Welcome to Episode 52 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 this? Tuesday of Thanksgiving week, man, You know I'm doing pretty awesome, James.

How's everything over there on the east side? Things are good here. Just, you know, getting ready to stuff myself until I burst. What do you stuffing yourself with? Tofurkey? Oh, yes. Yeah. You'll stuff yourself in the more water you drink, you'll just get bigger and bigger. Oh, boy. Yeah, Well, that's the That's the stuffing. The bread. Oh, man. I'm not gonna feel too well Friday morning. I can guarantee that, but it will be so worth it. Just spending time with family. And, you know, just having a good time.

Lots of delicious food that should specify not store bought tofurkey homemade Tofurky. It's way better. Gourmet vegan, You know, kind of sewer here. Everybody just, uh you know, James has had vegan food all across this country, so he knows his his homemade Tofurky. Well, man, I know I've been to 46 states, but I don't know how many of those states have had vegan food in probably most of them. Probably I got to figure that out. But anyway, what about you? What are your Thanksgiving plans? Oh, just, you know, be real thankful for a lot of stuff and probably also stuff my Gord with.

See, I don't like turkey at all. I think it's a gross, dry, disgusting meat on dso e. I try to go for ham. I know that you're not supposed Thio, but I'd rather eat ham for for Thanksgiving and for Christmas. Because hams delicious and turkey's gross. Well, we can agree on one thing. There you. And besides, honestly, the real magic is scallop potatoes. I am a like scalloped potatoes of the one thing that exists in my house year round. So there's no there's no oh, this is scallop potatoes just for Thanksgiving.

It's like Now give me like cheesy potatoes. There's nothing better. I love potatoes just because there are so many different ways you can prepare them. Oh yeah, and it's It never gets old. An interesting anecdote for all of you food science people out there. Did you know that the potato is actually the Onley food that changes food group once you process it? Really? Yes. Potatoes air a vegetable, and they are actually such a healthy vegetable. It's a root vegetable, and they're so healthy for you. It's the only thing that you can live off.

Nothing but potatoes. There are so many nutrients and uncooked potato you can eat them raw and they're super great for you. And then you can process them and they turn from a vegetable into a starch. It's the only food that changes food group, that is. I never knew that pretty crazy stuff. Yeah, yeah, it is. What I did know is that until the I want to say 16, hundreds or so potatoes were not a thing in Europe because potatoes are from North America. I actually think that potatoes started in South America.

I believe they're native to like Peru or something like that. That could be You're probably right about that. I feel like I saw that on when my son was watching. Let's go, Luna. They were traveling around the world and he was eating a bag of potato chips. I feel like it's like Peru or somewhere in South America. Yeah, I just feel so bad for, you know, because potatoes air such a staple food in, you know, Germany, Ireland to this day. And I'm like, What did you eat before you have potatoes?

Yeah, it was leaks. And like, broth and, you know, like bread and that kind of stuff. And I'm just like, these countries have such an association with potatoes, both Germany and Ireland and its like. You've only had potatoes for 400 years before that, man life must have been boring. It's in the, uh, alcoholism rate started to naturally incline like we got potatoes. Let's make whiskey. Yeah, or Russia vodka. Oh, gosh. Yeah, man, what would Russia be if they didn't have potatoes? So there's your there's your potato lesson for the day, everybody.

Happy face giving, folks. We hope you're doing well and having a great time with your home team, a k a. Your family. We're gonna talk about a different kind of team today, though, we're gonna talk about your creative team for your band and a few different areas that you probably should hire someone else to take care of for you. Unless you're already an expert in that field. And why so just jumping right into the advantages. Matt, do you wanna tackle some of these? Absolutely. The most powerful thing about building a team is you're building a network of people that you can outsource to.

The word outsourcing is a weird word, because while it seems like you are taking things, they're inside of your band and you are putting them on the outside so that you are no longer in control. Really? What it means is you're actually bringing a specialist or an expert on the outside, into your network and into your project. I love how you put that. And just to add to that, we're not talking about, you know, outsourcing in the way that it's talked about politically where you know, cos air sending work to India or something.

I mean, if you want to go find somebody on Fiverr who will do something for $10 or whatever. That's your prerogative, but they're not going to be a good as somebody that is recommended to you by someone you know. They do it for a living. They're based. You know, I shouldn't even say their base because where somebody is doesn't affect their work. But I can guarantee if they're on Fiverr and doing something for $10 their work is not gonna be great. Case in point, Our original podcast Art. I designed that in Canada.

After expanding, I think 30 to $40 on Fiverr and just wasn't happy with the results from the designer. Even though she did two or three different designs. They just all we're really generic and didn't follow the vision I had. So I spent an hour or so in Canada to make our podcast art. Now I do not recommend that, and I'll get into that more later for album or or anything like that. But because our podcast art has a very clean branded look, it worked again. I would not recommend doing that for your band's album, art or something, but more on that later started to jump in their map.

No, that was I think that's a perfect edition, you know, And I love you know, it's an important distinction because, like you're saying outsourcing in the terms that you know it gets thrown around loosely, it really does seem like your casting off responsibility on somebody else. You know, there's a lot of negative connotation to it. But if you actually take a step back and realize that what you as an artist are supposed to be doing is creating art, that's the position you're supposed to be in. You're not supposed to be in the producer role.

If you know a little bit about music production, that's awesome. Make your demos make really high quality demos so that you can then turn. You can send them off to be peer reviewed by other people in the industry. You can send them off to producers who might have more insight on them and things like that. If you are really interested in production, that's awesome. But unless you're a professional producer or professional sound engineer, why are you producing your music? You shouldn't be doing that. You're gonna burn yourself out.

I've seen some absolutely incredible bands who have tried to d i. Wyatt a little too hard. I know some people who are on point, the ongoing concept on absolutely fantastic band that Dawson Schultz who you know, if anybody's looking for video work. I know Dawson does a lot of video work, and he did all of their own music videos. He did all of their production. He went as far in music production as to learn how to sing five part harmonies. And he recorded their entire album without using any auto tune.

Any melodies in any software like that? Because he wanted it to be this really authentic? Absolutely, you know, polished product. If you were to ask Dawson how much work he put into that, I mean it captured his entire life. It ate his whole world quick shout out to them. Their podcast failures and fakes is an absolutely, you know, it's a great listen. I strongly encourage any and all of our listeners to go and check them out as well just because they have riel human stories and, you know, and really regrets that they made.

And I mean these these guys worked hard. There's very few artists in the industry that I have more respect for than the guys in the ongoing concept. And it took years for for Dawson. It took years for us. It took years for every musician who competes at this level. To really learn this idea that you need toe relinquished some of the control in your band in order to receive a better product. I'm not a video editor. Any idiot can hold a camera. But as soon as you get into the video editing software, as soon as you get into, you know, color palettes and color grades and you know, and really even from step one, you need to know the types of shots you're going to shoot.

It's an art form, and just like any art form, it takes a lot of practice to become perfect. You know, there's, uh, speaker out there who basically talks about how long it takes to become an expert at something, and the golden number that they settled on was 10,000 hours. You need to do something for 10,000 hours before you are an expert at it. Now, if you think about becoming an expert at music production about that song writing at video production at graphic work. If you're looking at all these things and you're going to spend 10,000 hours trying to become an expert in each one of these things, that's 30,000 hours that you didn't spend working on your business.

You as an asset are more valuable. And really, if your band ends up not making it in some you know, in some way, shape or form, you'll probably still end up in the music industry. But you're gonna be one of those middle men. You're gonna be one of the people that gets, you know, people are coming to you for graphic work. They're coming to you for music videos. So you really need to figure out exactly what's important to you. And James. You did this perfectly. You went out.

You played music a little bit. You're like, Maybe that's not for me. You got into production. You liked that more. You went out on tour. Touring was not the life for you. You're more of a home body, and you learned that that was a strength that you learned. And so you were very easily able to identify what was more important to you. You know, you knew you wanted to be in the music space, but you didn't necessarily know what exactly your niche was. And so you tested the waters a little bit.

You figured out what was important, and then you stuck to it. If you guys wanna be rock stars, get out of the dark room, you know, get out of the photo booth, get get out of the music production world. Write songs that are undeniable being awesome musician. And this is this is playing to your strengths. This is what you want to do. This is probably what you have the most practice in. And so take advantage of that strength. Don't be afraid to ask for help in other areas.

The person who can't ask for help is the person who will never, ever, ever succeed. I promise you, there's a fantastic story about a basketball coach. Whenever he had a player who was feeling confident and like they were better than everybody else, he would run a drill with them. That person who thought they were great, you give them the ball and then he would put four players on basically the opposite side of of, you know, one. The player would be on the left side of the hoop.

The other four players would be at the baseline, the free throw line, the half court line and the other free throw line. He gave one ball to each side and he said, You, you're the best. You know, I want you toe dribble down and score layup and he candida ball today, that one He said, I want you to pass between your team members and score lap and we're going to see who scores first. And of course, all the players who thought that they could do everything by themselves that everybody wanted to try, and each and every single player would go through the motions they would try and every single one of them scored after the four people.

The four people working together, always 100% of the time, accomplished the goal quicker and on top of that, who do you think was out of energy? You think the four people were at energy passing the ball? No, that one dude running up and down the court. He was absolutely out of energy. He burnt out. He tried so hard to do everything himself that in the end it was like, No, not on Lee, Did I lose? But now I have no oxygen burning the candle at both ends. Don't think that everything needs to be so perfect in your own eyes that you have to do everything.

That's a great way to put that. I love that. And, you know, just to translate that to the band world, if you're writing and recording yourself By the time you've recorded all your tracks and you've got the harmonies in there and you've mixed it and you've mastered it, you're going to be burned out. You are not gonna have the mental bandwidth to continue pushing that release properly. You're not gonna have the mental bandwidth to come up with your cover art or videos or anything like that. It's just not gonna be there for you.

This is where having a team really comes in handy. Now, obviously, if you're a band which most of our listeners are, there's a couple people who have solo projects. But most of you are bands, so you have an advantage there because you might have somebody in the band who is a professional graphic designer. Maybe somebody else is a videographer, which on that note, Episode 41 we interviewed Christian James of James and the Giant sleep all about mindset and just having the energy and the drive to make music your life.

But Christian is also an amazing videographer and cinematographer. Christian really had some great things to say, So if you want to check that one out, it's at Band. I've got rocks slash 41. That's the number 41. But getting back to it having that mental bandwidth is something you need for your music. Because if you're so burned out on doing other things when it comes to your music, you're not gonna put out the best thing you can write your not gonna put out the best thing of your performance. It's not gonna work for you, so I may be biased being an audio engineer.

But I think the first thing that should be outsourced is the recording and production aspect off your music. There's a caveat here. If you are, someone in your band happens to be a recording engineer, a mixing engineer, a producer, anything like that on a professional level, and that doesn't necessarily mean full time because there are some great engineers who aren't full time. But what I mean is recording other clients working with other clients. If you're only quote unquote, client is your own music, your own band. You are not a professional.

You might know a little bit about recording, but that does not mean you're an expert in any way, shape or form, because what that means is that most your recording, you know, an album every year or two, maybe you're doing singles every month or twice a month or something like that. That's still adds up to an album every year or two. You need somebody who can take a professional expert perspective and apply it to your music, especially when it comes to production. Because even if you're an expert recording engineer, if you're recording yourself, you need a second set of years on that.

You need a producer who could say, Hey, actually, you know if you play this parched a little bit differently, or if you know you add a tambourine there or you know something cheesy like more cow bell, things like that matter absolutely. I know. For some artists, it's tough to take that outside feedback because it's like, No, this is my song. I hear like this. This is how it has to be. It's like, Yes, it's your song But do you want it to be 100% years and 80% great? Or do you want it to be 80% years and 100% great long term, which is gonna benefit you more?

One thing that in my early years I never heard anybody ever talk about. In the in the d I Y world was Sonics was the different tones that when you start adding mawr and mawr instruments into your recordings, you might have a little bit of bleed through, and you might have to instruments that are playing in the same register sonically. Now this might cause things to get a little bit money, and you might actually not be able to discern some of those tones. This is kind of the stuff that James is talking about.

Ah, producer, somebody who is trained to know these things. He might come in and say, Hey, you don't have to change anything, but this should be played an octave lower because right now you wrote the music and all the music together Sounds perfect. But as soon as you add your vocals in your vocals, air singing in this register and so what's gonna happen? Maybe they're singing the same registers as a guitar. And so now you're guitar tones. We're going to start muddying in with some of your vocal tones.

It might sound great to your ear, or you may have listened to it 100,000 times already, and you might be so desensitized to what's going on in your music that you don't even know. I mean, how many of you guys have written a song and then tried to make it better and better and better and better? And by the time you get to the end, you're like, I hate this song. I don't wanna play it anymore because your brain is tired, and that's what James was talking about earlier.

You know, you have to have these fresh ears. You have to have these thes fresh bodies, these fresh opinions and basically people that just have enough experience in the areas that you don't to come in and tell you, Yeah, this part rocks This part is not good. This is a really good song, but if you did this, it would be a total Bangor. And that's really what you need is the network. You need the network of people who a care enough about music to learn these things on their own.

There is a difference between an audio engineer and a producer. You don't have to go to the same person for tracking as you do for mixing. You don't have to go to the same person for mixing as you do for mastering. Find out who your favorite artists are. And honestly, I wouldn't even say who your favorite artists are. Go listen to albums that sound how you want your product to sound. Then figure out who produced it and go to them. Get in contact with, Um, I feel like a lot of artists at early stages are blown away at the possibility of working with an award winning producer.

But you don't realize these are just normal people that run businesses, so they're absolutely eager to take your money because they're eager to keep their lights on their eager to keep their bellies full, so reach out to him. If you're a sucker for the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rick Rubin is your guy, then you need to figure that out. Now, I Nobody here has the budget for that, but that's my point. You have to listen to things sonically that you think will translate into your project.

Go with them. Yeah. You know, one thing to watch out for two. I see this all the time recording engineers who call themselves producers. You want to make sure that your engineer is actually a producer. So one of the things that a producer will do is they will listen to your demos, and they will help you tweak those demos before you ever set foot into the studio. You know, maybe they'll come to your rehearsal studio and work with you there. But before you ever go to the recording studio, the producer will already have been spending a lot of time with you helping you flesh out your songs fully so they have the best arrangement possible.

And that way, when you go into the studio, guess what? You're gonna need less time because you know all the parts you're gonna play. You've practiced them. You know exactly where everything fits. Yeah, Okay, maybe some things will change last minute as you hear it come together. That's perfectly normal. It's art, but the producer will have gotten you 90 to 95% of the way there. So once you get the studio, you could just knock everything out and you're done. One last thing in audio here before we move on.

Always, Always, Always hire a mastering engineer. Whether you're outsourcing, mixing or not, hire a mastering engineer. If you outsource the mixing, and that engineer is also a good mastering engineer, that's fine. But if the mixing engineer you hire isn't a good mastering engineer, hire someone else for mastering. If you mix your own stuff because you are an expert and you have your own clients, that is when you absolutely need to get a mastering engineer because if you're doing the whole process by yourself, you want another set of ears on that final product before he send it out for distribution that is so incredibly vital.

Yeah, there's also a good chance that whoever is mastering it probably has, like $100,000 an outboard gear, and you can't cut corners on things like that. There's some awesome plug ins out there. There's some great APs, but there is no supplement for experience, and a nice little icing on the cake for that one is the outboard gear. I will always go to somebody who has impressive catalog and $150,000 an outboard gear over somebody who has put out some really good things. But then you look at their set up and it's like, you know, maybe we could do better.

I love what you said there, James. I think that's really powerful. Thanks. Yeah, I think it's so important to at that last step. If you're doing everything yourself, just get that one thing out of your head and have someone else take care of it, especially because when it comes to mastering as much as it is subjective, it is incredibly objective as well. There are technical specifications that you have to meet, so your CD plays properly. If you're doing a vinyl pressing, Oh man, that needs a totally different set of specifications you should never use.

The same master for vinyl is you would for C. D. You know, if you dio hire a different mastering engineer because they don't know what they're doing now. There are plenty of artists who have done this on major labels because the label said, Well, we don't care, just we want to sell the records. But if you truly care about the experience of your fans, you better pay for separate master just for vinyl. That's how it's gonna be Spotify apple. They have certain technical specifications that have to be met.

You know, there's the little mastered for iTunes badge that doesn't really matter. But meeting the proper specifications absolutely does. So you know, the badges, a badge. All that means is that that person has been trained to meet those standards. Somebody can still do that without the badge. They're just not gonna have the badge. So find somebody who knows what they're doing and hire them for mastering. Like I said, if you're mixing, Engineer also does mastering and they're good at what they dio. Then that's fine. But for the most part, having a separate mastering engineer is just key.

And, you know, we already talked about video here, Matt, a little bit But just to drive the point home, people will notice when they see a d. I y video you were talking about color grading. If you have different cameras or different locations with single cameras, it all has to look consistent. Going back to the last episode Episode 51 Everything has to be on brand. That includes having a cohesive image throughout your video that matches your overall brand. If you want to check out that episode, it's like I said 51 visual branding for bands.

Why it matters more than you think. You can check it out at Band. I've got rocks slash 51 again, you can also check out Episode 41 with Christian James, where Christian talks all about mindset and videography and D I. Y. And all that stuff. Another great episode. Great Interview. Christian is incredibly talented, with some great content, but anyway people will notice. Don't mess this up. All of this stuff is very public facing. It is you're very product if you go to McDonald's. No, I'm not even McDonald's. I'm not going to go down that route if you go to Azadeh rated restaurant.

High ratings supposed to have wonderful food and you go in and you order, Let's say soup, but the chefs not there. So the recipes there, the chef is not there. And they got some McDonald's line cook and said, Here, follow this recipe. Well, you know, McDonald's. There's no recipe that the line cooks they're using. Everything is prepared. All they do is put it together, heated up or whatever. That line cooks gonna look at it and say, Okay, here's recipe. Well, what do I dio? And they're gonna do their best job to put together the ingredients and follow the recipe.

But it's not gonna be highly rated meal. It's not gonna be the same as if that chef was there. So with all of this, you're writing the music, you're providing the performance. Think of that as the recipe. And then the chef is the producer, the audio engineer, the videographer, all of that. Hire a chef? Absolutely. No, I mean, and that's great. If you think about it like photos videos. Do you want all of your band members to be in your photos? Do you want all your band members to be in your videos?

Well, then one of you can't be behind the camera selfie mode. Yeah, exactly. You know, unless you wanna have a whole bunch of of selfies, which I mean, that's great for Snapchat. That's that's good for instagram stories, Facebook stories, things like that. You know, your YouTube channel is even okay for selfie videos. But the thing that you need to realize is that do you know everything you need to know about lighting? We're probably not. Light is like the great thing when it comes to art, photography, painting like anything visual, it's all about light.

And so, unless you know a lot about light, be have the supplies for lighting rooms Well, and then see somehow, you know, like, uh, e I mean, I know there's cameras out there that air on timers. I know there's things that will move on tracks by themselves. I mean, you're literally talking about tens of thousands of dollars of gear on top of all the time that you have to spend toe, learn that and all the money that you put into that when it's like you could just turn to this guy over here who knows that you could go toe lenz dot com and rent a lens.

And he's the one that can film you. Or maybe he has watched every single music video in the country genre of music. And so you know what? He just knows the types of things that need to go into the video. He knows the props you need. Go back to school when you're writing a paper. You know, teacher gives you assignment to write a paper and in your mind, what do you do? You start going. You have these dreams of grandeur. You're like, Oh, I'm gonna I'm gonna write about this and it's gonna be awesome.

You know, I'm gonna bring in this point in this point, and all these plans are gonna work out, and everything's just gonna slide right in tow, right into the groove. It needs Thio. And then what happens when you start when you start and maybe you get a little ahead of yourself and then you gotta go back and edit, And then maybe then maybe you write a really good part. Well, then maybe you're like, Oh, shoot. I should have started with that. Then you gotta move stuff around, and then you keep doctoring this thing over and over and over again.

And by the time you finish the paper, it's nothing like what you wanted. It's not as good as you had hoped, and that's fine. You wanted to do it yourself. And at the end of the day, you got to take the letter grade for it. This is no different. Whatever the work that you're gonna put into this, whatever you're gonna outsource like if you're gonna pay $10 for somebody to make you a music video, E would think twice about that. I love the band thrice. I think they're fantastic.

They're lead Singer started a solo project and he put on a music video. Now this music video. The song was great, but the music video is literally him on a treadmill, you can't see the treadmill. The camera is like mounted basically on the front of the treadmill. And then there's a green screen behind him, and throughout the course of the video, he's walking towards the camera on this treadmill that you can't see. It gets faster and faster and faster as the song gets more and more intense and then as it slows down the treadmill gets slower and slower until finally at the end of the video.

He's really just a little bit sweaty, and the video looks like crap. The visuals were cool from the green screen effects, but there was nothing that stood out, and he very obviously did it himself. There was no dynamic shots at all, and for me, it was a huge letdown because listening to thrice growing up was like Do these guys have put out like four or five albums that I love that are powerful and moving? And then I saw his solo project and it's like this. Do you know, like there's a guy who's like a little bit overweight on a treadmill?

Good for him, and I'm glad that that was an art style that he was choosing to pursue. But have any of you ever seen that music video? How far do you think it went? I mean, this is somebody that was in a band that was huge, and their lead singer puts out a solo project, and you know, most people don't listen to it. And for good reason, because the art is lacking in quality. Don't let your art lacking quality yet somebody who knows what they're doing. You know, don't try to cut the corner.

That you should be cutting is not money. You shouldn't be saying. Oh, I need to make things as cheap as possible. You know, we've talked about this over and over again. You should be focusing on how can I make the best product and then from there, figure out what you have to dio. And how do you do that? Well, maybe you have one guy film and another guy edit. You rent the lights yourself. You know, maybe you get on some forums and realize, Oh, I can rent this camera and I can I can have, you know, somebody come and use it and maybe that's a little bit cheaper.

You're just It's better to test the water and figure out a few different things. But don't cut corners on your art. You don't want nothing but selfie videos. You wanna have good quality stuff? Look at different videographers. Look a different styles. Both James and I share a enjoyment of the band. The bravery, We were actually talking about them before this episode started, and they have a music video. I want all of you to go watch it. It's a song. Song is called on. Honest mistake. Yeah, this song is great and the music video is one of my all time favorite music videos.

Go tell me if you think that the band members were the ones that film that go watch fat lip by some 41 tell me if the band members were the ones that films that music video, even Blink 1 82. Okay, Blink 1 82 is like they were kind of the King of the D i y but they did it in a punk rock way decided yourself band, right? Exactly. It really and it really waas and, you know, and there's literally a music video of them going in and saying, Oh, we just got the check from the record label for a music video And what did they dio?

They made a video of them cashing this check and going around to people. They got home. They bought a homeless dude like an Armani suit and got him like a shave and a haircut and bought him like a nice meal they like, you know, went around giving a bunch of money toe like women in wheelchairs and things. I mean, they did absolutely Ridic. I think they blew up a car Maybe. I mean, it's been a long time since I've seen those videos, but they did a bunch of ridiculous things, and they had one of their buddies hold the camera, and that was the style that they specifically went for.

So it's not to say the 100% of the time you can't do it, but even still, not one of the band members were the ones behind the camera. They still brought in a professional toe, hold the camera and they did it very D i y. But they went with, um or artistic like they were trying to brand it that way. When you look at these high production music videos that really have, like, an incredible reach that really do things like visually for you or they have like a narrative and a story, those aren't cheap budget videos, E. I mean, I think the cheapest I've ever paid for, like a good video is like 2500 bucks, three grand, maybe, you know, And that was us really die lying in That was different editors than film er's.

That was us asking permission to use locations. You know, I think we we hired a makeup artist to work with us for an entire day one time. So we had to pay him for an entire day. And he just came with us from location to location, doing more makeup, and so, like, we had to figure out really clever ways to do it. But it always came out expensive, and it always came out better than we would have done ourselves. Yeah, absolutely. And that's the main thing here is if you want to make the best art you can.

You have to make the best art you can. And there were so many takeaways and everything you just said, but two things stood out to me. One of them is a little silly because when you said, think twice about hiring somebody on five or for $10 my mind immediately went thio, huh? Band joke. I would think thrice and then 20 seconds later you mentioned thrice eso huge coincidence There great timing then the other thing is, if you want to see a really cool music video with treadmills. Look no further than okay.

Go. Absolutely. That went viral back in, like 2007 or something. And it was amazing because it was creative. It was unique. It was something that nobody had ever seen before. It was amazing. So you can absolutely do something on a low budget, like with what blink quantity to did. Granted, they had a huge budget, but they gave it away. But it was creative, and that's what was key. Now, obviously, they still paid. Like you said, for somebody to film it, I'm sure they had, ah, professional team do the editing and color grading and all that stuff.

But they got away with giving away as much of that budget as they could. One last thing before we wrap this up graphic design. I know I said I was going to get back to this, So I'm going to just make this quick. Episode 51. It's all about branding. Just go listen. That episode you can use Canada if you want, but if it's for a cornerstone of your brand, so you know your band logo, your album art, Whether it's an album a single and EP whatever it is, don't try to do that yourself.

Like I said, I'm a little bit of a hypocrite here because the original podcast art was done in Canada. In my opinion, I think it looks great. But here's the thing. We're going for a very clean branded look. That's not the case for most album covers. If you see an album cover that looks like a corporate logo, you're gonna be like Nah, dude, no. And that's not for May, No thanks. Whereas with the podcast, that's kind of how it goes with most podcast. It's a very different I don't want to say environment, but there's a very different requirement for it.

Canada is a great tool for making simple branded images. It is not a great tool for making creative art. If you want album art, you do not use Can Va because Canada is not for art, it is for business. So to wrap things up every second or minute or hour you spend doing this stuff is taking time away from your creativity. And I think Matt, you have some ideas to expand on that I know that every single one of you guys. Well, there's at least one of you in in your group or maybe you as a solo artist.

You are the one who is going to ask the big question. Why? Why do I outsource this? If I can do it, why would I outsource it like you were just saying, James, every second that you spend working on these things, you know, every one of these 10,000 hours that you put in towards becoming an expert in these other areas. That's time that you should be spending working on your business. What you're actually doing is working for your business. This is a big distinction in entre, you know, just in entrepreneurship, where you as an entrepreneur, you need to run your business.

You're not an employee working on day to day things. You are thinking about products that you need to create marketing strategies that you need to implement how to make your business and brand grow. You're an entrepreneur, So think big. Hire somebody else for your tasks so that you can continue to think big. You don't want to narrow your focus on one individual thing. You might be able to compartmentalize things. And maybe if you guys were really taking the d I Y route like really hard. Maybe if you're in a group of multiple members and you guys have different interests, sure, you can have quote unquote project managers.

You could have people that are overseeing to making sure that things air, staying in line with your vision. That's totally wonderful. You should definitely be a stickler about the quality of your art, but you are a musician. And if you want to be a musician, if your dream job is to make music making music, that does it for another episode of the Bandhive podcast. Thanks so much for listening this week and every week, and I got to say, if this episode sounds a little familiar to you, that's probably because it is.

We talked about outsourcing elements off your business way back on Episode six almost a year ago. That was January of 2020 before we had any idea of what was gonna happen in the coming months. But we focused mostly on the business aspect of outsourcing rather than the creative aspect and benefits. So this was a topic that Matt and I wanted to revisit from a different angle and talk about it again. I really hope it's helpful to you to show just how much further you can go when you have the right people working on your music, your videos, your graphics, all that stuff.

It really is such a huge help. And it just puts artists miles ahead of the competition when you do things like this because people can notice the difference they noticed. When you've cheap doubt on something, they notice when you did it yourself. Unless you of course, like I said in the episode, it's something that you're an expert at. In that case, you know what? Maybe they won't notice they shouldn't, because if you're an expert and they notice that's not good. But anyway, the main take away here is Do not be afraid to ask for help.

Seek out the right people who will take your baby and make it something better. That's what we're saying here, so thanks again for listening. If you are interested in hiring someone, feel free to hop on over to the Bandhive Facebook group, either by searching for us or by going to better dot band slash group in your browser and ask folks there who they would hire. I'm sure you'll get tons of great recommendations for all kinds of different areas that you might be looking for helping. We'll be back with another new episode next Tuesday at 6 a.m.

Until then, I hope you have an awesome week. Stay healthy and, of course, as always, keep rocking.