Welcome to episode 103 of the Bandhive podcast.

It is time for another episode of the Bandhive podcast. My name is James Cross and I'm here with Matt Hoos of Alive in Barcelona. How are you doing today man?

I'm doing awesome. James, how is everything over there on the east side? I'm glad to hear things are doing awesome. I'm doing well. I just caught you totally off guard mid yawn, but you recovered quickly. So I'm happy about that. It's friday. We usually don't record on Fridays, but I'm looking forward to the weekend. It's Halloween weekend, it's world series weekend. Not that I really care about either of the teams in the world series, as long as the Astros lose because 2017 and they're cheaters. So I hope they lose and I hope the braves win even though I really don't care about the braves.

But you know, to all my socks, fans out there whether white socks are red sox, I am so sorry about the Astros. Just because you know, that's both socks got steamrolled and I'm a little upset about the way the Red Sox went out because they were totally beating the Astros up in the first three games they won, games two and three and then all of a sudden the Astros just flipped it and I don't know man it seems awfully suspicious in my opinion. Isn't the red sox the team where their coach like puts his annual salary in the team's budget too so they can get like whatever players they want.

I have no idea about that. I don't follow baseball that much. I mean either I don't know anything about baseball. I mean I heard that I think somewhere maybe that's the white sox. Maybe that's not even a baseball team. I don't know I don't know much about sports. Yeah I don't know much about sports aside from baseball and then even then like I used to be all in on the red sox and I would keep up with it all season now I'm like okay like I'll watch our local teams baseball games in the summer because I volunteer there and then if the red sox make it to the playoffs in october I will watch that.

Baseball games are fun to go to. That's for sure. Oh absolutely. I'd much rather watch it in person than on tv and that's why I don't watch it all summer because there's like there's 162 games on tv. I don't have time for that. I would rather spend that time podcasting or playing music or Doing something fun that isn't as repetitive which is somewhat related to what we're going to talk about today because we're not here to talk about baseball. Although I will say if it comes out in two years that the Astros cheated.

One, I would not be surprised and two if they win the world series, I hope they'll take this one away from them because they didn't take 2017 away. They found out the team cheated and like, well, but you're still champions. It's okay because it came out two years later. They couldn't do anything about it. So that happens now and it's like 2023 then the Astros are discovered that they were cheating again. It's like, okay, fool me. Once shame on you, fool me. Twice shame on me. Your championship has revoked. Oops.

I did it again. Okay, Brittany. Okay. Where the Astros? Uh, yeah, yeah. All right. Speaking of senseless, grinding. Good segue. Good segue. You're talking about grinding XP. And the band senseless. Because my friend Jasmine who plays bass for senseless convinced me to play rune scape for the first time and probably about 8 to 10 years, Great game. I dig it. I don't play it as much as I should, which is probably a good thing. And then just this morning as we were working on this outline, matt. I discovered you also still played room escape once in a while. Absolutely.

It's a great, great tour game. Oh yeah. I had never even thought about that. You travel around the country. It's, it's nice to just have some, I don't know sometimes you're awake in your bunk and you're like, I just want to play some games and like feel like a, I feel like I'm at home or something like, you know, maybe you're four weeks out on the road and you're like, you're missing home, You're like, I just want something normally like, oh, let's play some video games. The nostalgia kind of really helps buffer your mood sometimes.

So Rune scape is a blast from the past. If I could just get Zelda a link to the past on my phone and like Super Metroid, I probably would be content like Pokemon would be another great one to have on my phone too. Yeah. So I mean the nice thing is that Rune scape is sold. It will run on anything and they have an iphone app, But I don't know if this is still true back in the day. I had a jail broken iPhone. This is like 2014 and I don't mean jail broken in that.

Like it was jail broken from the carrier. I mean like I had a cracked version of IOS that allowed me to do cool things with it. Like I was one of the people who had, hey Siri before you could have, hey Siri because it used to be back in the day, you have to hold down the button and you couldn't just say, hey Siri, but if you jail broke your phone then you could activate Hey Siri and just talk to your phone, which I turned off because it drains your battery, but it also allowed me to install unofficial apps, including a Gameboy emulator.

So if you jailbreak your phone and I'm not advocating to jailbreak your phone because that can cause lots of issues. But I'm just saying there is a possibility that you can put those old games on your phone via an emulator, not recommending it though, I don't have a jail broken phone anymore. I just use straight up IOS, it's awesome being able to do stuff like that, especially games that have a long grind, like Pokemon or Rune scape. Those are two of my personal favorites. I know that you have probably played your fair share of hours.

What's your parallel from rune scape and time investment, I want to say just a little background on rune scape first because to explain, I played room escape when I was 13, like 15 and I just did a little bit of everything and became a jack of all trades master of none. So for those who aren't familiar with Rune scape because you're either too young or too old or somewhere in the middle and just didn't care about games or too cool. Yeah, exactly. Or to cool, it is an mmorpg which is massive multiplayer online role playing game.

Yeah, yeah, it's about 20 years old now, might even be like 22 or something. So seriously, this game would be halfway through college if it were a person and there's like 40 different skills, you can level up and you can go from level 1-99 in every skill category. And I promise this is related to being in a band, we're going to get there. But bear with me, every single player starts at level one of every single skill. As you gain experience in those skills, you level up. It's like pretty much any video game that has levels you level up based on experience of some sort.

You do something to collect experience and the higher your level is, the more experience you get to the next level that's across all games. But for ruin scape and many games, that's how it works. And because of this, each level takes more time. So you might be able to get to level 10 in mining in a couple hours. But then getting from level 60 to 61 is going to take you a couple of days. This kind of has a real life parallel, which, you know, matt, we talked about it a few weeks ago on episode 96.

The myth of the 10,000 hour rule where we were saying, hey, like You can learn the basics of a skill in only 20 hours and that's how ruin scape is structured, you can get the basics going quickly but the better you get at whatever fictional skill you're doing, which it's all made up like you're just clicking on a screen, it doesn't take skill, but that's why the game has the skill levels built in. So if you're at a higher skill level, it takes longer. And so there's two paths.

There's the first one, which I already said, I'm a Jack of all trades, I'm a generalist and that means in Rune scape, I leveled up moderately in many skills, but I never mastered anything. So that's where the saying, Jack of all trades, master of none really applies. On the other hand, there are players who would choose to focus on one or two key skills and just crush in those skill categories. So I'd say I'm going to be an expert in mining and smith thing and they get to level 99 in both of those skills.

This is ignoring players like Zezima who got level 99 and everything and that's because he just has no life, which no offense to him, no offense intended. There, it just like he does nothing but play the game at least back in the day, that's how it was. So people can do that. But it takes years and just a lot, a lot, a lot of grinding, like you're saying that and both of these approaches have pros and cons. Do you want to take us through that mat. Yeah, of course.

The thing with things like Rune scape it's nice because they have this artificial world that they've built for you, you have these predetermined ways that you can raise your specific skills and that's not really the case when it comes to music, when it comes to business, there are some guides and things that you can use. You know, you can, we have tools like books, we have tools like musicians, friend guitar tabs, Youtube videos, you know, God bless all the people who go out there and and tab out a song and make those tabs and release them into the world for free.

I think you meant Ultimate guitar Guitar tabs. Oh yeah, yeah, I did what I say, musicians friend. Yeah, I was like musicians friend. Guitar tabs. Yeah, Ultimate guitar, Sorry, misspoke tongue is moving a little faster than my brain is today. So, you know, and things like landscape, you have this, this system built for you. You go and click on the rocks while you have a pic X in your, in your inventory, your in your hand, it will mind the rock. Unfortunately, it doesn't exactly work that easy when you're learning how to play guitar, you actually have to do a little bit more work than that.

But like James was saying, you know, the amount of time that it takes you to get from level one to level 10 might only take you a couple hours. It's up to you to kind of determine what is your level one, what is your level 10, you know, what goals are you going to actively work towards? You know, for me when I started playing bass, I focused on learning tabs, my favorite band was the chili peppers and so I literally sat there in front of my computer looking at the tabs, I learned how to read tabs by reading tabs and when I didn't understand how to read something, I pulled up an article and I read how to read taps and then what I did is I would, whatever song I was playing and learning, I would sit there and just play it on repeat over and over and over again whatever part of the song I was trying to learn while I'd be looking at the tab, so it was kind of like I was trying to read along with the tabs while I was learning the song and for the first little while it took a long time for me to figure out how to build my system and for me to even figure out that that was the best way for me to do it because then I was visually learning, I was learning to using my ear, I was hearing it and then on top of that I was also like reading information and it was nice too because there were times when I pull up two different tabs with the same song going to be in a different tuning or different key because someone had transposed it and this is back before I even understood what transposition was.

And so I was like, oh my gosh, this is all so confusing and so it kind of forced me, it made me ask more questions. And then before I kind of knew it, I was able to play like four or five chili peppers songs, which is a feat, right, right, that's not like going out and playing some punk song. The first ones are the easy ones. I think the first one I learned was like don't forget me, you know, real simple four bass chords, you know, like just stuff that it was out of my element.

I was level one. I played with a child Prodigy guitarist and he showed me a few things, but you know, no music theory, no formal teaching, nothing. So when I started doing this and when I finally kind of developed a system for myself that was like, oh yeah, I'm gonna listen to this music while playing it while reading the tabs and I'm gonna do this over and over and over and over again until I can't get it wrong. Really? What I was doing was I was developing a system for leveling up, I was making a tool, think about fishing, is it easier for you to fish with your hands, you're gonna stand in the water for three hours and wait for fish to swim between your hands and you grab it or you're gonna make a pole and put a line in the water and then you can go do other stuff while you're fishing line tries to fish and so that's kind of what I was trying to do inadvertently.

I didn't realize it. I was building a system that worked for me that allowed me to learn how to play these songs. And so then before I knew it, it was like, oh now I'm level 10 now I can wield the bronze pick ax, you know or whatever. Now I know I can wield the iron pickaxe. Now I am holding this base correctly. You know, now that I've done this for so many hours incorrectly, I am setting my hand in a normal fingering position. Oh, I heard somebody talk about scales now that I've learned 10 songs, Maybe I should go back and practice some fundamentals. James.

You're talking about these two different approaches. Like I started off with literally no idea where I was going, when you have to build your own systems, it's kind of hard to find a good place to jump off. So first thing you need to do is kind of identify what it is that you're trying to do. Last week we had Todd on the show and Todd makes a lot of mash ups, Todd does a lot of covers and he drops a, youtube video every week and that was kind of like what he set out to do and because he, he had a clearly defined goal that allowed him really to set in motion effective systems rather than saying like, oh, I'm going to be a Youtuber.

So I'm gonna go get really, really good at doing backflips so that I could do backflips on a camera. It's like that's kind of a less important thing, but he said I'm going to be a Youtuber, so I'm going to make sure that I know how to use like lighting correctly. So when I make a video, my face looks good for anybody who hasn't heard that episode. That's episode one oh two called releasing a song every week with todd marriage of the atria highly recommend listening to that because he's a fascinating character to listen to kind of, you know, he has a, there's no such thing as a roadblock mentality, which is a super, super important mentality to have for the entertainment industry and really just kind of for business in general, if you're going to chase that life and you've got to be willing to kind of go all in.

So first you set your goal, Both of these approaches, you know, like you can say, I'm going to be a jack of all trades. I can write all the music, I can produce all the music, I can come up with all the ideas for the music videos, I can make all the music videos myself and by the time you get to the end of that? Only about 15% of what you've actually done is write music. Are you a musician? No, you're not. You're a jack of all trades.

And so while there is a lot of like really good things that can come from this, there's also a lot of really bad things that can come from this. So if you want to do everything yourself, that's great. You should not be the end goal for like any one of your processes. We've talked about having peers review your stuff constantly throughout the course of this podcast. It's no different. Now, even writers, if you go watch a movie, there's a script, one person doesn't write that first off, like 10 people write scripts and then somebody buys one of these 10 scripts that they like and then that script goes to what's called a script doctor and this is where somebody like goes through, reads through it, fixes dialogue and things like that, that just don't feel natural.

This is the same process that you should have when it comes to your writing material, you write material, you should send it off to somebody, have them listen to it. You know, when you play a song and you're like, oh, you know, this part feels a little jumbled. These are all really good things, It's that creative criticism, iron, sharpens iron. It really hones you. So if you're gonna set out to focus on that, Get your product and then have somebody else polish it. I don't produce my own material.

We send it off to people with hundreds of thousands of dollars in gear and tens of thousands of hours in experience. Now we track our own demos, everything starts with us. But we've never, ever ever released a song that we tracked and we de mode and you know, it's like none of that stuff like all of that is all scratched track, that's all alpha level. We have an alpha level skill, we have enough to give a good idea to a professional. Now that professional, what is he doing?

He's not doing the jack of all trades approach. He he is doing a specialist approach. The specialist approach. He is the master. Have you ever seen somebody that displays a school of fish on their wall? No, how about a marlin or a shark or a big huge impressive catch. Of course, when you have this trophy, that's what you display on your wall, you are a specialist. You are somebody who excels at your craft and that is what individuals are like looking to work with back in the day, being a handyman was like kind of a joke.

It was like everybody was a handyman and the contractors could like build anything with scraps. You know, it's like being a, being a contractor was kind of like a normal thing. Now we kind of live in the day where a lot of people know how to like computer program. So that's becoming much more of a natural thing. So then there's people like me, I'm not good at computer programming and I'm a little bit handy. So like I'm kind of a jack of all trades type person, where if I had to build a website, I could do it, but it wouldn't be the best and if I had to put up some drywall, I could do it, but it wouldn't be the best.

There's a certain level where it's like, I can either take my time, I could become a specialist And then I can do this for other people or I can decide, Hey, maybe this isn't my area of expertise may be all I need is to get a rough idea. And then I have the specialist come in who can basically take over the project. They can bring my vision to life, why they started with their 20 hours in the right place, They've spent their 10,000 hours mastering. If I'm a songwriter, I should be spending my, you know, my 1st 20 hours should be writing songs, it shouldn't be spending 20 hours like looking for, you know what synth tone I'm gonna use been there, right, I mean, and honestly, every artist has, every producer has.

If you want to sit there and take 10 years to figure out what synth tone or what ominous fear tone you want to use for a song that's totally cool, You should take pride in your final product and there's nothing wrong with that but the second that you're taking 20 hours to find a tone and you're only taking 20 minutes to write. That's where the issue is. If you're going to be a musician than be a musician, you've got to go all in and you got to be a master of those things and then the things that you can't afford to be a master at, you need to outsource, you need to say I've seen some awesome music videos in my life.

How many of them did i film approx. zero. Am I trying to become a videographer? No. Am I trying to become a story border who makes stories for music videos? No. Do I know anything about cinematography, lighting? No, I don't. Okay, so why in the world, what kind of hubris do I need to have to say? I think I can do this better than somebody who has literally spent the last umpteen years of their life doing this. Honestly, it really, it's just hubris, it's just this cocky thought that like you have the ability to do everything, there is nothing wrong with not having the ability to do everything.

As a matter of fact, I personally would say that it is a much more important quality to know when you want somebody else's services and on top of that then you start to build quality relationships man, this producer, like we've used paul for years and years and years and years because we have a quality relationship with him and when we listened to paul's music, when we listen to his mixes, paul is so sonically on point, it's ridiculous and we'll continue to work with him over and over and over again because paul is a true specialist through and through and a true specialist is like somebody who will work with you, you know, like they're not afraid to learn new things, There's no such thing as perfecting your craft.

I know I've told the story about the 90 year old cellist who when asked why he still plays eight hours a day, you know, he said because I think I'm getting better because I think I'm making progress and to me you can be a specialist and there's always more objective truth that you can adhere to and there's always new levels that you can grow to. So that's why I say like set up a goal, set up these level markers, what is level one, what is level 10? What is level 60 is the amount of time it takes you to get from level 62 Level 61 Is that exponential growth or is that, you know, your bars set a little too low or are you saying you know what today, I'm going to learn how to play this song, the first guitarist I ever played with, when I met him, he was playing joe satriani steve vai john Petrucci, all these guys, you know, I can play 25 notes, a second fastest guitarists in the world.

And then by the time we stopped playing music together, it was amazing because when we started, it was all so let's get as many pedals, let's get all this cool gear. He was a gearhead, he was shred head. And then by the time that I moved away, he was like, oh, my goal is to take this guitar, this cable and that amp with no other pedals, no distortion whatsoever. And I'm gonna put on a john Coltrane record on vinyl and I'm gonna play that loud and I'm just gonna play along with john Coltrane.

And so, I mean, it was like this literally totally different paradigm where when he started, he was like, I gotta be the shred head, I gotta be going as fast as I can, I gotta become like, like all the rest of these guys. And then by the time he was done, he was like, no, I just want to like play my own stuff in my own unique tone and I want to be special, I want to be unique and this like Facet works into every single area of your music.

If you're writing songs, if you're recording songs and you want this like unique aspect to it. You need to bring in a specialist, one of the biggest crimes of like the post hardcore scene was that everybody started going to Joey Sturgis. First it started with Attack, Attack and then the Devil wears Prada on all these other, I mean, tons of bands, Miss May I, uh there's literally too many to name the air I breathe Memphis May fire. They all went to Joey Sturgis and it started off as like the first ones that went there, it was like, oh my gosh, these records hit so hard, Joey Sturgis had found some little tricks of the trade that were just absolutely incredible and he made post hardcore, just punch you right in the chest and then everybody started doing it and every record started to sound the same and every single snare hit had a giant Cymbal swell, you know, and and every single breakdown had a giant eight await, and it was just like, man, this specialization kind of like became generic and so then all of a sudden, once of these other artists going back to Devil wears product, they came out with dead throne, and instead of going back to Joey Sturgis who was still at the apex and everybody was still using, they said, hey, we need to get away from this, because if we don't, there's nothing special about this specialist anymore because this specialist has now become an industry standard, and so instead they went to a different producer and they went with a little bit more raw sound and you know, there's, there's value between Hi Fi and Lo Fi and we've actually talked about that in a previous episode as well, it was with Greg Lloyd and it is number 79 making a case for Lo Fi home recording any of these episodes we mentioned by the way, if you go to Bandhive dot rocks slash the episode number, you can find it.

So, for Greg's episode, Bandhive dot Rocks slash 79, or 79. For Todd's episode, it's Bandhive dot rocks slash 102, and then for the myth of the 10,000 hour rule, it's Bandhive dot rocks slash 96. Exactly, perfect. Thank you for those links. So, basically, to kind of surmise everything that I've I've been rambling for the last 20 minutes about when you play Rune scape, you have clearly laying out goals. When you have an iron pick ax, you can look at your guide and it says, oh, I have to raise another 10 levels before I can use the next level.

Pick ax, Okay, you're very cleared out goals with your own personal business, your brand, you're the one setting those goals. This is why you need to be your own worst critic at times, because you have to set high standards for yourself. So, you set those standards, you set those goals and you make those goals, they don't need to be easy to achieve, but they need to be adamant when you achieve them. Like, learning a song, if you're learning somebody else's song, there's no question in your mind, if you got it right or if you got it wrong, you cannot lie to yourself.

You know the truth of what you're doing. So the same thing goes with setting your goals, set your goals, which is also a great band, by the way I was waiting for it, then you can compartmentalize those goals, break them down into smaller things. You know, we've talked about that before to Todd did a great job, talking about how it's like if he sets out on monday and has to release something on Wednesday, then he's going to do whatever it takes. So figure out what your goals are.

If you're a touring musician, focus on writing, focus on your live show, you should be spending your lion's share of time doing those things. If you're an artist who does weekly covers, then you should be taking time to learn as many possible songs as you can. There's only so many different chord structures that sound good to the human ear and if you're doing covers, all of them have already been played. You could literally learn about 17 total songs if you've learned 17 different songs you've almost learned every song ever written.

So start with that, that's a really good place and it's measurable, if you have measurable goals, then you can find those, like adamant successes in your life where it's like, oh yeah, like for me, it started off as like, I don't know how to read tabs, I don't know how to play chili peppers, I don't know how to play bass. So then I started kind of doing all those things at once. And even though I was still working on my goal of learning chili peppers, which was really just a compartmentalization of my goal of learning bass guitar, I set out to learn base, but I couldn't just start there.

So I was like, well I'll learn chili peppers. Well, I couldn't just start there. I was like, okay, we'll all learn tabs and I couldn't even start there because I didn't know how to learn tabs. But with each and every one of these individual things as I was coming closer to my top goal, each of these compartmentalized goals, I was inadvertently achieving. I hadn't learned every song in the chili peppers discography. When I learned how to read tablature, I hadn't learned how to master the bass guitar by the time I learned all the songs I wanted to learn in the chili peppers discography.

So each of these smaller goals was the subset of my larger goal. And throughout the course of learning working towards my ankle always focused with the end goal in sight, working towards that, I was able to knock out some of my smaller goal. And then before I knew it, it was like, I'm a lot better at base than I was a year ago and I did it just by learning songs and I built a system that worked for me. So one thing I missed was a songwriter.

If you want to be a songwriter, that's another option. You know, you get mailbox money, it's nice to write songs, sell them off to publishers, publishers work with labels or with artists individually and maybe you do that, you can be your own publisher or whatever. But that is another way to make some good money on the side. Absolutely. One thing to add to this, these are just three different examples. You can choose whatever your goal is, whatever you want to do, figure out what skills you need to do that.

We're not saying only learn those skills were saying focus on those skills. So if you want to learn a little bit about mixing because you want to be able to record and mix demos at home because you want to be a songwriter, that's fine. But you know, do the minimum do like 10 or 20 hours on that. Don't do 10,000 hours on that Because where you want, your 10,000 hours is on songwriting if you want to be a songwriter. So we're not saying ignore everything else. We're just saying no where your priorities lie.

Don't be afraid to write out visual goals to like, you know, if you type of person who needs to like see a visual goal. Like I'll get some sticky notes, put a sticky note on your door, Like put a sticky note on your mirror in your bathroom, put a sticky note anywhere that you want to anyway, that's like, oh, practice guitar, you play too many video games, put a sticky note on the controller For lack of a better term, whatever ways you have to manipulate yourself into into growth.

It's not bad. You know, it's not a bad thing to make yourself feel bad about not becoming better, strive for excellence. The key take away here is just like with rune scape, it takes time for you to get from level one to level 10 and even more time to get from 60 to 61 the more time you invest, the more you will get out of it as long as you spend that time appropriately. How do you do this? You make a road map of where you want to go, a roadmap of what skills are important to get there.

You make measurable goals and then you stick to that road map, there will be distractions every step of the way and it's up to you individually to figure out how to get around the roadblock. Get over the hurdle. It's always always, always going to be difficult. So you have to know your own weaknesses and you have to do everything in your power to fight against those. Maybe it's bringing in another person to keep you accountable. Maybe it's sticky notes. Maybe you're really good about waking up and getting your practice time in.

If some of you feel like I'm like calling you out, it's really that I'm staring at a camera of myself and I'm calling myself out, I'd like to talk to myself when there's directives involved because it's like, you need to practice more map, you need to play more music, you spend too much time worrying about other things and not enough time songwriting and we all do that. So make your roadmap, stick to your roadmap, find measurable goals, celebrate your victories and never, ever, ever settle for anything less than excellence. Mhm.

Mhm Yeah, that does it for this episode of the Bandhive podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in and listening. I really hope you enjoyed this episode and you have a clear idea of what areas you should focus on leveling up and what areas maybe you shouldn't level up and you should let other people take care of unless you want to be the generalist. But keep in mind if you are a generalist, You're probably not going to end up at level 99 in every skill. So one thing that you can do is in your band have different members, level up different skills, so you'll have somebody who's good at songwriting, somebody who's good at business, somebody who's good at marketing and work together as a team and collectively decide who's going to go after each individual skill and obviously focusing on your natural talents and abilities and your interests is the best way to do this.

So figure out what each of you is good at already. And if that's a fit for the band, focus on those things first and foremost, so you can all grow together and basically have the best chances of success possible. I just wanted to say again thank you to jasmine from senseless for inspiring this episode by getting you back into ruin escape and I've only played a few hours, but I'm already like, oh man, I need to play less. That game is so fun. Anyway, thank you for that.

Thanks for getting back into the game and matt and I will be playing Room Escape soon. Probably. So thanks again to all of you for listening. We'll be back next Tuesday at six a.m. Eastern time with another new episode of the band. I've podcast. Until then, I hope you have a great week, stay safe and of course, as always, keep rocking