The Music Education Podcast
Listen for authentic and challenging conversation on all things music ed. Brought to you by Charanga. Hosted and produced by Chris Woods of The Chris Woods Groove Orchestra.
The Music Education Podcast
Episode 88 - 'Yustudio, DAWs, Risk Taking + More' - Max Wheeler
In this episode Chris chats with Max Wheeler about music education. This podcast is brought to you by Charanga. Find out more about Yustudio here...https://charanga.com/site/secondary/yustudio/
Welcome to the Music Education Podcast. I'm Chris of the Chris Woods Groove Orchestra, and this podcast is brought to you by Chiranga. In this episode, I chat with Max Wheeler, producer and music educator, and a man who was instrumental in bringing UStudio to life, which is a game-changing door that is designed specifically for young people. For those of you who don't know about it, UStudio is Duranga's award-winning cloud-based digital audio workstation or door that has been purpose-built for schools and for young people. Now the door offers unparalleled flexibility and crucially accessibility. I mean it's an affordable option for schools, there's no seat limits, for example, but there really is so much that is exciting about this door that makes actually this conversation a really exciting one. From a philosophical point of view, the idea of actually creating a door or a digital audio workstation or a recording program for young people brings up a whole host of really fascinating perspectives and game-changing choices, I suppose. Now you'll join our conversation where we're talking about risk, how we see risks in our day-to-day life and how that reflects in music education and the choices that we make as music educators, and of course, for students as well. About 30 minutes in, Max takes some of these philosophical ideas and starts to match it to some of the incredible things that U Studio does and some of the exciting developments. This is a really interesting episode for any music educator, whether you're really heavily involved in music tech or absolutely not at all, and a far more traditional music educator that's working exclusively with acoustic instruments. There's a lot in this conversation, and I really hope you enjoy listening. Partly to do with the amount of coffee I drink, but and this was it.
SPEAKER_00:This was sort of um what this thing was saying is that like we perceive the world as much riskier than it was, but actually it's much less risky than it was, but our perception of it is much higher. And it's kind of that when you then feed in all the kind of macroeconomic stuff like AI and stuff, that creates this environment which is just kind of unmanageably tense. Whereas actually, when you look at decisions that young people make in particular, they're much more risk-averse than they used to be. And I think actually that feeds into education where I think young people are. I I noticed it when I was doing youth work that I started out doing a lot of like rap and beats, sort of hip-hop grime workshops. And at the beginning, everyone who turned up wanted to be an artist. They were all, I want to be a rapper, a producer, a DJ. Towards the end of me doing that job, more and more people were asking, How do I become a youth worker? And they were more interested in the, you know, sort of like lower risk, higher return career routes that were open to them. They were the questions they were asking were much more kind of vocational and much less aspirational music industry. More practical, more practical, yeah. Because it's more practical practically achievable to be a youth worker working in music than and not that I saw that as a kind of a negative, but I found it interesting. And I think it changes how you do music education because if if the sort of moving factor for young people is not becoming an artist, it changes the things they want to learn. And so I say, like at the moment, I'm finding more young people interested in how do I record a podcast, how do I create content, and you know, things that they are aware of as vocational, you know, skills they might use in real life. Um, and I I just find that stuff interesting as a kind of as a trend in Yeah, for sure, mate. It's sort of in society, also in education, in that, like, okay, well, if you want to engage people, there are going to be different skills involved in, say, like making a hit record as a rapper versus delivering a series of short form content pieces to a client. You know, they're quite different skill sets. So it's sort of, yeah, I've been thinking a bit about that stuff recently. And all and also, I suppose for me, it's like I still want to encourage people that like you don't just make art because of the end product and the result. There needs to be a bit of just creating art for the, you know, the sort of the process, the value of the process of doing it, and what you experience by doing it. And I think the further I go, the more I end up coming back around to that where the value is in the process. And I think I think young people are more open to that now as well, which I find interesting. That they are more aware of doing things, you know, like mindfulness. And this you look at things like yoga and mindfulness, and I see music as moving more into that kind of sphere on some level where I think people are more aware of the fact that there are benefits to music other than the product.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:People seeing music as an experience.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I think that's why it gets matched more with moving image, with art, with experiences. I don't know, things like festivals are more popular. Gigs are less popular. It's like it's it's experiences, isn't it? And it's like uh yeah, a well-being thing, or not even necessarily as linear as just this is going to make you feel better, but it's a yeah, it's a multi-sensor experience.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no, totally. And also kind of this idea of a sort of more self-aware, more risk-averse generation, are more likely to understand that there are psychological benefits to creating stuff, but that maybe that isn't a linear career path. But it's like, okay, well, maybe I will do music, but that will be my personal practice, and then I'll do this other thing as a job. And you know that, and it sort of gets to this portfolio career thing or this idea that you're not so much defined by one activity anymore. You're a bit more as a person, you're a bit more kind of um you know it's like the birth of the word creative, right?
SPEAKER_01:That's kind of uh a new I personally yeah, I I hadn't noticed that until like the last few years of people saying, I'm a creative, yeah, rather than I'm a musician or I'm an artist.
SPEAKER_00:That's a huge term, like I'm creative or I am not creative. Yeah. I kind of I find that kind of interesting as well, because it's like it's almost like by saying that you're saying that there are people who are not creative. Yeah, for sure. But let's not even let's not go there because I don't want to, I don't want to upset anyone. But I think I think my thing as well is that I think creative is an interesting concept in that creativity isn't inherently good. And I sometimes get in like skirmishes about this where you can create things which do harm. For sure, man. Yeah, so I think the the sort of blanket use of creative as a positive modifier I find a bit strange. Yeah, yeah. But at the same time, I understand why people use it because I think for so long, and to get to the heart of the whole thing, I suppose I'm trying to do, there has been this idea that music is essentially sort of listening in appreciation, learning an instrument and performing someone else's piece, uh-huh. And sort of getting accredited for that process, and you know, in a in a kind of cliched way, becoming the first violin for an orchestra. And that sort of becomes that's the ecosystem you're in. You listen, you learn, you perform, you know, you get your accolades. And my background is I learned to make hip-hop beats on a piece of shareware software in the 90s in West Yorkshire, mostly in my bedroom. Improbably got a record deal out of doing that by essentially by competing with my best mate to see who could make the best beats. That then kind of introduced me to the music industry, and I then sort of got a bunch of experiences which led to me being able to do my own records and kind of produce my own music, which I've carried on, you know, I'm still releasing records now, but also to do workshops and teaching and education projects. And but because of that, my music education was really a lot based around kind of technology and experimentation, and kind of like, can I get this thing to make beats that sound like the Wu Tang clan? You know, would be the type of thing I so I'd be like, okay, I've got a piece of shareware that came on a CD ROM on a magazine, and I realized I could record sounds off records and load them into this software, which it wasn't intended to do that process. The software wasn't meant to do that, but I realized you could do that with it. And so it was this kind of like extracurricular, slightly experimental process, which in a lot of ways is still how I make music now. You know, I kind of just found my own little workflow. Um, and in a lot of ways, what I've been doing with You Studio is just trying to give access to that to more young people. So it's like, okay, here are a set of tools you can use to find your own way of making music that are sort of accessible and available to you and work in your own lived experience outside of education and you know, and in education, but that you have access to in your normal life. And I suppose for me, the bit thinking back on it was that music theory was something I applied a lot later. So I'd chop up jazz records to make hip-hop. Years and years later, I'd realize, oh, okay, well, if I want to feature a singer on this track, I need to kind of work out what key it's in and add a bass line to this sample. And that was really my interaction where I discovered music theory and kind of went further in that direction. And I sort of learned things in the order that I needed to know them, and I suppose that sort of informed my kind of pedagogy of stuff, which is I sort of usually want to start with stuff young people want to know and then build out until they learn the things they need in order to do that thing. Um, and to kind of go back to the whole like creative, non-creative thing, I think what I did was quite often labelled as um not music, you know, it was it was something outside of music because it wasn't notated essentially. So I remember like in the early days of doing this stuff, people would be like, oh, but hip-hop's not really music, is it? And what they meant when they said, and people would genuinely say stuff like that, but what they really meant was that there's no like sheet music, there's no kind of traditional composition process. If I've taken a sample from a jazz record and I've overlaid that over some chopped-up drums, to them that was more like a technological process than a musical process. Whereas for me, it's like, well no, they're just different ways of achieving the same sort of set of results, but just a different process. And I think the on a kind of curriculum level, the curriculum is I mean I say the curriculum, but I suppose like the whole system of delivering music in schools has kind of meant that there's a there's been a lot of emphasis on listening to music, learning about music, learning about kind of, you know, I think of like when I first encountered music tech in a lot of schools that I would go to, they'd be doing minimalism. And they would do minimalism on like a version of a, you know, a kind of early DAW. And the reason they would do minimal minimalism is because it would be quite difficult to input notes on this software for the kids. So they would do something where you didn't need to input many notes, and they would then realize, okay, well, we could call this minimalism, and and it would be sort of like a reaction to the technology just not really being fit for purpose. Um whereas I think now, like you can have every kid in a school composing their own music, and they can do it in whatever style of music they're listening to, like that's totally technically achievable now, and that is a creative process, and it does tie into you know composition and coursework and um being able to do this stuff. So I think there has been a need to bring that creative element into schools and into music, but it's yeah, even talking about this, you realize it's very you know defining what is creative and what isn't is like is listening creative? Because I think about this sometimes, it's like, well, actually, you could argue that like listening to a piece of music is a creative process because you have your own kind of subjective response to it, and you could argue I don't know, composing could be really non-creative if you're making a really generic piece of music that you say you want it to sound exactly like something you've heard, could you say, well, actually that's not creative? So you know it it gets quite complicated quite quickly, all this stuff.
SPEAKER_01:For sure, man. I I I think a large part of the problem is fundamentally the need to be able to measure something being better, something being A or B or C or level one or level two or level three. That's kind of the root of I'm not saying that that mustn't happen, because I understand the necessity of that happening sometimes, but that's kind of the root of the problem, isn't it? Is because you need to in some ways the whole of philosophy behind education pitches what you were doing with trying to sound like the Wu-Tang plang next to someone who's trying to work towards their grade eight and violin that literally pitches you together. And neither of you necessarily wanted to have a fight about that. No, but but but they go at the end of the day, you have to, because they have to go, well, you get level one, you get level two.
SPEAKER_00:But this is it, how do you give someone a level eight Wu-Tang? You know, it's like this is the it's like, oh I'm afraid this is only a level four Wu-Tang, but if you you know, and the the funny thing is, I suppose with my workshop teaching, essentially that is what I kind of ended up doing, being like, okay, a young person turns out and Wu-Tang is like was my generation, but the kids I started working with all wanted to do grime. So down here I didn't.
SPEAKER_01:I think level eight Wu Tang is going to be the name of this podcast episode.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean it's it's got a kind of Wu-Tangy ring to it, hasn't it? It'd have to be um 37, level 37 Wu Tang, wouldn't it, for uh 37 Chambers? Um, but yeah, so but so say like that I would have hit this exact issue where you would get kids turning up to my projects who would want to create grime tracks, write lyrics, record lyrics. That would be like the sort of day-to-day thing I'd be doing. And it would be a case of well, they'd still want to progress. And you'd still want to be able to show them that they were progressing. Because actually, my thing is progress is a healthy thing to encourage and to aim for, and it does sort of necessitate some kind of metric where you can be like, oh, okay. And the thing I would do a lot would be like record the first thing they did a few months later when they've been working on it, listen back to that and compare it with the latest thing they've done. You know, it's like baseline monitoring kind of stuff, and that's just as valuable for a rapper as it is for a violinist, arguably more so a lot of the time, because there's less framework and scaffolding around rap as a thing, as an activity. But I think like what you're getting at, which I do agree with, is the problem is when that sort of becomes external, this kind of bigger external framework, and it's sort of seen to be around some things and not around other things, and it then kind of creates this funny dynamic where it's like, okay, well, this thing is valid because there's a framework to assess it, whereas this thing's not. And you know, like we're talking about here, the the issue isn't that you can't you can assess rap. It's just that isn't yet a kind of traditional framework. And I think that stuff tends to emerge over time because I think about like blues, you know, like blues when it first happened was the most controversial music on the face of the planet, and they were trying to ban it, and you know, it was like there was a moral panic all the way across America. And then, you know, cut to 50 years later and it's on the GCSE specification, everyone does it in year seven. And it's sort of it's a bit like, you know, when you um see butterflies pinned to a board in a museum. Like I think that's what happens to musical genres. They basically get kind of sort of like pinned down. There's an assessment framework built around them, and then they kind of become a relic of an age. And I suppose, in a way, that just kind of constantly iterates and changes and develops. And I and I've kind of come to terms with the fact that that's going on. My thing is that nowadays it's kind of happening in real time in the classroom, and teachers are kind of trying to react to things that because I get emails all the time where it's like, oh, my students made this. How do I help them get to the next stage? And I I'm, you know, I'm really lucky that I talk to loads of teachers, like hundreds and hundreds of teachers, and I'm quite often helping them with this stuff as it's happening. And for me, it's the that was always my favorite part. It kind of still is my favorite part of this job, is like, how do you react in real time to what young people want to do with music? And how do you kind of find ways to assess it? But and you know, it's one of those things I think I remember Martin Faultley talks about this a lot. Like, who is the assessment for? Like, is it for the young people, or is it to sort of um, you know, more of an external thing that's to, you know, justify something bigger? And where I've kind of arrived at is it it's sort of something where I'm quite often able to help teachers because I can do stuff where the assessment happens in the background. Um, and I wrote the first time I started to really think about this was I used to do a lot of work with young offenders, like work in prisons, work with young offenders. I do I did a lot of that for like, you know, 10-15 years. And I remember the first time I tried to gr get a group of young offenders to do an arts award. Right. And I remember that being one of those moments where I was like, this the project was going great, everyone was engaging, really positive group. And then as soon as you get out like a big folder of papers and put it on the desk, everybody just shut down and didn't want to engage. And what it was is because it kind of gave off a slight vibe of like social work. And there were connotations to paperwork and a folder of that I would see some educators wouldn't really realise that. But I kind of realised, well, actually, the work I was doing to engage those young people was around meeting them where they were, listening to what music they were interested in, helping them to kind of find a workflow where they could do the thing they wanted to do. And then when you, you know, kind of quite like laudibly wanted to assess it and get more funding for the project to carry on and show people what you're doing. So I'm not like Arts Awards are great, and I think what they're doing is great, but they then had to develop a load of digital tools so that that assessment wasn't a big folder of papers because that got in the way of the work itself. And I think that happens a lot with you know, like composition in schools now. We're kind of looking at stuff to make it so the young people can create their music, the teachers can actually do the job of teaching music, and then we can support assessment so it doesn't have to get in the way of that process.
SPEAKER_01:So find finding the okay, by doing that, you have ticked that box, but they don't even need to be aware, they're just on that sort of journey. Yeah, I suppose I suppose that's the experience of being involved in like an arts council funded project or something, for example. That's that constant push and pull between I'm doing something creative and oh, wonderful, and oh, hold on a minute. We've got to go. We've gotta like check back to the things we said we'd do to make sure we do that. And that's important because the arts cancel just can't just throw out millions of pounds to creatives in inverted commerce to go and do fluffy stuff. So it's got it's gotta be that measurement. So having that sort of a teacher is like the facilitator of making. Like doing the justification bit along the side so it doesn't have to be based on kids' intentions. It can be teacher going that's what I yeah, and you know what?
SPEAKER_00:So like here's a here's a free tip that anyone listening can have. The thing that I figured out which made this so much more painless for me was I started at the beginning of every project that I had to assess for any of these kind of frameworks. I would do an interview on day one with the young people, like an artist interview. So I'd be like, oh, what kind of music do you want to make? Like you know, like they're on MTV or whatever. And then I would do the same thing at the end of the project where I just asked the same questions again.
SPEAKER_02:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:Again, framed as an artist interview. Oh, tell us about the music you've been making, when's it coming out, you know, all this kind of stuff. And that was just my baseline monitoring. It was just intro intro and exit interviews. But the thing was, because I framed it as an artist interview, it felt like an authentic part of that process. And young people were always totally cool with it. And it didn't disrupt the project. It actually, if anything, felt it made the project feel cooler.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:If I'd have said, right, we're going to do arts council assessment questionnaire, yeah, they'd have been like, what's this? Like, why are we this is you know, this isn't what we signed up for. So sometimes it's about how you frame those. If if you can make them seem like a credible, authentic part of the process, then it's like, well, yeah, of course we'll do this. This is part of what we're doing. And I think that I've kind of tried to carry that through a bit into the sort of philosophy of what we're doing with the software, where it's like, if you could make things credible and authentic, then there is a way where everybody gets what they need, you know, and and because yeah, a lot of the time we need to justify what we're doing. Like as a teacher, you need to justify to your management, I've achieved X, Y, and Z. You know, I'm doing well here, this is going well. As a student, you want to see, oh, okay, I'm getting better at this. Like the things I was doing at the beginning have really improved. You know, I've I'm now so these are all things that like you can see why we need this stuff. And and you know, and as a senior manager, you need to be able to look at a project project and go, oh, well, this is going to be well.
SPEAKER_01:So I mean, picking up and going back to something you said earlier, actually, that the ability to do that is for kids or young people to see uh how they've progressed in a non-sort of linear bunch of folders, greysuit, these are the markets way. Actually, recording is fundamental, isn't it? Yeah. To be able to do that, to be for people to be able to listen back to what they've done and assess it in a way without necessarily talking about it. Um, because that that's that's something that I'm very interested by, partly through these conversations, that articulating talking about music all the time is uh it's kind of futile sometimes. It's all gonna like write off the whole podcast, but yeah, especially for like for young people, um, if if if you're gonna take language out of that and just the ability to be able for um a young composer to create something, record it, and listen back and then create something again, that's kind of enough, isn't it, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and and I suppose it sort of reminds me, if you know the old quote of um talking about music's like dancing about architecture or whatever. It's it's one of those things where there is a level where yeah you you experience the music and young people know if they're making progress. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:If they hear it, they'll be like, oh they're closer to what they're trying to do, even if they didn't know that. I mean, it's the same for you as an artist, isn't it? Yeah. Like, oh that's I'm kind of happier with that, I'm less happy with that.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, I think arguably, I think young people are probably better at it than I am at this point. I think I've you know, there's a point where you you get a bit too close to your own music and you sort of um I think quite often they're quite clear-eyed and rational when they they're sort of young and they they know exactly what they want to achieve. And I I that's one of the things that so I mean to kind of get into the you studio side of stuff, the the place it sort of came from was that it started with creating a load of tutorial videos. So I did all this teaching, like I said, I was making records, I was teaching workshops, I did a lot of work on sort of like teacher training where I'd I'd go to schools and I'd help them troubleshoot their tech setup. And the thing that came out of it was that I think we were talking before we started that a lot of the time I'd realize all of the music tech in a school was designed for use in a professional studio, and in a school environment, especially in a school kind of IT structure, none of it really worked. So you would have teachers who were, even like teachers who were experts in music tech who just couldn't deliver a project. Um, and got to the point where a lot of the time I would just do rap workshops because I knew that the beats workshops wouldn't work in the school because the school server would delete all of their beats, or it would take 20 minutes to get them logged in, and then I'd only have 20 minutes left to teach because it'd take 20 minutes to log them out again at the end. I'd have all these recurring things. Really, what happened was when software in the cloud came around, we had a conversation really early on. So I'm talking like maybe 2008, 2009, where it was like, if the DAW was in the cloud, would that change things? Like, could we move this forward? And the thing that occurred to me right at the beginning was if we made tutorials that were also in the cloud, then all of the young people in the whole school could have access to exactly the same tools. So there wouldn't be that issue of, oh, this computer's got this version on it, and this computer's got this one, and in this other room, they've got a different operating system. And you know, all those kind of things that would be a problem. But the bit as well, I realized was they'd also have access to those tutorials at home. And the other key bit that I kind of don't know why it doesn't get talked about more, but you know, we kind of talk about time poverty and like, oh, no one has any time anymore because we're all kind of like working these ridiculous kind of online lives. The thing with young people is they do have time. The one resource they actually have more of than us is time, and they're quite happy to invest that time in learning how to produce music, for example. It's one of the things they happily will put loads of time in. But the problem was if you've got like an IMAC suite with professional software in a music room in a school, I would see loads of schools being like, oh, well, you can have two hours on a Tuesday, and that's it. And it's like we if you to compare it back to like a cello, can you imagine telling someone, right, you want to be the cello in the orchestra, you've got two hours a week. Like any conservatoire in the country would just laugh you out of the room and be like, there's no way you can learn to play cello two hours practice a week. But that's sort of what we were expecting producers to do. And so my thing was, well, if it's in the cloud, they get access for as many hours as they want anywhere with an internet connection. And also making these tutorial resources, they can sort of choose their own adventure. So if I make a load of different genres, they can choose the one that speaks to them. And it allowed this different model of like independent study. So we had this the the initial thing was called VIP studio sessions, um, been used in loads of schools. I'm just actually updating it at the moment. So there's a new version of it coming. And it's basically like, yeah, software in the cloud, videos that students can follow that sort of hopefully anyway correlate to the music they want to make. And they work through it at their own speed. Tutorials. Yeah, yeah. And and the other bit with this was talking to teachers, um, when you're in a classroom setting, you're trying to do music tech as a kind of a big group activity, the other problem is differentiation. Like how you differentiate stuff for the group. And it would come up over and over again that say if you've got a group where a couple of the kids have got a computer at home, they've got their own software, a few of the kids really struggle, and then the majority are in the middle. As a teacher, that's a real dilemma because you can either teach at the speed that the experts want to go, you can go really slowly to include the people who are struggling. Whichever way you do it, you're going to have behavioural problems from the class. Because if it goes too quick, someone's feeling frustrated and embarrassed. If you go too slow, someone's feeling like they're being held back. Um, if you go in the middle, you lose both of the other.
SPEAKER_01:So everyone's unhappy. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And so I would see this dynamic. And what I've found with VIP, we kind of enabled this thing where everyone just moves at their own pace. And the teacher, the the funny part is what I realized, the teacher kind of becomes like the record label. They sort of become more like, you know, like an AR at a record label, where they can go around, they can offer advice and support and coaching, they can sort of have conversations about music theory and you know the more in-depth stuff, but they're not just delivering whole class IT, which is essentially what everybody was doing. Um, and that sort of enabled this bigger thing to happen. So we've got like, you know, hundreds and well, thousands of schools using this now. Um I think last year it was, I'm trying to remember what the it's like millions of hours of usage, basically. So like it's a big project at scale. And uh what that allowed essentially was for us to then say, okay, well, to go to the next level, we need to build software specifically for this group of users. So we then with U Studio went back to first principles and said if we built this just for young people, if we completely ignored the commercial audience, if we ignore professional users, we ignore commercial users, what would young people in school and teachers really want this to look like? And that really has been the kind of still is the mission statement of U Studio is like, how do we make something specifically for this audience? Um, and it's like on the I've got it on the screen here. I still say my favorite feature is just the fact we've put the words on the buttons. Okay. And the reason for that is if you've ever talked like whole class music tech and you're trying to show a group of 30 young people how this works for the first time, the first lesson you'll spend the whole time walking around leaning over people's shoulder and just pointing at the loop button and saying that one's the loop. Because they don't know that that symbol means loop until you tell them. And you'll have to have that conversation over and over and over. There's so many basics in music tech that you sort of take for granted, isn't there? And that explanation. Yeah, and it's it's assumed knowledge. And really, the thing with assumed knowledge is that is gatekeeping. Like that is, um, and we talk about access and inclusion, that is a barrier to access.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So my thing was the software design itself needs to encourage inclusion and access. And so say, like another really simple thing. If we add a new track, add a drum instrument, we've got this little message explaining double-click to add a clip.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:We've just added that, that's in this new update. That's because watching lessons, I could see young people were struggling with what the next step was. So our whole design process is informed by like being in a room watching students, seeing how they work. And this is my other favorite feature. We've put the numbers on the beats in the bar. One, two, three, four.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_00:That's because if you load up almost any DAW, they don't do that. The reason they don't do it is because they just assume that you know that.
SPEAKER_01:Right, I've never thought that.
SPEAKER_00:And they they assume that you know that because they think you're in your mid-20s and you've been doing music for a bit. And say if you're like Hans Zimmer and you're doing the Thor Avengers soundtrack, and you want it to be like 0.00783596, because you want to line up Thor's Thunderbolt exactly where it needs to be to match the film. Do you mean zooming in as well as you you want all of the kind of metrics on screen to correlate to your professional workflow? Yeah, yeah. If you're teaching year seven how to make their first hip-hop beat, you want a kick drum on beat one, yeah, and then you want a snare on beat two and four, and you want them all to be able to find the loop button on their own. So how how small a division can you can you go? So, well, in this, you can go up to 64th notes with triplet swing. So you can you can and I suppose what that brings me to is the other sort of philosophical part to U Studio. If I load up one of our instruments, so say like this is the subtract synthesizer, this is our kind of like one of our core synths when you load it, there's four controls here that you can tweak. Um, we use this a lot with primary school students, so they use this, they'll kind of I was making videos today that use this to create a bassine, for example.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:If you're in the secondary school and you're doing sound design for your GCSE, you click on the advanced button and then you can see all the more advanced features. But we sort of decided, well, actually, if we load with all of these features on show, actually that's quite overwhelming for young people. Yeah, for sure. Um and I would see this when I was teaching, I remember I don't like to kind of um, you know, out people like this, but have you ever used Ultrabeat in Logic?
unknown:No.
SPEAKER_00:Have you so Ultrabeat is like the built-in drum machine in Logic that's been there since I don't know, like the late 90s. And when you load it, it looks like one of the spaceships from HR Geiger, you know, like Alien.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Like it's the most overwhelming, millions of buttons and controls and dials everywhere. And I used to teach beat making workshops, and Ultra Beat would be the thing that I would have to use to teach beats. And I would load it up on the screen and I'd look around the room, and quite often, you know, it'd be either like young people at risk of offending, or young people with S End, or young carers, or all kinds of different groups that I'd be asked to work with. And I would load up this thing to show them how to make beats, which they're quite motivated to do. They want to make beats, they're they're there because they want to do it. They'd see this thing and they would just shut down. Their arms would cross, they'd sit back in their seat. Especially young women, I noticed, would just be like, This is not for me. And it was because of the software design that it presented every single thing it could do all at once in a way which was really triggering. So, really, U Studio is as powerful as any other DAW, but a lot of the features are behind the advance button because we know most of our users are not ready for that. When they're ready for it, is there? And I think this is sort of the whole the whole thing behind it is putting young people first in that decision-making process. And I really my job, like because my background is I'm a producer and an educator. The team is a software engineer who actually writes the code and builds the software, and a graphic designer and UX designer who does the kind of user experience and the design of the thing. My job essentially is like youth voice ambassador, you know, that I go around, talk to young people, talk to teachers, and just figure out like what do they actually want. Um, and you don't just navigate back to that, because I think it's quite easy to lose sight of that and be like, oh, well, we need to add this feature to compete with this or to this trend's happening. And my thing is like actually simplicity is the thing that is most important in education, you know, something where people don't get overwhelmed, lost, confused, stressed out. Um and and I suppose like on while we're kind of doing this, like the philosophy of youth studio bit, the other bit, if I go to our packs, so this is the other big thing that's coming in January. We've launched, there's like 5,000 new sounds. So all these kind of packs. Um and the thing that I love with this is a lot of these are partnerships with organizations that we love. So if I go to the partner tab, Youth Music Next Gen, these are um six, there's actually going to be another one, um, producers from Youth Music Next Gen, who've all created a sample pack. They're gonna create content to support that. Um, and U Studio is available free for all youth music projects. So any youth music project in the UK can get free logins for all of their young people, and then they can remix producers who've come through NextGen. Um, and like I've loved working on this. And the thing with this is A, it's great because we love youth music and we want to work with them. But B, if I drag in like this is Gabriela Bongo's um jungle pack, and let me just speed it up to the tempo that it's supposed to be. The sounds are just really cool. And it's one of those I found by working with community projects, um it also is just yeah, so there we go, some kind of like really black nice, nice sort of jungle-y Dm Bree breaks. Um that it's sort of representing that project, but also it means that we've got sounds that we know are gonna speak to those young people and that they're actually gonna be excited to remix. Looking at the the Look Library, 50% of our um sounds are from female producers as well. So that again was really important because you see so many people paying lip service to like, oh, we want there to be more women in the music industry. But then when it comes to the decision of who's gonna make all the sample packs, it's just a bunch of white middle class men. And it's like, well, you can't say that and not actually back it up with your actions. So there's there's things like that where we've been really explicit about it. Because I kind of just think, well, why why are more people not like that? You know, why isn't that kind of built into the philosophy of stuff? Um and the other bit to go again to go into the sort of education-y part of it, um, say if I add a piano loop to this. So if we drag and drop this loop in, it will set the key of the project to A minor. Um, and if we now add a loop from a different key, it will transpose to match that. Um, and this this was one of those things where getting into like barriers to education access, I think music theory has historically been a real barrier to a lot of young people who really want to do composition and create music, but they sort of feel like they're being gatekeep because they haven't had private tuition, they haven't learned music theory. Um, and one of the things that we've added, I'm just looking, where's my favourite bass loop's gone? Uh okay, I'll just add to the item. Let's go. Horns. Let's add some horns to this. So I'm gonna add a saxophone solo. So now we've got quite nice, actually. So we've got a saxophone solo, which is transposed to match our key of A minor, which means that young people can kind of compose stuff and it'll actually be in a in a key. And instead of just loads of clashing sounds, which is what lots of teachers were telling me with say using other platforms that I won't name, where students would add loads of loops, they'd be in different keys, it would be really clashy, they'd then be disappointed and feel like, I can't do this, this is too difficult. But to go back to the sort of pedagogy, the bit for me that's important is if they now decide they want to add their own bassine, it's now showing them these are the notes of the key you're in. So it's sort of using those loops as a way in, but it's then offering it's really fascinating.
SPEAKER_01:And um we can just see that with the general acceptance that most people are clinically anxious.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and what we're finding is this the sort of transposition, the loops, the key highlighting, this set of features means that whereas it used to be, in the early days of what I was doing, you'd maybe get everybody to write a drum beat, and then one or two people had managed to add some chords, maybe a melody. I'm now seeing like in a class of 30 kids, all 30 kids will create a composition in a key with a melody that they've written, with drums that they've programmed. And the tutorials are part of that as well. It's sort of that whole ecosystem. But I think that's sort of my aspiration for it is that when they when they encounter it, it doesn't feel overwhelming and stressful to them. They can use it outside of school as well. So if they want to invest their own time, they have that option. But then it also sort of supports them with music theory, and that doesn't feel like a barrier to them having a go. And obviously, you know, they can record vocals, they can, you know, if they want to add a rap, they can do things like that as well. But that actually That's sort of the philosophy of it. And I sort of think it's worth it's worth talking about that because for me it's a bigger deal for us than it is for some people.
SPEAKER_01:Amazing. There's a really exciting opportunity though, isn't there? Or it must have been. Maybe this is more applicable to when you first came up with it than necessarily the updates now. Maybe not. But where the sort of studio doors that you know are more mainstream, if you like, or however we want to frame that, are I think he says like for a 20-year-old upwards. But they are facilitating specific sort of end results that people expect from that. Usually making a composition that runs from A to B, or there's certain linear expectations. Yeah. Whereas you've made a door for children or for young people, and those expectations, I suppose, in some ways, are less obvious and less mapped out because we don't really know what children are going to create.
SPEAKER_00:Do you know what I mean? I do. And do you know it's funny you say that because this is one of the things I always say about you know about software design more like broadly is that when you're making stuff which is effectively a tool that other people will use, you don't really know what you're making. You're sort of making a thing, and then other people tell you afterwards what you've made. And we were talking about this yesterday with the team where I was saying, well, we're gonna release this and then we'll find out what it is because other people decide that. And the I remember that when we first launched the first set of videos, I really believed I'd made like GCSE support tutorials that were gonna help kids do their GCSE, write a composition. It was really aimed at the top of school, and that was and that was mostly the age group that I was working with at the time. So it was like, here's a series of like how to make a grind beat videos that I thought would like engage kids, support that process. The week we launched it, about five secondary schools said we've done it with all of year seven. So they gave out 400 logins and they were like, we've got like 500 tracks from year seven, they've all made a grime track. And I was like, Oh, but year seven can do it. And they were like, Yeah, we didn't, we've done it with all of year seven, now we're gonna do it with all of year eight. And I was like, Oh, okay, so what we've actually made is like a mass engagement key stage three thing, but that wasn't really the and what it really tells you is when you remove the technical barriers, the process of creating music is really accessible, like everyone in the school can do it. And we sort of just leaned into that because we've never had limits on the logins either. So you can effectively have as many logins as you want, give them out to the whole school. That has enabled all of these schools to do huge projects. So we had one school that had done 10,000 hours of music in three months when I looked at the stats, and I was like, this is pretty mind-blowing. But they said, well, actually, we just gave out all the logins, assigned some of the tutorials, assigned some of our own resources that we'd made, and that's just how many hours we did. This is also from kids then accessing it at home, probably as well. Yeah, kids at home. And also just if you think if you've got like all of the year groups of a secondary school logging in, creating stuff, it you quickly rack up a lot of hours. Um, and so for me, it was like, oh, okay, this is not quite what I thought it was, but the thing it is is quite exciting. And actually, recently, the same thing has happened again in the opposite direction, where we were then like, okay, we've made this thing, everyone's using it in key stage three, we're gonna lean into this. This year, I've just had nothing but emails from secondary school teachers saying we want to deliver GCSE with it. Can you do some training on supporting GCSE composition? And what it is is that those kids who started in key stage three now want to do their GCSEs. And so all those kind of advanced features I was telling you about, I'm now doing loads of some training I'm doing at the moment, which is really popular, is like mixing and mastering for GCSE. Um, I did I did a thing with GCSE teachers where you know they do like a moderation to see what marks they should give a composition. And I sat in on one of those, and they all said, What do you think about this piece of music? And I said, Well, the music's great, but the mix down really needs some work. Like, I can't hear all the separate elements in the track. And I just showed them a little bit of like using EQ, using compression, reverb, and we've we've added limiting so you can do mastering in New Studio now. So I was doing like a little walkthrough of how to mix a track and how to master it, and I was saying, like, that for me would probably move the grade from like a B to an A. And we haven't changed the note, the notes are exactly the same. What we've changed is the psycho-acoustic response of the moderator to the piece of music, and you know, you get into this, like if you hear something as you know, better mixed, you perceive it as a better written piece of music. And I was saying it's it's an interesting question for a teacher where say if you've written a beautiful piece that's beautifully arranged, but the flutes are just buried in the mix and you can't hear them. As a moderator, you'll perceive that piece of music as badly written because you can't hear the flutes. But actually, you turn them up a bit, put a bit of compression and reverb on them, suddenly that's a beautiful flute part. And you can get into a real argument of like, well, is the mix part of the composition process? Because, you know, if you if you've got like a Mozart concerto but mixed it really badly, it wouldn't sound as good. So I've found funnily that the when you release something, especially something online, people in the world tell you what it is and what they want it to do. And a lot of what I'm doing is just responding to that in real time, Robby, like, oh okay, well, let's do some resources to help teachers with mixing and mastering, or you're you're getting out of the way, basically.
SPEAKER_01:Like like we talk about as a teacher, get out of the way for the kids to make music. It's the same for you, get out of the way for young people and teachers to sort of get on with the making. Exactly.
SPEAKER_00:And actually, it's funny you use that phrase because there's a there's a thing I've always thought about the studio. I heard an anecdote about um guy who produced all the Billy Joel's records, so like famous producer, Phil Ramone. And he he he there's a great story I'll tell you off record about him and Billy Joel, but and it's a it's a good story. But in this thing, he was saying that he produced all these platinum records, like millions selling records, but the guy didn't actually know anything about studio gear. Right. He couldn't tell you like what to change on a compressor or like which, but he could get the best out of artists. And what he said about studio equipment is it should just be invisible, that it shouldn't slow you down, it shouldn't get in your way, it should enable you to facilitate the thing you're hearing in your head. And that's how I look at a DAW. Like a really good DAW, you just don't notice it. It just gets out of the way, and you're you're just writing the music. And it's almost like as soon as you notice it, it's not doing its job. And I think actually that's a bit of the problem with like, you know, Instagram and TikTok, and a lot of production stuff now is made for an audience on algorithmic social media to pay for it. Where it's like, here's this flashy thing, subscribe here, pay for this, download this pack. And it it kind of wants to do the interesting bit for you. It wants to write the music, it wants to use like a generative tool to create the melody. That's not the bit of this that interests me. The bit that interests me is like, how do I give a kind of neutral canvas that is most like emotionally supportive, doesn't stress you out and allows you to kind of create in a nice kind of peaceful way. Um and if you think schools are like the perfect place to test this, because if you've got 30 people in the room, all trying to produce a track at the same time, lots of time pressure, if all of them are getting a little bit irritated, when you multiply that by 30, that quickly creates like quite an intense environment.
SPEAKER_01:It's got to be quite a zen experience, and they've got to be they've got to be in a flow state, really. Like you you or I or any music maker listening, would probably be in where you it's suddenly three o'clock in the morning and you've been moving a snare. Yeah. Um that's very interesting. I I'm excited by the the talking about the sound quality in um context of composition because it makes me think about uh Rick Rubin and the things that because he's obviously the things he's been saying in the past couple of years has become quite mainstream. Yeah. So Rick Rubin is mainstream if you like, but now he started talking about it, yeah, and sort of constant video clips of him saying, I've got no idea what I'm doing, and it's all about my taste. Yeah. I was recently listening to uh Fortat's interview. I love that. I listened to that twice, yeah. And it's just so amazing to hear. Well, I'm banging to what he does, and I'm sure lots of people are, but really he's just saying, I just it's it's about the sound, it's about the sound quality and the um the association of a of a sound rather than yeah, sort of a compositional element.
SPEAKER_00:Like, yeah, and do you know the other bit that I took away from that forta interview, which has really changed how I've been writing music since then. So, like on the kind of artist side, I've always released records, did an album, so my band's called Anushka, uh, me and a vocalist. We've done three albums, did one with Giles Peterson on Brownswood, which is sort of obviously Giles Peterson, everybody loves him and kind of knows about his sort of um his sort of world that he's created. We did another record on True Thoughts, and we've just done the latest one on BBE, which the reason I was excited about this is that I'm a massive Diller fan. Um, and BBE did all of Dilla's solo albums, so you know, to be sort of like on a label that released Dilla stuff um was a bit a bit of a kind of bucket list type of thing. But I've been very deep into that world of like creating records with a vocalist and it been quite a kind of you know, the songwriting process, then building a sound around vocals, mixing vocals, producing it, mixing it, getting it mastered. And they've all been on vinyl, so like releasing those records on vinyl. It's quite a kind of like intense, um, complex process. And since that, finishing that record and releasing it, I've had a bit of a window to just go back to just writing some music. You know, in a bit of a more kind of like um sort of less structured way, basically. And after that Fortet thing, the thing that really interested me is that he writes his arrangements at the beginning. So he'll he'll write a really basic sketch with maybe like some drums, some bass, some melodies, whatever, and then he'll arrange the full five-minute track there and then, kind of to see if it's interesting enough to worth finishing to be worth finishing. And I found that so fascinating that you know production lends itself towards you write a loop, spent ages getting this loop to be perfect, and then maybe you exp extend it and arrange it at the end. Build a track around a sound or a clip. Yeah, okay. And and the fact that he would actually arrange it really early on and then see, is this holding my attention for five minutes? Because if it's not, probably I don't need to spend three weeks finishing it. And I've started recently doing that where I'm just writing beats on my laptop on the sofa, which is another thing that he said that he he creates sounds in the studio but then writes in bed on his laptop.
SPEAKER_01:And just using laptop speakers. I mean, that that's really exciting, especially like talking about kids making music at home and that's all I don't have monitors. And uh, well, the big guys that we know and love are just doing it too. That's not good.
SPEAKER_00:But you know, this is the real irony. So, one question I get asked a lot by schools is like, what gear should we buy? And I've just been saying, get cheap Chromebooks, get loads of them, and let the kids take them home. Right. Because then they'll actually be able to invest time. And I've been doing the same thing. I've been writing music, mixing it on my laptop speakers. So in in the studio here, these are quite high-end monitoring speakers that you can, they're kind of like mastering grade speakers. The mixes I've been doing on my laptop speakers hold up to the mixes I did here. For sure, for sure. And it what it tells me is it is decisions, it's taste. It's like it's not like what's the correct decision, it's like what do you love? Like what triggers emotions in you? And so if young people have access to even the most basic laptop with built-in speakers and a microphone, just make a whole record. And really the thing that's interesting is your taste in sound. Like, do you have interesting ideas? And actually, yeah, these days you don't need to spend thousands of pounds. You can and I always come back to, you know, like Lady Garga, there's loads of bits of vocals on her records that are just recorded on the built-in mic on an iPad. Right. And it's like that's like a you know, elite level major label record.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But they kept those vocals because they sounded cool. They sounded great, yeah, for sure. So I say this all the time to teachers, like, don't even a lot of the time, and this is slightly heresy to say this, but like, don't even buy a sound card. Just like literally use the built-in mic. Yeah. You know, buy some headphones and some cheap laptops, some Chromebooks. Don't buy a sound card. Maybe have this is actually I had a conversation with the music hub a couple of weeks ago. They were saying, like, well, what about condenser mics, like for recording the you know, final vocals? The thing I've started to recommend is have one really good condenser mic and a really good sound card, and say to the students or the young people, you can go in the studio and record with the condenser mic when you play me a finished demo that you've done on the laptop.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And it's like a reward for like, you know, having invested the time in the songwriting, so like, have you spent enough time on the lyrics? Have you spent enough time on the performance? If you can play me a demo made with your built-in mic, where I'm convinced that the song is there, then you can go to the studio. Because you know it's like a classic young band mistake to rent a studio and then write your song in the studio. And it's like, well, you should have written the song in the rehearsal room where it's cheap, and then you record five songs in the studio where it's expensive. If you're writing in the studio, the economics don't make sense. And it's sort of the same in a school where they have all this time in the world. If they've got a laptop and they can spend ages working on their lyrics, their beats, using tutorials, all this stuff, then when they have got time in maybe you've got a studio space in your school. When they get to the studio space, they need to have finished stuff ready to record. And that's actually teaching them a professional workflow. Like if you're going to be a professional producer, a professional artist, you don't want to turn up for your first, say if you get a record deal and you've got a finally got a shot in the studio, you don't want to turn up with your stuff not ready. You want to arrive and be like, I'm ready, the song's written, the lyrics are there, the performance is there, let's do as much as we can while I've got access to this space. So I'm I think there's a lot of stuff where it's kind of the cheapest, easiest, most accessible option, but it also encourages them to think like a professional, which is just like a double win, that kind of stuff, I think.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think there's a lot a lot in that being able to make music whenever you want as well. Because that's the another unhealthy fit of music and education is demanding creativity to go back to that this specific allotted time. We just come back from the playground and then all the crazy stuff is there and then it's still flowing around. No, it'll be creative for children.
SPEAKER_00:But just I would love to see some like peer peer-reviewed research on if you're assessing student compositions and you've got one group who have the first lesson of the day, and you've got one group who've got the lesson after lunch, and what grades those compositions get. Because I'm not writing good music after I've had my lunch. But if it's the first lesson of the day, I've just had my first coffee, I'm writing good music. Saying maybe by the time it gets late at night, I'm maybe feeling inspired again. And we don't, we don't really, we don't really pay attention to like, oh, what time is this creative activity occurring? We're just like, oh, this is your allocated 50 minutes, be creative.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's it's interesting, which is really why it's so it's so exciting that New Studio is accessible outside of school, because that is a that's just a huge thing. Because I don't know any musician um that hold on a minute, am I gonna get that in the muddle? Well, every musician that I know, let's probe it like that, has gone above and beyond in amount of time in commitment to their craft or art for uh to be able to do what they do. Yes. And then then no one is saying, oh well, I just learnt in my music lessons. And you know, even if music was a positive experience at school for them, it's still they were working into the night at home. So it's it's essential, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00:Really, I think, you know, it's I I don't think there's any other way to do it. And and actually to um to obsess, basically, isn't it? Yeah, and and I suppose in a way it's it's that thing, you know, that sort of classic bit of advice that you should do the thing that doesn't feel like work to you. And I think that's what it is. A lot of people have that feeling with music where they're like, well, I just love doing this, but then the reality of that is well, if you love it so much you want to do it as your career, you're gonna have to put a lot of time into really finding your own voice and doing something unique and all those other cliches. And and that's where the mobile app came from, that where we did a lot of consultation with youth music after the pandemic. So we did in the pandemic, we did a lot of work supporting projects going online because obviously a lot of people had to go from bricks and mortar to online in a hurry, and we did a lot of support of like here's a way you could do an online um kind of creative project. But what came back was that it went really well. We had loads of like really beautiful stories from people who we kind of worked with, but it came back that digital poverty was a massive thing, and there were a lot of young people who just did not have a computer full stop in their household. And the feedback was pretty much everyone had access to a smartphone. So we've been developing a smartphone app kind of as a response to the youth music consultation. And the idea with that being you can create music on the app, um, you know, really wherever you are, regardless of whatever device you've got, works on Android, works on iOS. But what what we've done with it, um, A, it's more of a kind of touch screen performance-based tool. So it's a bit more of a kind of sketchpad to create ideas, which again wouldn't be record audio as well, or is it that's yeah, that's coming as well. So there's there's it it pretty much does everything, including like a live performance. So you can kind of jam out a live performance. Um the recording's coming in the first update, and there's gonna be there's a whole sampler basically where you can chop and do all sorts. But the bit that's I think really cool is whatever performance you record, it records all of the automation, all of the arrangement, and that loads into U Studio. So say a kid could be at home in their bedroom creating stuff on that. When they get to their lesson, they can just hit export, it will appear fully arranged in the door, and then they can that's so exciting. And I think for me, that was almost one of the missing bits where it's like, well, okay, what about young people who just don't have access to a Chromebook or even you know, a cheap laptop, a cheap PC? And I think this means that really I from all the kind of research we've seen, pretty much anyone in the UK, if they want to get access to this, they will be able to via youth music, via their school, via their music hub. Um and that's and I suppose you know to go full circle back to like where I started, I went to school saying, right, I want to make hip-hop beats, and my school just said, Well, you're not doing that in music. And so then I was like, okay, well, I'll find another route to do it. And I think hopefully with this, it sort of A makes life easier for teachers and helps them to, you know, do something where they enjoy it and it's creative. But B means that those kids who don't necessarily feel included can sort of find a way into that, finding their own sort of voice and workflow and creative process. And just because, you know, for me, that was the thing that got me through like my early years was being like, oh, how do I make something that sounds like This or like, oh, what would happen if I recorded that and then did this to it? And you know, the sort of like experimental kind of approach. Um, and yeah, hopefully this means that we can we can get that out to a lot more young people.
SPEAKER_01:It's amazing, man. It's again it's a game changer because we talk about tech and music tech anyway, is this oh it's so accessible, it's so but actually it's kind of it's kind of not, it's not as simple as that, it's overcomplicated, it there's huge amounts of cost in there, all the all the things you've talked about that about that simplicity of access. So this is yeah, genuine, genuine game changer stuff. I think it's exciting. Yeah, thanks, man.
SPEAKER_00:It's sort of you know, I it's funny actually talking about this stuff because I sort of find I spend all my time kind of in the details, obviously like working in a small team, and we're kind of bouncing stuff around and we're getting emails and we're thinking, oh, could we do this? And then every now and again I'll talk to a teacher and then I'll just suddenly see it as what it is. And I had a I had a I was talking to a teacher in Wolverhampton this week, and she was just telling me how she'd been using it with year nine. Um the most popular feature in it, which I totally haven't mentioned, is it's got video, so you can compose to picture. And what a lot of teachers do is um use it to kind of do film music, game music, um, which obviously, again, is like another professional sort of workflow, and she'd been using it to do composition to video with her year nines, and just saying really the experience had been they'd used another DAW, they'd found it overcomplicated, a lot of kids had felt excluded, they'd and she called what did she call it like death by loop? That was quite a good and then she was saying they just tried this, they were all getting on with it really well, and it was one of those where I was like, Well, that's why we did it, you know, to have that conversation, to be like someone in the real world working with a group of young people who, you know, not necessarily the most like economically advantaged group in the world, but they're all doing it, enjoying it, and that's you know, that's why I do this job basically, is to have those chats. And you know, hopefully, hopefully there'll be more of them kind of coming out of talking to you today and being out in the world. And yeah, it's just it's it's the best, it's the best bit of this job.