then they might slap on the last chorus because you were smart and you built it. And they're going to edge that up as a double out, it's going to jump up a level for when the big blow happens. One of them stands up, walks away in the snow and the other one's left to their chagrin.

Chris SD:
They are making a point on the screen with that scene, with that drama. You need to make a point with every song that you do, that it's not just write some lyrics and then play music to it. Is what are you singing about? What are you doing? How are you doing what you do? Make sure that the point of what you're saying gets made. So when you're talking about whatever it is that you're discussing, whatever subject that your song is about, that the music is hammering that home, right? At least by the end. It doesn't again, have to be from a whisper to a roar. As it goes, it has to do that in the build. So always think about that.

Chris SD:
I would really seriously take a note, write that down and remember, "How am I saying this emotionally, the way I do it?" If I'm trying to emphasize something to you right now, I'm raising my voice a little bit and I'm trying to add some inflection in my voice, do that with your... Music supervisors will love you for that and it will massively put you in front of everybody else, who's just saying, "Formulaically, I'm going to have an intro. I'm going to have a verse, a pre-chorus and a chorus, the western world way of making music." Use build and not isn't just dynamic build, but in how to make a point, it's super, super important.

Michael Walker:
All right, let's take a quick break from the podcast. I can tell you about a free special offer they're doing right now, exclusively for our podcast listeners. So if you get a ton of value from the show, but you want to take your music career to the next level, connect with the community of driven musicians and connect with the music mentors directly that we have on this podcast. Or if you just want to know the best way to market your music and grow an audience right now, then this is going to be perfect for you. So right now we're offering a free two-week trial to our music mentor coaching program. And if you sign up in the show notes below, you're going to get access to our entire music mentor content vault for free.

Michael Walker:
The vault's organized into four different content pillars. The first being the music, then the artist, the fans, and last but not least, the business. When you sign up, you unlock our best in-depth master classes from a network of world-class musicians and industry experts on the most cutting edge strategies right now for growing your music business. On top of that, you'll get access to our weekly live masterminds, where our highest level of Modern Musician coaches teach you exactly what they're doing to make an income and an impact with their music. Then once a month, we're going to have our music mentor spotlight series.

Michael Walker:
And that's what we're going to bring on some of the world's biggest and best artist coaches, successful musicians to teach you what's working right now. And one of the most amazing parts is that you can get your questions answered live by these top-level music mentors. So a lot of the people that you hear right here on the podcast, are there live interacting with you personally. So imagine being able to connect with them directly. On top of all that, you'll get access to our private music mentor community. And this is definitely one of my favorite parts of music mentor and maybe the most valuable, is that you're going to have this community where you can network with other artists and link up, collaborate, ask questions, get support, and discuss everything related to your music career.

Michael Walker:
So if you're curious and you want to take advantage of the free trial, then go click on the link in the show notes right now, sign up for free. From there, you can check out all of the amazing content, connect with the community, and sign up for the live master classes that happen every week. This is a gift for listening to our podcast, supporting the show. So don't miss it out. Go sign up for free now, and let's get back to our interview. First of all, I love how just hearing your perspective in the way that you communicate this. Yeah, I think that's one thing that is really helpful. Just thinking about it from the point of view of the supervisors and it's just a natural because you have the experience, but the way you're describing how music is used within TV and film, it just is super connected with what they're using it for.

Michael Walker:
So that's really fascinating, interesting. And what you pointed to with how big of an impact music makes on the emotional point of the visual, I think is so fascinating. Yeah. I wonder if you have something like this or if you don't, maybe you could create it because it would be interesting to see something like this on your website, where maybe it's like the same film scene, but done with the right soundtrack. And then if you put a completely different soundtrack on it and just use that as a way to illustrate that point of how big of an impact the music soundtrack has on the film. It could be interesting thing.

Chris SD:
Yeah. That's awesome you caught onto that, Michael. So for everybody out there, I, of course, teach this stuff, right? So I have a program, just like Michael does and other people. So we're not here to talk about that today. But within the program I have what are called spotting sessions with music supervisors. So a big part of my program is I literally connect you directly to music supervisors, not just any music supervisors, but top ones. So you connect, you meet them personally. You get to submit your music to them and talk about it with them. So that's big.

Chris SD:
And we also have these little spotting sessions within the program where we do exactly that, Mike, as you were just pointing out, is we show people a music supervisor does. I don't do it. Why should I do it? I'm a music supervisor. So we bring on a real music supervisor, they have to get permission for a particular show or whatever, and then they run through, "Here's how we chose the song for the scene. And here were the contender songs," and then they do it for you, so you can hear exactly what they're thinking and they tell you what's on their mind about it.

Michael Walker:
I love that. Yeah. Having the ability to actually connect with the real supervisor, using it as a way to understand better how you're providing value for them. Awesome. Sorry, I cut you off there. You're going on a really good train. So I want to get back to a second point there.

Chris SD:
Yeah, it's all good. And by the way, guys, I don't want to be sitting here just lecturing or whatever necessarily. I'm going to talk until I'm told to shut up. But if there's questions that you guys have, if you have a question, put it in there, definitely want to hear what you guys have to say about this. And I'll just tell you one of the main questions that I get from people and they're saying, "Who is music licensing for? What kind of people? It must be for major label bands or it must be for people who are 20 something and they're touring and they've got all that." Of course the major labels are into it and all those things, but it is a brilliant way to get your music out there in a big way if you're not that. If you've got a family, you're busy running around with a job, you're older, there's no age limit on this at all.

Chris SD:
People get sync all the time. They don't care. They don't care who you are, where you live. None of that matters. You don't have to have an image. You'll just have to have a great song and great production, is what we're talking about. So I just wanted to mention that as one of the bigger questions that come in sometimes to me. So the other one that's related really closely to this, is the arrangement. Now a lot of people pick their arrangement randomly, of their song. Like we were saying earlier, right? The intro and the verse and the pre-chorus and the chorus, and all that. So you get into your studio, you start recording and maybe you're referencing another song, or you wrote the chorus and you wrote the verse, so you just play them together and then you tack on an intro.

Chris SD:
And should you put a bridge in? I guess so, everyone else does. That's the wrong approach. So the arrangement, two music supervisors, this isn't a songwriting course that I'm giving you here, this is a, "What music supervisor want to hear." Tons of them are my friends. I know lots and lots of them. I deal with them all the time. So I know exactly what they're looking for. And one of the biggest things that they love to hear in a song, is one that's arranged in such a way that not only compliments the build, which we just talked about, but it's one that takes the listener on a journey. And that is related to build. It's not exactly build, but it's telling a story so that they can take that story and they can marry it to the story that's happening on the screen.

Chris SD:
Now you might be thinking, "Well, so what's the difference if I have a bridge or not?" Or do I have a chorus? All these arrangement bits that you put together, that you throw in there, should always make sure that they're... Let me give you an analogy. So I don't know if you guys cook a lot at home. A lot of people just go out for meals. But if you cook, especially like French cooking or something, you'll learn really quickly that you don't take all the ingredients, put them in a pot, throw it on the stove, or in the oven, or whatever, turn up the temperature, wait, and it's done. Well, if you're slow-cooking something, sure, you're going to throw whatever you're slow-cooking into the pot, but you're usually having it with something else. You're not just eating what's in the pot.

Chris SD:
You're going to have potatoes and carrot. Well, you got other things that you do to compliment what you're eating. French cooking, and I say French cooking, I'm sure Italian, all kinds of different cooking does too, but I know French cooking because I like to do it sometimes, is they focus on the pot and they subdivide it into all these little parts. So if you're making a Coq Au Vin, those onions, you got to put half an hour and then making those onions taste great. It's frustrating, honestly, but it turns out amazing every time. But you take the onions and you do a certain thing to them with the herbs, and you make the onions the thing unto themselves. So they're a unit, they're like a finished product. They're balanced. They're exactly what they should be to go into the Coq Au Vin. You do this with all the ingredients, then you put them together and then you eat it, right?

Chris SD:
That is the magic of the art of cooking and is also the magic of great songwriting, is having those parts. It's not a mishmash. It'll get lost in this wash of sound. It takes you on a journey, right? Or even a meal's laid out that way. It's like you've got your drink. Sometimes you have an appetizer. You might have a main course. You mean there's dessert. We invented dessert. People don't normally eat dessert before dinner. Some people might, but they normally don't. For a reason, right? Arranging new music is the same way. If you don't understand how to do that in the arrangement, then you're going to be at a disadvantage. So the secret to great arrangement is not a formula because they're all different. Sometimes you've got choruses that repeat constantly. In another song, the chorus that repeats constantly is going to be no good.

Chris SD:
It's not going to be happening for you. So the big secret to arrangement is making sure in your mind, you can't do it in one shot, you've got to look at your music and say, "How is this taking the listener on the journey I want them to go on? I cook this nice meal. Whether it's like ribs or Coq Au Vin, like I said, "How do I want make them enjoy that meal? What's the sequence? Or how am I going to do it? I'm going to make a drink for them ahead of time," and all this other stuff. So think about taking the listener on a journey and you use the parts of the song, at least in western music, you're going to use the intro. How long should your intro be? It depends on your song.

Chris SD:
Some intros are great. Eight bars, maybe 16, some four. Some, no intro, just boom, into the song. You've got to basically create your song, take a break from it, sit back and then listen back to it, and the first thing you want to think of is, "What can I take out of this that's not going to diminish it?" So just like Michelangelo, I think it was Michelangelo who said, "The figure is within the marble, I just have to take away the right amount of marble and the figure's there." It's not like, "How do I make the figure?" It's like the figure's in there. I just have to take away the right amount of marble. So you've got to think about your music that way. So just take out things, that's the first thing, is minimize it to its essence, to its absolute lean, mean, delivery of the message and make sure that comes across.

Chris SD:
And then after that, it comes down to an emotional response. Take a break, go sleep on it, play your song, sit back and think to yourself, "Where am I getting bored?" Be malicious about it. Don't get too attached to your music. Just think like someone else, think like you haven't heard it before or something like that. Ask your friends, put a little vetting group together, get them to pipe in on and ask yourself seriously, "Where does this song suck?" I know it's harsh. It's harsh. It's your own music. You don't want to be thinking like that. But trust me, if you can get yourself to think like that, your music is going to absolutely go up in a huge amount and music supervisors are going to really appreciate the fact that when they hear your song, you're taking them on this journey.

Chris SD:
So when the verse comes in, it's setting it up, "Oh, they brought in a little guitar part. Okay, that's great. A little bit of build there to keep my attention." Then they're going to go into the chorus, right? Uh-huh, you went into a pre-chorus. You had this really cool pre-chorus and it's got this big question mark built into it and it's building, the chorus is coming. But by now you're really excited for the chorus. Had the pre-chorus not been there, might have been less impactful. Then boom, the chorus hits, and the chorus has to be great. You guys know that, but the production of the chorus, that arrangement, has to be marked.

Chris SD:
This is the chorus, right? That's the arrangement part. So you want to have a marker and not only does it make it easy for the music editors to cut in those spots, to remember truncate your song a little bit if they have to fit it into maybe a minute and a half or two minutes, there's these nice defined cut points, but you're also telling the listener that this is the appetizer. This is the main course. There's a pause. This is the dessert. They're separate. They're not all on the same plate. You don't just serve the oysters with the Coq Au Vin and then you stick the cake on beside it. But we don't do that. Who wants to do that? No one wants to eat that way. So people sometimes in music forget that. So remember about each part of your music leads into each other. Each thing has to be refined to it its own, so that even the verse by itself, sounds complete. It sounds complete. Even though it's got to question mark leading into the next thing, it's got us feel like, "Oh, this is a nice little poem together."

Chris SD:
And there's a great analogy that I love, and John Lennon, the way he used to write his song sometimes, was if he wrote a chorus that he thought was good, he wrote a part of a song, he thought, "This is a cool part of the song," He would demote that chorus into a verse or a bridge, and make himself write a better chorus. That's fantastic. That's that maliciousness that works really well in music. So anyway, to finalize all that thing about the arrangement, make sure like cooking, everything is in its way. You're taking them on a journey through this really cool spot.

Chris SD:
The bridge comes up, people are going, "Oh, I'm a little bored of this first chorus thing." The bridge takes them aside, gives them a little break, it's cleans the palate. But it's like this, "Oh, okay. There's this thing now." It gives them a break and then boom, you hit them with the next chorus. And it has this, "Take it home. You've added the build in there." And those small common sense, easy things. Some of you might be like that, "Chris, that sounds easy. Are you doing it right?" Because like I said, a lot of this is not rocket science. There's some mysterious thing that great music producers have or great hit song writers have, they use the fundamentals and just make sure they get it. So that's really what it comes down to. And I just wanted to relay that to you, for that.

Michael Walker:
I love it. It's so good. The analogy of food, being a cuisine artist and making a song, I feel like there's a really great analogy to it. I feel both hungry and I want to go make music in this same time. So maybe someone here can throw together a retreat where it's just you cook food, you eat it, and then you make songs together. Maybe you could do that, Chris? I don't know.

Chris SD:
Absolutely.

Michael Walker:
You sound like you have both of those skill sets. That's so good. Yeah, and even just thinking about how an appetizer leads into the main course and that idea from John Lennon, if you have an awesome hook or an awesome chorus being like, "Okay, that's the main meal," but then if you take off a piece of that and you put it as the appetizer, and then lead up to an even more awesome chorus, really interesting. I think probably now is a good time to shift over to some Q&A, answering questions from people.

Michael Walker:
Maybe before we do that, we can do a quick zoom-out and a round of applause for Chris and just say, thank you so much for being here. This has been awesome. I feel like every time I connect with you, I learn something new. You do a great job of both. You have the mastery over the fundamentals, in terms of what does it really take to be successful in sync, which it seems like really the point that you're trying to get across, that it is down to the connection between you and those supervisors, and really understanding what they need and being able to cultivate your craft and what you do in a way that you're chipping away with the ice block so that you can actually...

Michael Walker:
It's not about changing who you are, but it's about molding it into exactly what's most valuable for them when it comes to sync, which is really cool. And then we'll get into some Q&A and this is one thing that we're going to do for all of our speakers on the conference, is throughout the presentation, we'll have our team putting in links, because everyone here has a freebie and a gift that you're going to get just because the presenters here are awesome and very generous. So Chris has put together an awesome freebie for you in the chat. You can check that out and we'll talk a little bit about at the end as well, but for now I'm going to go to some of the questions that we had come in.

Michael Walker:
So we had a question from... Man, I don't even know how to pronounce this name. It's a really unique name. It's like Mitch, sorry if I'm like butchering your name, it's way more unique than Michael, but the question was, "How do I set up a publishing company from out of the USA? I want to be able to collect publishing royalties from BMI." So it sounds like they're interested in building a relationship with music supervisors, but they live outside of the United States and they want to be able to sync up with BMI with some United States companies, but they're not sure how that works.

Chris SD:
Yeah, yeah, of course. So first off, yeah, you don't need to worry about setting up a publishing company unless it's for tax reasons or you're signing other musicians that you're going to help. You can just do it under your own name. If you live outside the US or outside of whatever country that you're trying to sync in, I should tell you first, you got to know this, no matter where you live in the world, you can get your music synced in a bunch of other places in the world. So not everywhere in the world has a system set up for that.

Chris SD:
But anywhere, like from South Korea, all the way to Germany, in Australia, anywhere, you can get your music licensed in those shows, movies, and ads in those places, and the money that gets accrued in those foreign countries, so you live in the US and you got synced in Australia or South Korea, whatever, the PROs are all connected, right? They're all connected. So you don't need to do anything extra to get the money. It all filters through. As long as your PRO is filled up correctly, it literally filters through a chain and it all comes to where it's supposed to go. So that is the PRO's job and so you don't have to worry about that. You don't have to set up a publishing company. There's reasons to do that, but it's certainly not a requirement, okay? Just know that.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. So another question came in from Karen. So Karen asked, "How many songs do you need to have in your portfolio in order to be successful with sync licensing?"

Chris SD:
Yeah, it's a great question. And just before I answer that question, the freebie that Michael mentioned, I assume that Tori probably put it in the chat there. What it is, it's three music supervisors talking about three more things about music production for sync, that I didn't cover here. And you get to hear it right from top music supervisors. These aren't any supervisors, these are top ones that work on top shows. So that's what it is. So if you just go in, click the link, and email address only, completely free, of course.

Chris SD:
The supervisors go through three other things that you really should pay attention to, that they look for in the music. Just so you know what that is for. So in terms of how many songs you need in your catalog, if you had a 1,000 songs to choose from, talking about Einstein earlier, the way Michael was, you statistically would have a better chance or you'd have more options to pitch your music, assuming that the songs were different enough. But in reality, the number of songs that you need and to be successful in a realistic way, are magic number ready, one.

Chris SD:
You only need one song and that is because the song could be used multiple times. So you could have one great song, you for sure would want to pick the one hit song, right? You'd be like, "I will give up having written 10 mediocre songs, so I can write one great song." If you write one great song, have it produced correctly, you can get that synced over, and over, and over, and over, and so on. That's the really cool thing about sync, is that you don't have to keep producing music all the time. You can just keep pitching the same great songs, set of songs, till your next record comes out.

Michael Walker:
That's so good. And one thing that I want to point to, based on what you just said is, it seems like especially nowadays, one of the biggest challenges and mistakes that we can make is thinking that we have to do everything ourselves, especially when it comes to the production. It's a super valuable skill set to learn how to produce yourself in a home studio and probably something that almost every musician can benefit from, like having their chops. But it seems like even the most of the most successful musicians, artists, they work with producers who are at the top of their game. And they work with producers who have a track record of success and that's such a important way to shortcut and to significantly increase the quality of your music.

Michael Walker:
And to your point, you're spending the time, and the energy, and the money, to record the 10 or 20 songs yourself, when you might get more bang for your buck out of the recording one song with the right production team, seems like something that is really easy to miss. And the reason I bring that up, is because I know you, Chris, you have an amazing service that you actually provide when it comes to helping musicians as well, get their songs produced with a remote production team. That's still something that you offer and how does that work exactly?

Chris SD:
Yeah. So what I did is, that was actually the first thing I did when I moved to LA and then I was like, "We got pregnant with our daughter," and we're like, "I can't go into studios doing 12 to 14-hour days anymore. I've got to spend some time with my daughter." And so I moved it online. So we have a studio called Sundown Sessions Studio, and we basically have world-class producers, players, and everything. Our whole mantra is to provide world-class tracks for indie budgets. So the idea is that you could take anything that we produce, we produce it at the top level. You could put it on radio, you can get publishing deals with it. Of course, get it into TV and film, which we've gotten a lot of them into TV and film, and that is another thing that we do to help Indy songwriters at Sundown Session Studio.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. I know personally, our first album we ever recorded with Paradise Fears, compared to probably within a year, we recorded with a producer who had worked with some of our favorite bands and I actually had his chops. We did not improve that much as musicians, like our songwriters. It was not like over a year just magically transformed. But I remember that second album was the first time that my parents, when they listened to it, they didn't know I was listening to them, but they were listening to it, my dad whispered to my mom, "This actually sounds good."

Michael Walker:
And I think that it's one thing that it's really easy to oversee it, is not recognizing that the production is so impacted by the team that you're working with. And there definitely are people who are a lot less talented than you are, who are super successful and have amazing quality music because they're working with the right team, the right producers. So if it's a good fit, I would highly recommend checking out Sundown Session Studios and reaching out to them.

Chris SD:
I appreciate that, Mike. I wasn't expecting you to bring my studio up, so that's nice. Usually we have a lot of students, of course, who use that and all that. But I just want to make one quick comment on working with other people, is that the danger we all know, working with other people with our music, is that, "What if it's not a good fit? What if I waste my money? What if it doesn't turn out the way I want it to turn out?" But the fact is when you nail down somebody who is better at what they do that you are, and you bring them onto your team, that was a famous Steve Jobs approach to building Apple. He said, "I go after the best in the world. The best people I can get, and they're going to be better than me than a lot of this stuff. And I put them together and let them have at it."

Chris SD:
And so I can't agree more to do that. And I learned what I learned from music supervisors. I didn't make the stuff up that I teach my students. And Michael, the same thing with you, you didn't just make it up out of the air. You were actually in a band, you toured, you guys made it with some of these crazy things that you did. And now you teach all these things through your program. So talk about short cutting, but you got to find the right people. There's shysters out there. There's people who have different motivations. There's people who are just not a good match. They might be great people, but once you find that good mechanic, or dentist, or doctor's story, you stick with them. Yeah. Couldn't agree more in that.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. So another question that came in, that's connected with this idea of production quality, or mixing and mastering quality, maybe you could speak a little bit to actually the role of a producer and a production team, as it relates to mixing and mastering, as well as the actual production of the song with the arrangements. And this question was, what's more important, the source material or the mixing and mastering quality?

Chris SD:
Oh, by far the source material, because you basically, you can't take a crappy recording and make it great with all the studio magic in the world, without remixing it or re reproducing it, rerecording it. So your source material is pretty critical. If you are not good at it, like Michael was saying, just work with a producer who is good at that. And that usually includes the mixing and mastering. So by a long shot, it's definitely the source material. If you have great source material, you hire a mix engineer and you don't like the mix, you still have great source material. You can just send it to another mix engineer or whatever. If you've got bad source material, no one can uncrapify it. I invented a new word. So you just cannot do it. So definitely the source material, for sure.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. That's really smart. And there's quite a few different analogies or phrases that sum that up, right? Like polishing a turd. If you polish a turd, it's still a turd. It's a gross one. Or putting a lipstick on a pig. That's a mean one, depending on how you're thinking it. But cool. Last question here that we had come in from someone was, so Helga asked, "So if I'm an instrumentalist, but I'm not necessarily a vocalist, and I just play piano, can I still be successful in sync and TV and film? Or do I need to be X, Y, Z genre?" I guess the question is really, who does this work for? What genres of music do I need to play? Does this work for instrumentalists or only for bands with vocals and... Yeah.

Chris SD:
This works for everybody. That's the beautiful thing about sync licensing nowadays. Back in the day, we're talking probably 40 years ago and then back, studios would have an in-house composer. The in-house composer would produce all the music or composers, right? Plural. They would produce all the music for the shows. And then they quickly figured out as things were growing and they were producing more and more content, and having to hire all these composers, instead of paying another composer, whatever they pay them, $50,000 or whatever it is, for a thing, I can go out and get one of these indie songwriters who are happy to give this away for 10,000 or 5,000 or whatever. So that is when everything opened up for sync for indie artists. This is why it's a golden age for you guys. It's a golden age for you.

Chris SD:
And the beautiful thing is that you just have to know how to get it to the right people. So that's really what it comes down to. In terms of genre and what you do, there is a spot for everything. So one of the things that I teach my students is called targeting. What that means is that you don't want to take your song, throw it out there in shotgun-style and hope for the best, right? So hope is great in a lifeboat, when you're floating out in the ocean, it'll get you through until the ship comes, okay? But that doesn't work in sync at all. What you want to do is target your music. You need to know who you're sending it to, why you're sending it to them, and you're basically giving them the music they're looking for, when they're looking for it.

Chris SD:
That's the trick. And so I show people how to actually do that with just online tools and they know exactly what song to send, how to know what song to send, and that's the supervisors looking for it at that time, and they're like, "Oh, ha, how did they know what I was looking for?" Because they did some smart targeting and that massively increases your odds of doing it. So that's all that you got to know. And whether you play piano, you do punk rock, techno, whatever, there's a spot for everybody. The industry is massive. It's growing at an incredible pace. Yeah, it's the golden age. It's a great time to be an indie songwriter in sync. And why so many indie songwriters are doing so well, licensing their music.

Michael Walker:
I love that. It's so interesting too, because everything you're talking about, I feel like really applies to a lot of what we teach too, with growing an audience and targeting the right fans, and almost to that question of, "Should I get a sync agent, have a middleman, or publisher, or do you really need the middleman nowadays as much as you used to?" And it seems like the internet has really become like a great equalizer in a lot of ways, where it's allowed you to cut out the middle man efficiency of just distribution that you used to really require in order to be successful.

Michael Walker:
And now because of people like Chris, and Sync Songwriter, and the ability to actually reach out and build real relationships directly with the people who need what you offer, it really opens up a lot of the reputation that used to go to the libraries or where you used to go to the sync agents and allows you to have a more real direct connection with those people. Pretty dang cool. All right-

Chris SD:
Sorry, I wanted to add one quick caveat to that really fast. So you're absolutely right. The internet has come along and it's great, and we can reach out in the ways that we could never could have. Look, you've got people watching me from all over the place. That wouldn't have happened. That couldn't have happened before the internet. We would never have connected, which is amazing. It's absolutely amazing. But the bottleneck in sync just moved up the chain. That's all that happened. You can go out after this call and try to hit up a bunch of music supervisors, and I'm pretty much guaranteeing you that you're not going to get any response back. You have to know how to earn their trust. So that's really critical. And you don't have to go through me at Sync Songwriter to do it. There's lots of other places that you can go to try to learn that or figure it out.

Chris SD:
But that's just one thing that I figured out how to do, was break that bottleneck, so that the people that I work with, I can actually get their music in front of the music supervisors, but it's still really tough. You can't just go out there and just do it, otherwise I wouldn't need to be here. Just keep that in mind, no matter what you do. And again, not talking about me here, talking about you and your music. If you want to get out there, get around the libraries and get around the middlemen, make sure that you find out how to connect directly with the music supervisors. That's just something I specialized in and to help people do. But that's the path.

Michael Walker:
And that totally makes sense too. And I guess the way that you're presenting it, is that really when it comes to building trust with anyone, whether it's a music supervisor or building a relationship, it helps if you have a mutual acquaintance who already has built trust with that person. It just so happens that the fact that you've built these relationships with these music supervisors, that your service that you provide is about helping them build their own reputation, their own credibility, with those music supervisors. So you're facilitating those relationships in a way that maybe traditionally in the old industry, that didn't really need to happen.

Michael Walker:
It was more about just, "Oh, you can just send all your music to us and then we'll build those relationships." But with you, it's like you have this reputation, you have essentially a shortcut, is really what it is. You've spent the time, and the energy, and the resources, to be able to build this reputation and trust. And so whether it's with you or with anyone that has that trust, that's going to save so much time and energy, versus trying to reach out directly when they already get hit up with so many solicitations. But, yeah, on behalf of everyone, thank you so much, Chris, for coming on here live.

Michael Walker:
It's always a pleasure to talk with you. I appreciate what you do for the music industry. And I would highly recommend that you take advantage of the freebies that Chris shared. So we'll put those in the chat. And if you click on that, then you're going to get even more free resources directly from the mouths of the music supervisors that you're looking to connect with. So cool. Chris, you're the man, appreciate you. Any final thoughts of wisdom or any final things that you want to leave us with before we wrap up the session?

Chris SD:
One last thing, you guys. My mission is to get as many indie songwriters heard in the industry before I leave this earth. That's been my mission since day one. I don't know why I ended up that way. I just got into the studio and I cared more about indie songwriters than I cared about the ones who were signed to labels. They're already set. They're fine. They don't need any more help than they've got, but when you hear great music and you realize it's just lost in a haystack, I really want to help you get out there. So please look into sync licensing as a way to go. And again, this last second here, just to let you know, but the freebie that I gave you, is just to hear more of what I talked about in the body of this call, but it comes from music supervisors.

Chris SD:
It's a shorter version from them, but they're going to tell you three more things that you really should have in your music production, that they listen to and look for all the time. So just check it out, totally free. And, yeah, and hope to catch you guys around. Thanks for hanging out. And if we see you in the Sync Songwriter community, that would be amazing. And otherwise, I wish you the very best of luck and keep that spirit up, okay? Keep that aspiration up, because you guys are just a small distance away and people like Michael are there to help you rise above there. So Michael and I, that's what we do. I do it differently than Michael, but we want to make you guys shine. Okay? So have a good one. And thank you, Michael, for having me. This was really great. I really enjoyed it.

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