Welcome to Episode 62 of the Bandhive Podcast.

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

How're you doing over there on the East side? Thanks, man. I am doing really well over here. I am super excited for a project that my friend Todd is working on. Most of you listening probably know that I'm a massive a fi fan and so is Todd. He's such a big F I fan that he is covering their albums Sing the Sorrow from Start to Finish, including all the hidden tracks, the B sides, all that stuff to of the songs were already out and he's gonna have a least two more out by the time this podcast episode drops and bringing it up because, well, not to brag.

But he sent me a preview of the whole thing, and it just sounds stellar. And the thing is that this is not just a cover. It legitimately sounds so close to the original, and this is a trick that audio engineers will do. They will try to recreate a song as close to the original is possible toe. Learn how that song was done so they can figure out techniques to use. But he's not just doing one song, he's doing the whole album, and I think it's so close that the average person, unless you're a die Hard A f I fain, would just think, Oh, is this like an alternate version or something?

Is this a demo version on? It Doesn't even sound demo. It just sounds a little bit different. Last night I was listening to one of the songs, and my fiance, Jamie, was sitting at the desk next to me, playing e think with Sims. She's going old school right now, and I was listening to the song and like, halfway through, she's like, Why does this sound different? She literally had thought it was a f i for the first half of the song before she picked up on Hey, something's a little different about this.

That's how good it is. Like this is not the average person doing ah, crappy cover on their phone like Todd is a recording engineer and multi instrumentalist, and it's just it's insane what he could do. So So if you want to check that out, he's on instagram at Todd B A R r I a g e. Sorry, Todd, I don't want to butcher your last name, So that's at T o d d b a r r A g e really nice guy. Also a really good studio engineer.

So go check out that cover even if you're not interested in a f I. But his Siri's is just gonna blow your mind. And now that I've been learning out about that for, like, two minutes, his coverage were great. But moving on from that this episode is going to be about skill as a musician and how buying gear is not the answer. Won't won't won't on. This was an unplanned tie in. I don't know how much Todd has spent on gear, but whatever amount he has spent on gear.

I know he's spent way more time practicing because he can sing. He plays drums, he plays bass, he plays guitar. And for those of you who know if I Jade's work is not the easiest stuff to reproduce, at least not in some cases, the rhythm parts. Okay, sure, but some of the lead work he does is incredible, and it's really buried in the mix of time, so it's really subtle and difficult to pick out. So let me tell you a story about another friend. His name is Buster.

At least that's what we're going to call him for this episode, because we're kind of gonna rag on him a little bit. Sorry, buster, if you figure out who you are. This comes from a place of love. So Buster has, or hopefully had a very bad habit of always buying new gear, whether that's pedals or amps or guitars to try to find the perfect tone. Invariably, after 3 to 6 months, he would be selling that gear because he found something better and wanted to buy that. So, you know, he got a new river pedal and then I was like, Oh, you know what?

This is good. But in the in comparison to this other one, that's terrible. So I'm gonna get this one instead. Now, who wants to buy it? And, you know, you see a Facebook post go up saying I'm selling this gear busters. Entire life was about looking up gear reviews and finding out what the hot new tool was for his toolbox. And yes, I'm going to address the elephant in the room. You need decent gear to sound good. I mean, Matt, you can attest to this like gear does matter, and I'm not denying that gear matters.

But at a certain point, when you're spending more and more money on gear, the improvement in sound becomes smaller and smaller. So in economics, if you're looking at a supply chain, this would be called the Law of Diminishing Returns. For example, let's say you have a factory and you are investing in faster conveyor belts, and that's the Onley thing. You improve in that factory. Well, great. Your conveyor belts are moving faster, but can all the other machines in the factory keep up? Can the human workers in the factory keep up faster.

Conveyor belts don't do anything if the other machines and the people who are working there can't keep up with the speed of those conveyor belts. If that's the case, you need to upgrade all the other machines and hire more people. So when you are upgrading your gear constantly over and over, always trying to find a better sound have you looked at yourself? Are you improving at all? Can you tell the difference if you were to play Ah, $100 guitar and a $5000 guitar? Or is it going to sound the same because you can't fret the notes properly to be clear here?

Buster was a pretty good guitar player. I'm not saying that he's not a good guitar player, but just in general you have to be able to play your instrument for that $5000 guitar to be worth it. Otherwise, it's going to sound like you're playing $100 guitar because you can't play guitar. Absolutely. You know, that reminds me of the first band that I ever played in when I was 15, and my guitarist Waas and honestly still is the greatest guitarist that I've ever heard. He was a child prodigy and he spent a lot of time practicing.

He taught me how to play bass. And he was so good at his instrument that I was so blessed to even get to play with him because it made me Ah, much better bassist. And he always you know, his favorite guitarist, Inveigh Mom Steen and Joe Satriani and John Petru. She and you know you know Paul Gilbert, all these guitarist who could play, you know, 25 notes a second And you know he would tell me stories about how you know Paul Gilbert couldn't get into China one time.

I'm sorry. In China, you can't import any gear and so you're only allowed to use what's in the country if you go and play there. And Paul Gilbert has a very specific set of pedals that he needed and he couldn't import those. And so he ran. I think it was 25. Big Muff pedals through each other in order so that he could get the dirty enough sound that he wanted. Now, when I played with my guitarist for a long period of time, he went through a gear face.

I think everybody goes through a gear face. You want to make sure you have good equipment and you don't know what really the bar is for. You know what it needs to be. You need to have, like, quality equipment. Look up with the industry. Standard is guitarists. You know, a 700 guitar will work wonderfully, even even a $500 guitar. Well, generally work wonderfully for what you're trying to dio. You don't need to go buy a PRS, okay? You don't need to go buy a $3000 guitar. Now, if that's what you want to dio you go for it.

We're not going to shame anybody for, like going and buying expensive gear. But just keep in mind that that is not a crucial factor in success. You know, you need to have I don't want to say the bare minimum, but you need to have the industry standard, and that's like a very important thing. The last thing you want to do is to take a crappy cab and put it on stage and have a sound engineer Mike that, like cool, You just took a bad tone and made it louder and nobody wants that.

And you will know all those people that have crappy amps and you go and you buy, like, you know, this $1400 half stack and the next show that you go play that sound engineer Mike's Your cab is like, Oh, what a good tone. These were very, very important things back to my first guitarist. He went through a gear face. He wanted to figure out the best, you know, his wah pedals and his whammy pedals. And is this and that and the next thing. And by the time he was 18, he got rid of every single one of his pedals.

It became about the music and about taking any guitar and plugging it into any AMP and being able to make it sound beautiful. And that, to me, was eye opening When I met this kid, you know, he was 16 years old and he flipped a guitar over and played Eruption upside down. I'm right handed and he's left handed, and he flipped my Les Paul upside down and played Eruption by Van Halen. Note for note upside down. And then when we stopped playing music together because I moved out of the state he was putting in a Coltrane album and playing along for an hour and a half and just jamming with a Coltrane vinyl Or, you know, popping in Stevie Ray Vaughan or someone like that.

And so his entire view kind of change because it was like, No, the beauty of the music is in just the simplicity of it. And I'm not going to tell anyone of you what you need, because obviously everybody needs different requirements for the music that they're trying to make. Figure out what you need. But if you're spending $5000 on your guitar pedals and you're spending 10 minutes a week or a month practicing like if you're buying stuff so that it sits on your walls and your when your friends come over, it looks cool.

Well, you're buying really expensive art. You got to make sure that basically that you invest in the most important factor practice. Yeah, exactly. And it sounds like in your situation, your friend already had the skills where maybe that gear was worth it, but clearly he didn't think so, since he sold all of it down the road. But for the average person, it doesn't matter. I have two main guitars. I have UNEP, a phone, Les Paul, which I think was $450 or so about a decade ago. That one right behind you.

Yeah, exactly. And then my other one is a PV bullet. I think it's called that I got off of Facebook Marketplace for $20. Both guitars have their pros and cons. By far, the EPA phone is a better guitar. It plays smoother, it's got more sustained, and it's just more comfortable. But no matter how many times I've had set up stunt on it, either by doing them myself or paying a professional luthier to do it, the high E string on frets 16 or 17 and up buzzes can't fix it. It's just not built that well, and that's because it's an EPA phone.

Now the head stock won't break off like on a true Gibson, but I can't use the high E string above the 16th or 17th fret without plucking it really hard and holding it down. Yeah, but that's fine. The PV, which is a Strat knockoff, plays really nicely on lower frets and I can actually play those high frets on the E string. It's easier to set up that $20 guitar, which I think probably was about 100 or 150 new, I don't know, but for me, $20 and I did have to do quite an extensive set up on it, and that's why I got it.

I wanted to see how easy it would be to set up a $20 guitar took me in afternoon. It was fun. The issue with it is that the frets are sharp. They need to be filed down. So every time I play that guitar, my fingers get a little chafed by the frets. Okay, no big deal. The other thing is, the sustain isn't great on it, because I'm pretty sure it's Hollow E. I haven't taken it apart to check, but I'm pretty sure it's mainly hollow. Okay, no big deal.

I don't typically use it for recording. I just use it to play around not too long, so I don't want my fingers to get tourney up. But it's actually a better playing guitar than the Les Paul because I can hit those notes on the higher strings. Okay, cool. $20 guitar versus $500 guitar. Either one of those. When you jump up to $1000 or $2000 level, you're going to see an improvement. I think if you combined the PV and the EPA phone, that would be like my ideal guitar. If the EPA phone had the properly set up neck and I should say properly constructed neck, then that would be my ideal guitar.

I can play all the notes. It plays smoothly. It doesn't chase my fingers Great guitar alternately. If the PV had its fret issues fixed, which obviously I could have that done. But I'm not gonna pay somebody who knows how much to fix a $20 guitar. That would be a poor investment. If you ask me, that would work too. So no matter what, if you go for cheaper gear, there are going to be small issues like that. But as a whole, those instruments are still perfectly playable. I can make the PV sound good.

I could make the Les Paul sound good. Now, maybe if you are Joe Satriani, you will hear a difference between those guitars and I should specify that in the Les Paul I've replaced the pickups, at least with the bridge pickup. But overall, the average person is not going to say, Oh, that's a true fender. Oh, that's a PV just by hearing it, because so much of the tone comes from playing that if somebody hears that song on the radio, they're not gonna know. Yeah, I couldn't tell you how many guitarists I've met on tour that were like, Oh, yeah, I have this, you know, $1400 guitar.

But this is the one I play every night, this, like, $300 banger that you can literally treat however you want. And you know, the second you buy some super expensive instrument you like, bring it into the setting where you're playing concerts. It doesn't matter what style of music you play. Concerts can be war zones. Some people just aren't comfortable with bringing their expensive equipment in there. I mean, obviously that's a that's a risk of the job. And so that's why we have road cases and things like that.

And you know why we don't stack drinks on electric equipment and things like that, But I mean I've heard so many guitarists who were just like Oh yeah, you know, I Here's Here's my $1100 Whatever. Whatever My Gibson Les Paul or my Gibson SG or my you know, my Fender Strat like, here's these beautiful guitars and they're like, Oh, yeah, but here's my $120 Squire that I got at a music shop that, honestly, like I replaced the neck on this and this thing is now my favorite guitar and like, don't be afraid to try those things out.

Even me. The first base I ever played was a Mexican P base, a Mexican fender P base. It was wonderful. I really enjoyed it. And that led me to buying a Fender J base. And I bought an American made, and that was a $1200 base. Now I got lucky, and it had been on the shelf for a couple months, and so the local music shop had marked it down to, like, $800 after taxes. Yeah, I know. Tell me about it, and to this day I have that base and that is my baby.

I will be buried with that bass guitar. She's sunburst She's beautiful, she's she's beat up a little bit. She's got some character marks on her, but the tone is just so beautiful. She's got a warped neck, you know, and and that's my That's my expensive baby, But I'll always love it. And then I bought a little like, $450. I want to say it was like a Getty Lee signature J Base or P Base, or whatever basic plays and I think was incredible. And I felt like I could throw that one around two.

And there were different reasons that I loved different ones. You know, most of it was playability and not, you know, not so much, even in the tone. You know, unless you're like John for Santa on a bunch of heroin, and you need to pay $30,000 for a Gretsch White Falcon to get the perfect tone on Californication, just make sure that what you're investing your money in and and gender time make sure that whatever your investment is, it's practical and there's it's applicable If you buy something really expensive.

Ah, lot of the time you're like I don't want anything to happen to this I'm gonna put it on the shelf. Don't buy that. Don't buy that guitar. Don't buy that base. Don't be buying $5000 in gear. Drummers excluded. You know, drummers. You guys have a lot harder hill to climb when it comes to Price. Um, you know, each one of your symbols costs as much as a cheap guitar does. So you guys were gonna have something different, but I would even include Look out to some of these smaller drum companies now.

You know, there's a lot of custom drum makers now, people who are, you know, since the rise of hipster life, there's a lot more people who are willing thio, handcraft instruments and honestly, that becomes more marketable, cooler. A lot of the time, you can pick your own colors and you're still paying like the same amount as you would for, You know, your standard. You know, Pearl Premier DW kit, like we like to say, you know, shop your options and things like that, but make sure you bring it all back to the focus of of what it is is it's the practice, you know, like if you don't have a five, you know drummers.

If you don't have a bunch of money to spend on the drum kit, get yourself a nice practice pad. Get yourself a couple practice pads. Learn what a parody it'll is. Learn what a para diddle diddle is. Learn tips and tricks. There are so many. Resource is now that it's like, Where can you not look to find what you need? Just make sure that it's not like, you know, Hey, I need this PRS. Here's the $3000 guitar that they only make you know right handed. Chances are you're a You don't need that and be You're probably not good enough to play a guitar like that, so don't focus on running before you can walk.

Let the gear acquisition be mawr of the hobby part of the music. You know, if if music's gonna be your career, then the gear needs to be. The hobby kind of correlates with that. The things that you get excited about because you know, when you're like Oh, man, I have all this work to do musically, like it's exhausting everybody who wants to be a musician. It's a passion to play music, but the business side is work. There's no way around it. It's hard work. It's exhausting work.

It's physical work. It's mental work, you know. It's relationship work. It's consistency. And so you've got to stay on the straight and narrow. Make sure that what you're doing is what's best for your business, and that all comes down to practice. That all comes down to It's not about your gear. It's not about how how long you stay on the phone with business people. It's not about how maney YouTube videos you watch at the end of the day. If you are the best guitarist that you can be and you are continually pushing yourself to new heights, new levels, that's incredible.

That's the key to success. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice? Practice practice? One of my favorite stories ever is one of the greatest cellists in history at age, like I can't Remember how old he was in his nineties, was asked why he still practices cello 4 to 8 hours a day, and they said, You know, you're in your nineties. Why don't you get out and just live the rest of your life? Why are you practicing so much still, and he looked at them and very calmly said, because I think I'm making progress.

And that is the life mantra to success. You know, that's how he became one of the greatest cellists of it. And so, you know, focus on that focus on practice, don't focus on gear, bring good people who around you who encourage you to practice. You know, having people around you that love to hear you play guitar is a very good thing, because then you could just sit there and practice all day and people love it exactly. And just one more example to kind of bring this all home is if you buy a car, a sports car and all you dio is commute to and from work every day, you don't need a sports car.

Why do you have a Ferrari here? Is using that for show. So if all you're doing is basic power cords in a punk band, you probably don't need ah 3 to $5000 guitar to improve your tone. You're a punk band. Don't get me wrong. Tones do matter. But skill is just a important like you're saying that so focus on that skill first. And then if this is something you truly want to pursue, you will have noticed that because you can look back and say, Hey, I have played guitar for an hour every single day for the last six months.

Okay, I cannot reward myself with a new guitar or whatever instrument it is that you play. Set a goal for yourself, put in the time every single day to play that instrument, to practice that instrument. And by practice, I'm not saying Whenever you get together with your bandmates, that's rehearsal. You know, you've told us stories about that, Matt. I mean, practice by yourself, playing scales or learning new songs, or just playing the songs that you always play that you've written. Get those songs down, get your skills in place.

And since you've set that goal to practice, whatever amount of time for however long once you meet that goal, then you can say Okay, you know what? I deserve a new pedal. Now let's see what I want. That's how to do it. So we know practicing can be kind of tough to keep up with. There's a couple really good resource is for artists and one of them, you probably already know if you're in the rock world, at least its ultimate guitar. They have tabs for guitar bass there.

Guitar pro tabs also frequently have drums in there, sometimes keyboards, so you can learn a lot from ultimate guitar. And I should make this clear. We're not sponsored by ultimate guitar. This is just a resource that I use. I look up tabs and cords there all the time. The other one is use Ishan, which Matt you turned me on to that one, I want to say, almost a year ago, and I picked it up and it's honestly been amazing. I've been playing more guitar in the last nine months than probably than I have in the nine years before that, so I'm getting much better at what I do.

And it's really making a difference. And it's now gotten to the point where I'm not using musician as much because I've played most of the songs they have in there. But I'm still keeping up those habits, and my skills have gotten better. So it's much easier for me to pull up a complex tab and say, Oh, Yeah, I can play that because that's actually just thes cords. So if I play these chords and, you know, pick them, that's super easy. I don't have to like Fred every single note independently.

It's just this chord shape. Okay, Cool. Honestly, you guys, you don't have to get a nap to, like, make you practice either. Like for me, I use sticky notes right on the sticking out, you know, practice your guitar and then I put it on the door or something like that, or on the mirror in the bathroom. And then when I, like, go to bed that night and I wake up the next day and going to the bathroom go to brush my teeth, it's like a practice my guitar and we all need those regular reminders.

You know, APS have done a wonderful job, you know, with push notifications being like, Did you practice your guitar today? That's really cool, too, but you can do that by yourself. It's all going to depend on your drive and how you do it. Basically, if you want it, then you will chase it. Absolutely. I love that, and I do have to fully agree with you. I think for me getting musician helped me really give me confidence in what I can do on a guitar. And because of that, I now play more often, but I hardly ever use it.

I I log in maybe once a week, but I'm still playing every single day, and that's what matters. So do whatever you do, whether that's a sticky note, whether that's taking lessons and having somebody hold you accountable because your guitar teachers saying, Hey, did you practice every day this week? Whether that's musician, whether that's just looking up Random tabs on Ultimate guitar, which most of the tabs on the cider available for free. So that's a giant plus right there. Whatever you need to dio to practice consistently, figure out what that is and do what it takes to make that happen.

You want to know what the key to success is. It's not the gear. It's the ear that does it for another episode of the Bandhive podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in and listening this week as well as every week. I hope that this episode gives you some confidence so you can go out and practice your instrument more knowing one that you don't need expensive gear, toe, Actually be good at your instrument. And to that, you also will have that faith in yourself, which I know this was huge for me that I'm like, Hey, you know what?

I can play every day because I'm actually not as bad guitars I thought I was. I spent nearly a decade thinking, Yeah, I'm not great guitar. And once I started playing songs on Musician and quickly got to the higher levels, I was like, Oh, I'm actually pretty good at guitar now I'm not saying I'm the best guitarist ever, far from it, but I'm also not nearly as bad as I thought. I waas so whether you're using an app or sticky notes, which I think is a great idea or just pure habit that you pick up the guitar all the time at least 15 2030 minutes a day to really keep that muscle memory going, that's awesome.

Keep up the good work and just focus on yourself rather than constantly searching for more gear and, you know, fighting you gear once in a while. That's fine. Go for it. But make sure you don't overdo it. And don't be a buster. We'll be back with another new episode next Tuesday at 6 a.m. Eastern time. Until then, we hope you have an awesome week. Stay healthy and, of course, as always, keep rocking.