Pick Yourself with Philip Röder - Music Production Podcast #360

Philip Röder is a music producer who runs the Copilco professional mixing and mastering studio in Berlin. Philip's YouTube Channel, Pick Yourself, helps music producers hone their craft and tap into their own personal style. 

Philip and I had a great conversation about his work and his underpinning philosophies. We went into detail about how he encourages musicians to invest in themselves and "pick yourself." Philip explains how he employs the Go-Giver mindset to his work and how it has brought him success in many aspects of his life.

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Show Notes:

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Episode Transcript:

Brian Funk (00:01.026)

Philip from Pick Yourself. Welcome to the show.

Philip Röder (00:03.992)

Hi, good to see you, thanks for having me.

Brian Funk (00:06.666)

It's good to see you, man. It's kind of fun to talk to you like this because I've been watching your YouTube so much and it's like this interactive thing, you know, that weird, like, I kind of know you, but never had this sort of interaction. So it's great to finally get a chance to talk to you.

Philip Röder (00:22.27)

Absolutely and likewise I've seen a couple of your videos as well listen to your podcasts and have a lot of admiration for the style that you do stuff in which I think is Really nice balance of being super engaging but still toned down and like not like over the top like so much other content So really appreciate that

Brian Funk (00:39.731)

Oh, good. Yeah. I really like what you're doing too. You're especially, um, like your tutorial work. It's, it's very down to earth. It's very like, let's get down to business. Let's do stuff that gets results and, um, not a whole lot of preamble and all that kind of stuff, and, you know, as whenever we're doing any kind of learning online, you just want to kind of get to it and you do a nice job of showing lots of different ways to do things and.

Philip Röder (00:56.046)

Yeah

Brian Funk (01:08.418)

being concise.

Philip Röder (01:10.638)

Thank you, it means a lot. It's one of my goals. I think one of the main goals for the channel overall is to provide a lot of clarity. So one of my mentors said, whether it's overwhelmed, there is opportunity, and I really try to orient myself in that direction, provide as much clarity as possible, be concise, get to the point, and also just try to become a better teacher over time. And I think it's just putting in the work, doing tons of tutorials, and it gets better and better and better. And also big shout out to my editor,

He's also, he's like my right hand in that. Does a lot of the heavy lifting and helps me later on get kind of to the meat and bones as fast as possible.

Brian Funk (01:51.254)

Right. Oh, that's good to have another set of eyes on what you're doing. Yeah. I should shout out Animus NVIDIUS who's been editing the podcast lately. Um, really nice to have somebody again, another set of eyes, another set of ears. And, um, just cleans up the process a lot. Keeps me going. You mentioned mentors. Um,

And one thing that kind of caught my attention was you seem to have taken some kind of inspiration from Seth Godin, who I get his daily blog. He writes every day and he's done so for like 30 years or something, about as long as you could possibly be blogging. He's been blogging and it's always some nice bit of wisdom and an interesting take on things. Kind of a different perspective that maybe isn't so intuitive at first, but

offers a lot and I think that's where you got the name pick yourself for your channel and for your webpage as well, right?

Philip Röder (02:51.07)

Yes, exactly. Seth Godin is one of my, I call them like virtual mentors among people like Derek Sivas, for example, is another one. So people that I don't personally know, but that give me a lot of inspiration and serve as mentors that I can now just always draw from when I need inspiration.

And Seth Godin especially, he coined this phrase, pick yourself, and this was just like a little chapter in one of his books or in two of his books where he said, the time is over when artists needed to wait to get picked by some label, some gatekeeper.

And now is the time to pick yourself and claim responsibility. And this feeling of maximum ownership of your results, that is something that like deeply resonated with me on so many levels, whether it's starting a business, whether it's going all in on music, all these kinds of things. I just feel this, this is a great moment in history where we just have the possibility to do something like that. And Seth.

has given me the tools and mental models to actually do so. So for example in his book The Practice where he talks a lot about just showing up and doing the work independently of the outcome and detach yourself from this expectation of what's about to happen when you do it. No, just put all of that aside, focus on the process, trust the process, ship the work.

then eventually good things are going to happen. And this is exactly what I've seen happen over and over again in my life. So I'm like immensely grateful for that kind of wisdom that is in this little phrase, pick yourself.

Brian Funk (04:21.142)

Yes, and I read that book too, The Practice. I love that idea and it's something else I read from Stephen Pressfield and the War of Art, where you just focus on the work, do the work, because that's what you can control. It's so true about so many other things and if you just trust in that...

Philip Röder (04:29.891)

Yes.

Brian Funk (04:41.382)

even if you're doing the work in a weird way or kind of a wrong way, maybe there's a more efficient way somewhere, you're still making progress. And sometimes I think we wait for everything to be so perfect before we decide to go. And in a way that's kind of almost like the fear of starting something or, you know, we just don't want to make mistakes, but mistakes are like the way.

Just fumble through if you have to.

Philip Röder (05:09.63)

Yeah, yeah. Exactly. I used to be a really heavy perfectionist. And I mean, I still set the bar super high for myself in certain regards, or something that I will probably battle with my whole life. But just the act of self awareness for that part of my identity is pretty helpful, because I kind of can catch myself. My wife is also pretty good at catching myself in that in these kind of moments. But like overall, just this

Brian Funk (05:30.803)

Right?

Philip Röder (05:37.466)

this framework of trusting a process and doing the work, shipping stuff consistently and then seeing what happens, it just takes off so much of the pressure. It has helped me a lot like recovering from the like unhealthy side of perfectionism.

Brian Funk (05:53.407)

Right. I've listened to somebody, it might have been like on a TikTok reel or something. You know, while I was wasting most of my life, some valuable nugget of information came along and he was saying, um, lower the bar. Right. And his point was.

If you want to improve at something and you're not doing it, maybe your expectations are too high so you're not trying. So if you lower the bar and just do the bare minimum you can actually do. And then you can start adding onto that and building from that. But if it's, I don't know, if it's like getting in shape or something like and you're not doing anything, do five pushups.

even if you have to do them one at a time, like whatever it is more than what you're doing and it gives you something to start and I really like that advice because I Find the getting started part with everything is always the hardest just well, maybe it's not the hardest I don't know, but it's always hard. It's always I always have like this motivation I want to do something I want to do something then when I get the time We'll make my music

As soon as I get the time, like then I start cleaning the dishes and vacuuming and everything else gets done, right? Until I have nothing left to do, but face the actual work. But if I, if yeah, if you make it so small. Exactly.

Philip Röder (07:16.942)

Haha, that's what... Sorry, that's the resistance in Steven Pressfield. It's like resistance that you feel and you know exactly, you gotta push through in that direction.

Brian Funk (07:26.55)

Yeah. Well, we were talking, I think this is before we hit record, but we were kind of talking about how doing like this podcast, for instance, helps me solidify my thoughts and like understand what I'm really feeling and thinking. And just that word resistance.

is such a powerful word because it helps you identify that thing that's preventing you from doing the work, preventing you from getting going. It's so nice to have a label to put on something. So you can just, that's, I see what I'm doing here. Let's change course.

Philip Röder (07:59.77)

Yeah, because it allows you to detach from that. That's amazing. I did the same thing when I started the YouTube channel. I was like really, I wouldn't say like I was super anxious about it, but I knew that I had to get into the rhythm and it was right during the time when I was

Brian Funk (08:02.87)

Hmm.

Philip Röder (08:15.95)

getting back out of that phase of when our first child or daughter was born. That was basically the moment when I started to kind of ramp up YouTube stuff and I still was barely working. And so what I did was I recorded little selfie videos just with my iPhone when I was walking my dog through the through the forest nearby, nearby the studio. And I always.

When I sat in the tram towards the studio, I wrote down one idea that I wanted to talk about, one concept that was just going through my mind in that moment that I think would be valuable for people. And then during the walk in the middle of the day...

my thoughts had already sunken in, I had processed some of that, I had kind of structured my thinking, then I was just walking and doing these like one take videos, recording them, and then basically putting them out unedited, no intro, nothing, in just like a minute or three minutes. But I did this consistently and almost every day when I walk my dog I record one of these videos and then kind of publish them one after another. And this helped me kind of build up the momentum for the YouTube channel. Of course no one was...

viewing it but also I set the bar so low that I wasn't expecting that one of these videos became something in the end.

Brian Funk (09:31.138)

That's a really good point because one of the nice things about having that low expectation, you know, I'm just going to do this on my phone real quick. It's like, he kind of, it's not like you put 14 hours into the editing this video and it's this polished thing ready to go, and then no one watches it.

At least it's like, all right, so what? Like we're just putting these things out and you're still getting something out of this idea, just processing information and getting your thoughts together.

Philip Röder (10:02.174)

Yeah. And at some point this became so easy that I didn't feel any resistance about it. That was the perfect moment where I noticed, okay, now I get up the game. Now it's time to really jump into tutorial content because people were also asking for it, of course. So the little audience that I had at the time. And.

That was the next big thing. I was really afraid of this. First of all. Um, I mean, I had already recorded my online course that already existed. So I knew that I could pull it off somehow, but still in the YouTube world, it's like, it's different doing a YouTube tutorial compared to like a in-depth course lesson. That's just two different things.

Brian Funk (10:36.216)

Mm-hmm.

Philip Röder (10:38.242)

But yeah, once again, I started to just do this really consistently, putting in the work, recording these tutorials, editing them myself and committing to just putting them out just to see, okay, can I just grow in this area? And I focused much more on how can I become better at doing this instead of like what comes out on the other end.

Brian Funk (11:02.466)

What was your initial apprehension towards it? Was it the just the routine of it? Was it being on camera? Where were you feeling that kind of like hesitation to get started?

Philip Röder (11:18.446)

That's a really good question. Yeah, my main hesitation was that when I typically, when I make music, when I create music or when I mix and master music, which is kind of my normal day job, I do this in 100% flow state. So there's just no room for thinking, no room for talking. And I don't even have clients next to me in the studio. I do everything remotely and maybe someone comes in for an initial meeting or maybe they come in for doing revisions or so, but.

Typically I work in complete flow state without any distraction whatsoever and I was really afraid that I couldn't enter my level of quality when not being in flow state and to a certain degree that's true. I am not hitting the same level of quality 100% but I also don't need to because the question is like do I record something that helps people? Yes or no.

and it seems that it helps people so I've accomplished that mission. Even if it's just, I don't know, 70-80% of my true capacity. Doesn't really matter.

Brian Funk (12:21.39)

Right, yeah, because there's a lot to think about, right? And if that's how you like to work, I could see how stopping to comment and make video material or, are you using a lot of client work in your videos? Is it stuff like for your musical examples or do you just kind of put something together? Is it your own music?

Philip Röder (12:42.498)

Yeah, I put it together. So that is not music that's being released. That's just something that I create purposefully for the tutorials to kind of get the point across clearer. Um, I might also use some client work for like special mixing and mastering stuff. Like when I go super in depth, then I'm also probably using client material, but then you have this like permission cycle, meaning like you have to get the permission from the artist, maybe from the label and

like all this surrounding stuff that doesn't like really make any difference for the viewer. And so I tried to just not complicate it too much. But yeah, there's something interesting happening in a client session that I'm definitely sharing it.

Brian Funk (13:17.698)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (13:22.634)

Yeah, that's good to have that option, but I could see like in the name of simplicity and getting things done. You just want to not have to go through that extra kind of circus of getting the permission and who knows what else is involved with that.

Philip Röder (13:38.87)

Yeah, and it's also a lot of fun because currently I don't have the chance to produce that much music that is like really release worthy right now because like I said young children very limited time overall in the studio where I have to get just kind work done, get the videos out and so on. But the videos allow me to have this playground of still making music and sharing it with people even though I'm not executing.

until the very end and then releasing it which is definitely something that I will pick up again like once this like extreme phase is over But yeah, that is that is just for me a very joyful experience and I try to make it fun because that makes it easier

Brian Funk (14:10.39)

Hmm.

Brian Funk (14:18.85)

That's a cool thing to do and I've gotten some enjoyment out of it. Like there's some things in my process that I don't particularly like doing. Um, but I know is important and I like having have done. And, uh, like one example that comes to mind is making like little clips for this podcast, just to have stuff to put on social media, you know, it's hard to find.

within an hour or two hour conversation to find like those nuggets sometimes. And if you find it, a lot of times there's stuff I want to trim out of it. A lot of times it's me interjecting like I probably am right now. And I try to trim that out so it gets this complete idea. But a thing that's made it a lot more fun has been using these sort of like half musical ideas that I have that...

You know, little jams I make here and there, and they're kinda not gonna go anywhere, but it's like, all right, I could just put in the background of this, or I can use it in the video while I'm talking if it's a bigger YouTube video or something. It's nice to have just stuff like that to throw in when you need it without having to use music that's not yours or like library music or any of that stuff. So it's...

Philip Röder (15:33.882)

That's a great poem.

Brian Funk (15:35.234)

It's a good way to just get some use out of things that might not go anywhere anyway. And it sounds like you've kind of got a little bit of that going too in another kind of way.

Philip Röder (15:45.854)

Absolutely. And it brings me to the point of playfulness, which I think is massively underrated. So there's this saying, I think it was Picasso, I think so. Playing is the work of the child and the artist, something along those lines.

I think it's so important to just preserve the playfulness. There are so many frameworks on how to do things and the typical YouTube video style that I see popping up again and again in my feed is like, this is the one way you need to do X, Y, Z. This is the only five things that will make your mixes sound better, blah, blah. And this is just also, it sounds like

Brian Funk (16:06.795)

bit.

Philip Röder (16:27.978)

from the military and not so much from music. And I have an issue with that. I think about this in very playful terms. And even as a mastering engineer, which people think is like a really technical, strict process, I come from a complete creative musical perspective on that.

Brian Funk (16:30.018)

Hehehe

Philip Röder (16:45.958)

Also with mixing it's the same thing. Like my philosophy on mixing is how can I enhance the beauty in something? I'm not looking for errors, not looking for corrections. I'm thinking about how can I bring out the beautiful soul of the music with what I'm doing there, which is a very different mindset. But I would say 95% of artists who produce music, mix music themselves, have lost that frame, have lost that playfulness and that look at the material.

Brian Funk (16:59.96)

Hmm.

Philip Röder (17:12.114)

often gets into like a really draining technical process, overthinking stuff and completely losing that playfulness.

Brian Funk (17:20.254)

Yeah, I keep saying this, but it's called play music. I'm with you 100% on this. We play music, we don't work music. And mixing is a great example of how you can get so technical, you're looking at frequency spectrums and you're carving. And I've more and more gotten into this idea of rather than making a perfect mix, making an interesting mix.

So that might mean like something is like unusually loud or unusually harsh or mellow or whatever it is, but I think the idea of interesting is so much more fun to me than good or perfect.

Philip Röder (18:04.566)

I would even go as far as to say like this is one of the core ingredients of a great mix. So you're... this is the thing like you go through a phase that's almost like this sine wave in your Archer's trajectory where you oscillate between, oh yeah this is sounding great, oh yeah I'm kind of figuring out more technical details that will make it even better and then you hit this point where it starts decreasing again and...

this point you say oh screw it doesn't really matter i'm just going to forget about all these things and go just by my gut feeling which is then the moment when something really goes wrong on the technical side of things they're constantly oscillating and the more experience you get i think the more you intuitively know what to store in the back of your head then just focus on the playfulness being in flow state getting great stuff done and then in the right moment pulling

Brian Funk (18:40.679)

Hehehe

Philip Röder (18:59.874)

bringing it in the moment where it's actually necessary. But in all other moments, you completely forget about that.

Brian Funk (19:02.808)

Mm-hmm.

Brian Funk (19:06.358)

Yeah, right. And mixing is like a form of presentation. Where how am I going to deliver this? There's a lot of really great music. I think this happens a lot for me with pop, really shiny, crystal, perfect pop. Where a lot of it's like really good if you hear it on a piano or a guitar, but that presentation sometimes it's just...

it's the right way to do it or something, you know, and it's kind of not that interesting, but I love it when things use some sort of interest or some sort of creativity in that part. And it often makes like a more mediocre song, for me, a lot more enjoyable. It's, yeah, just the kind of like dressing the presentation, the way it makes you feel or something. It's hard to put my finger on, but.

You can have a lot of fun with that. You can really play with it as much as it can be super technical. What about.

Philip Röder (20:10.158)

Yeah, I mean even pop music can be super impressive in terms of the mixing skills sometimes. So there might be some... Yeah.

Brian Funk (20:15.902)

Yeah, it is impressive. It's like, I don't think I can get there. I don't think I have that skillset personally. So in a way, like I kind of just don't even try. You know?

How does that work with mastering though? Cause I am kind of under that impression that it's a much more technical art. And I mean, I do a little bit for myself, but I'm, you know, I'm not, I'm definitely not approaching it very artistically.

Philip Röder (20:48.655)

Yeah, I mean if you're mastering your own music it's exactly that. I mean you already did all the things from a creative perspective that need to be done. So what you're doing in mastering when you self-master is basically a little bit of quality control, maybe ABing it with something else and just making sure that the export is fine.

Brian Funk (20:48.956)

How do you do that? Yeah, sorry.

Brian Funk (21:08.99)

Yeah, that's about.

Philip Röder (21:09.666)

But if you're working as a mastering engineer, I think it's quite different. Of course, that quality aspect, quality control aspect is something that is super important, especially if you do it with formats like vinyl, for example, it gets really tricky. But even with streaming services, of course, you just need to make sure that it sounds great on different devices. It sounds great when somebody plays it on CDJs in the club, but you also need to make sure that it's gonna translate well on Spotify and so on.

But the quality control aspect to me is just, this is a given, this is just necessity. But the way you separate yourself as a mastering engineer, I think it's impossible to stand out with the intense quality control you make, but it's easier to stand out on things like the communication side of things with the artist, which is something that I stress a lot. Um...

Brian Funk (21:44.05)

Mm-hmm.

Philip Röder (21:59.194)

I really go the extra mile when it comes to communication with the clients. When someone new enters my studio or requests a quote, something like that, I always kind of meet with them online and take...

half an hour or an hour out of my day, just talk to them, get to know them, get to know their goals, listen to music with them, what they are currently working on, just to really put myself into the perspective of what that person really needs on the other side. That is one thing to differentiate yourself as an art, as a mastering engineer, because you really get involved artistically, you want to understand what's happening there, it's much more than a creative, much more creative than a technical process.

And then the actual mastering itself, there are also different ways of looking at this. You can approach it from a really technical perspective and throw on lots of meters and make sure that everything is within certain parameters. That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is to

listen to the material and see how you emotionally react to that. This is the way I approach it. And then just see how can I get the absolute most out of that emotional essence in the mastering process while making sure that nothing is technically wrong, but that is what I said about earlier about like storing stuff in the back of your head and then pulling it out when it's necessary. And to me personally, this is the

this is the way to master music these days because that's also something that AI currently can't take away from you. There is no AI currently that has a built-in emotional reaction to the music. And so to me that's a huge selling factor and I always try to also make this clear when I talk to people in the initial stages of getting to know each other that this is the way I master. If that resonates with you we're good to go. If not and just want the grumpy old engineer who

Philip Röder (23:53.628)

website where you put stuff in and then get it back two days later, hopefully technically correct and then it's also fine but it's just not my way of doing things.

Brian Funk (24:01.806)

Hmm. So what are you trying to decide about your process in those conversations? Are you, is it questions of the type of gear you're going to use? Um, you're having a conversation with somebody trying to understand the emotional impact that you want to bring. How does that translate into the actual work of mastering? Cause assuming we're going to get the kind of technical things under control.

What kinds of things, where does the artistry for you come in?

Philip Röder (24:33.138)

Yeah, that's a really good question. So...

Gear is really secondary overall. Yes, there are certain choices that you make, but the mastering chain that I use and that most mastering engineers use is pretty much similar in many projects. They might switch from one type of compressor to a different one in certain situations. They might prefer having a clipper engaged at this stage or at that stage, but these are kind of minor details. I think overall what you need to get right is to know where you want to land on the spectrum

between open and dynamic versus loud and aggressive. There's this kind of, I would say, a spectrum where you need to find like the sweet spot where that project needs to sit. And this is something that I really try to figure out during the conversation. And yeah, the other aspect is...

almost like how modern do you want it to sound or how retro slash lo-fi you want it to sound overall. Those parameters give you a really good indicator whether something needs to be really precise and clean sounding or a little bit more warm and I would say lush. And if you have this

diagram mapped out in your head, it lets you make the right creative decisions in the mastering process. But I then don't overthink this. It's not like I'm writing this down and then executing after a plan. It's like I'm just really in flow state 100%, but I come from the right angle at the music. I think that's the main difference that this initial conversation allows me.

Brian Funk (26:06.386)

Right. So you're getting that determination. Cause yeah, that's, it's a great point you make about AI that it's not going to feel anything. And I think that we can probably get with a lot of things like AI does a pretty good job of getting you kind of like in the right area. And like I, for instance, like even like on Ozone, if I click that.

you know, AI button or mastering assistant button, it gets me somewhere. Sometimes I find really weird decisions, but it at least gives me like that starting place. But then that's, I guess, where I start to have my fun afterwards. It's like, okay, so I don't know if I want that giant shelf here, but I'll pull that down and, you know, play around with the maximizer, change the way that's kind of.

affecting my dynamics. But it is, yeah, it's so subjective on each track, what you're trying to really leave the listener with. It must be really helpful to have.

Philip Röder (27:17.966)

Yeah, and I'm really not anti-AI, not at all. But I must say there's one issue with the mastering AI assistance and plugins and stuff. I think it's overall a great addition to the tool set, but especially when you're not as experienced, it always introduces...

Brian Funk (27:21.9)

Yeah.

Philip Röder (27:36.098)

this extra stage of overwhelm and self doubt and questioning things. It's almost like, okay, if the assistant says it should be there, maybe I'm wrong with what I'm hearing. So you might have this feeling, okay, that shouldn't be that extreme in this area. But then there's the question, like it was trained on so many songs, this specific model that they were using. Doesn't that mean that this is the right decision? And so you're questioning your gut feeling instead of reinforcing it.

as a producer, as a mixing and mastering engineer is to train that gut feeling and make these decisions quickly and intuitively. And the more friction and overwhelm you introduce, the worse it gets for the artistic outcome in my opinion.

Brian Funk (28:20.814)

Mmm. What a good point. The more friction you introduce, the more overwhelming it gets. It's that that's, you know, anti flow medicine right there, right? Like if you want to get out of the flow, give yourself some friction, give yourself some self doubt. And that'll don't take it right out real fast.

Brian Funk (28:43.898)

Interesting. Because I also think I don't really get the kind of extreme results sometimes that I want from those types of things, those types of plugins where they're trying to do something or like an upload to like a online mastering service. You get kind of like, like you said, like it's kind of the average of everything.

which can be really helpful. And often I leave it sometimes, but I usually want to go a little weirder and more extreme. So that's something I always have to kind of come back to. But I know what you mean, because sometimes when you click these buttons on any plugin, really, and it starts showing you like kind of drastic changes, you say, wait, was I that far off? What happened here?

Philip Röder (29:18.242)

Ha ha.

Philip Röder (29:37.562)

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And what the experience that I've made with AI mastering, especially the ones that you upload stuff to is that it's gotten pretty freaking good at creating a decent master on a song that is, I would say, average overall, meaning that it's kind of the style of production that is contemporary, for example, let's say mainstream EDM music.

Brian Funk (29:37.642)

Hard thing to get over, I guess. Yeah.

Brian Funk (29:58.199)

Yeah.

Philip Röder (30:05.058)

this type of stuff, if this is well produced and well mixed, you can throw it into this and will get a pretty decent master out of it. The problem arises when you throw in something that is slightly weird intentionally from the get-go. When you throw that stuff in and you for example you have a very weird dynamic bridge but then a super pumping chorus section.

it will blow up that bridge like crazy and kind of try to push it into what it doesn't want to be. And this is where these models lack and where I think there's just also not enough control and influence that the artist or the producer has in the whole workflow.

Brian Funk (30:46.966)

Right. Yeah, when I put some weird degrading plugin on my master track, even though it's, you might say, wrong to do, but I like it, sometimes throwing any kind of mastering AI after that, whether it's upload or whatever, it is a little like, it's trying to undo everything I just did. Probably with good reason.

Philip Röder (31:12.073)

I did something today on a client project that was pretty fun. The whole track was a mixture between band music and electronic music, so taking some influences from the Mars Volta, but then still also having like a house foundation. Really weird stuff.

the artist wanted the outro to really go crazy in a certain way and wanted me to try out different things. So what I did is I inserted an old school Flanger plug-in on the master channel and then fed this into like with an automation, fed it until it reached 100% wet, also cranked up the saturation on that and it sounded so weird but so great and this is the version that got

no mastering AI software would ever suggest something like this. There's not even a way to tell it to do something like this. And I think there's something to be said about this, like human interaction also between the artist and the engineer. And even better if an artist has the skill set to do it themselves, it's like the whole pick yourself idea is to empower artists as much as possible. So I'm all in favor if an artist doesn't even need me anymore for mastering, but there should be intention behind things.

Brian Funk (32:05.73)

Hmm.

Brian Funk (32:27.246)

Hmm. Well, art often is involving risk, right? And you, I don't know. I mean, look, we're still early in AI land here, so this could change, but I don't think you really want to train an AI to do something crazy like that. I'm going to be at home trying to get my, you know, nice, maybe like a singer, songwriter track sounding decent. And

You know, your flanger comes on in the middle of them. What the hell's that? Be like a completely crazy idea. But in that context, there's a very artistic choice to use it there. That's, I think, if anything, I'm excited about AI is, it'll get rid of some of these like more mundane things we do, which is why I like the Mastering Assistant, because it does, gets you somewhere.

And then you can be creative on top of it. So I'm hoping that it'll just kind of like wash away the average, because there's so much music, there's so much stuff coming out now anyway, like we kind of need to just clear the path a little so that the like, weirder artistic stuff, stuff that's taking a chance a little bit come through. My hope anyway.

Philip Röder (33:52.428)

Sounds like a good plan.

Brian Funk (33:54.442)

Right. I think it was dead mouse. It seems like something dead mouse would say. Gets a little cranky sometimes. He, he said something like, um, he's like, you know, AI generated music. He's like, great. It's just going to make more garbagey average music. And then there'll be too much competition for like all the stuff that's out now. That's garbagey and average. And.

then the real stuff will get to kind of rise to the top. That's kind of a funny take on it that it'll just, you know, I think we have like an interesting time. I mean, you could be a music producer and just be pulling loops for everything you do. You're not composing MIDI, you're not recording audio. You can just be really good at organizing loops from Splice or wherever you get your loops.

Um, but that's, you know, everybody using like the same colors in their painting. I wonder if this will kind of, you know, it won't matter if you can grab the loops because the machine can do it faster than you can now get interesting again.

Philip Röder (35:10.87)

Yeah, true. Absolutely.

This is one of the reasons why I personally went into 3D audio compositions, so working in ambisonics format and doing these like live installations here in Berlin with one of my friends, Jacob, who was really deep into that stuff as well. And so we started during COVID actually, or even before COVID, we started doing these concerts where people were just sitting in the middle of a room surrounded by speakers in a cube setup. Sometimes just we started with four speakers and it got more and more every time.

Philip Röder (35:45.09)

This was like just a little collective, a little crew that just got more and more attention in Berlin and people were coming to these events. And it was so much fun to compose music for that format because a. zero boundaries in regards to genre. Like this is a genre of music that basically doesn't exist. It's somehow electronic, but you can also do electroacoustic stuff of course. Zero boundaries in regards to the genre. People did not know what to expect when they entered the room.

and it was a really visceral physical reaction to the music when you then sat there and listened to it. It was like real happening and no flashy visuals. So the concept of these concerts is called into sound and it just means we can listen to the music in whatever way we like. We can lie down, we can sit, we can stand, doesn't really matter but there's not going to be any visual distraction and that was such a relieving almost meditative concept that

was so much fun to make music for.

Brian Funk (36:45.386)

That sounds really cool. And that's nice that it's, that has to happen there, right? Like you can't download that. You can't imagine you can't put it on like the Apple vision headset and be there in it because there's so many things that are getting replaced, um, where you don't have to go and experience it, but something like that is a, is a cool reason to go and.

go into the music, like you said.

Philip Röder (37:18.434)

Yeah, absolutely.

Brian Funk (37:22.034)

When you say ambisonic, that's just surrounded by speakers. It's not really, you know, it's not like a five one or, you know, surround sound or even like an at most thing. It's just what it was. I mean, exactly.

Philip Röder (37:36.682)

Yeah, so Ambisonics is a really special format. It actually exists since a few decades, I think. And it got developed more and more and more. And the cool thing about the Ambisonics format is that it works in different speaker setups. So it is a true 3D audio format. So it's not like multi-mono channels playing together and you just send this channel to that or this channel to that.

multi-speaker setup. But Ambisonics really plays with the phase relationship between the sound that's coming out of all speakers and you can install decoding software depending on how the speakers are set up in the room. But the signal in the beginning is always just a like a

Contemporary format would be seventh order ambisonics, for example, it's like a really well-developed format with a lot of precision. And then you can basically draw in certain decoding devices what the speaker setup looks like in the room. You put in the numbers of the distances between the speakers and their relationship, the angles that you position them. And then it will calculate how that signal needs to come out of each speaker basically to create exactly that type of spatial dimension that you want to create.

It's technically relatively complex, but the software that you then use is not that different from like, you can still do it in a normal DAW that just has these capabilities. So a lot of people use Reaper for that. I personally use Cubase Pro for that. And

Yeah, it's a format that in my opinion is much more charming than Dolby Atmos or these more popular formats because they always require you to have a very specific setup. You have to position everything like this and only then it will work within these parameters. And Amazonex is just much more, it's almost, I would say like almost, what's the name for that, like WordPress. WordPress is

Brian Funk (39:40.383)

Right.

Philip Röder (39:41.782)

know what I mean like this movement of, ah I'm forgetting I'm blanking the word, open source, yeah exactly, Ambisonics feels like the open source version of Dolby Atmos basically. It's actually much more powerful in a way, it's less protected and there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in terms of research, so a lot of people who work in that field who put out great papers and stuff, they work in this Ambisonics format quite a lot.

Brian Funk (39:43.398)

Yeah, it's kind of open source.

Brian Funk (40:08.302)

Hmm. And that's, is that built into Cubase and Reaper? Or is it some sort of like plugin?

Philip Röder (40:14.114)

Yeah, so in Reaper is super customizable. So basically this is the best DAW currently for doing ambisonic stuff. I personally use Cubase because it has everything that I need for my ambisonics capabilities, but it has that baked in. And Ableton, as far as I know, has a...

It's a Max4Live tool that you can use. I forgot the name. It's pretty unstable, so I would not recommend it for live installations. But you can also use it. It's usable. You can do ambisonics also in Ableton with this Max4Live device that I just forgot the name of.

Brian Funk (40:57.026)

Yeah, I think I've seen that somewhere anyway. But yeah, it was kind of like, I don't really know what this is and I don't know how I'm gonna listen to it anyway. So, just sometimes.

Philip Röder (41:10.49)

If you love weird music, then that's a pretty deep rabbit hole.

Brian Funk (41:14.366)

Yeah, I can imagine. There are certain things sometimes that come up where I think modular synthesis is that like that for me. I'm just like, I get it. It's really cool. I can do whatever I want, but I don't know. I feel like I'll never come out of that. I'll be like a gray haired.

bearded man and three weeks from now, like coming out of my basement with the cables stuck in my hair. Just the financial rabbit hole it would probably be. I think I'd never make any music again, just noises. Be probably pretty happy that way, but sometimes you have to make decisions and say, you know what? Maybe we're not going to...

you don't go this direction because I might not ever come back.

Philip Röder (42:05.51)

With Modular I actually have a love relationship. It means a lot to me. Not because I'm not this kind of person that says yeah you need to get into Modular and being super snobby about it. I have a really personal relationship with it. I originally was very fascinated by it but

Brian Funk (42:19.04)

Right.

Philip Röder (42:27.906)

never had the guts to spend that much money on it simply because other investments were more important into the studio getting the acoustics done and having great speakers have all that stuff that was just more important for my work and so i never jumped into this even though i found it interesting and my wife actually even gifted me like a diy oscillator module that i could just solder myself and i built it but i was missing the rest of the modular system to do anything with it

Brian Funk (42:56.574)

It was just like a tone basically.

Philip Röder (42:58.422)

Yeah, yeah. And then, yeah, so pretty pointless. And then I kind of let it sink in and forgot about it. And then COVID came along and the German performance rights organization GEMA, they had out, they handed out a fellowship where you could just apply super easily and get like 5000 euros to

Brian Funk (43:02.754)

Hehehe

Philip Röder (43:22.49)

create music with and invest into your music career. And of course I did it, got the fellowship and needed to spend that money. And so I was thinking, okay, what's the fastest way to get rid of 5K? Wait a second, my modular system that I wanted to build for like five years.

Brian Funk (43:33.498)

I'm sorry.

Brian Funk (43:37.414)

Yep.

Brian Funk (43:40.914)

Right?

Philip Röder (43:41.922)

I went on a modular buying spree here in Schneidersladen in Berlin, got really good recommendations by Jaco Jaco, which is now not working there anymore. She's like a really good artist and performing a lot. But she helped me kind of figure out the best way to put together my system and customize it in my way. And so far the joy that I got out of that system was that I was just, I was first of all super limited because so many modules that I

wanted that I ordered were not available because of the parts shortage during COVID. And so I just had super restricted modules and had to be really creative with the few modules that I had, which taught me a lot about synthesis and about control voltage. And I would say I would have been super overwhelmed had I had this like huge system to begin with. And then it slowly grew, it slowly grew module by module. They got shipped over the course of a year or so.

And now finally the system is together and the joy that I got out of it is it was the first hobby that I kind of allowed myself again after this like crazy phase of our first kid. She's now three years old, but basically for the first year and a half you basically don't have a life. It's just the way it is. And at some point, these like first moments of freedom in the evening pop up. You start to reconnect with your partner a bit more and

start to think about, oh maybe I can do something for myself again. And for me that was the modular system. So I, after she wasn't bad, I just sat there for myself, not thinking about writing a song, but just literally come back to the topic of playing. Literally sitting in front of it and playing like a child with that thing and getting so much joy out of the music and just listening on headphones in the evening. And that is such a...

fulfilling experience to me, such a once again visceral experience that I have. And this deep connection brought me basically back to the joy of music, which I sometimes, for some periods in my work, have even lost as a mixing mastering engineer. It's like you listen to so much music during the day that the last thing you want to do in the evening is just make music or so.

Brian Funk (45:55.95)

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Especially all day long, different music and some of the more technical stuff too, can really, where it's not so much play. It is work. It is fine tuning things. That, that sounds like a healthy way to get into it though, as a form of reconnecting with yourself after raising a child and going through all that.

having something to do that's a little bit separate from your work, but still related on some level too. Yeah, maybe one day, I don't know. I don't know.

Philip Röder (46:33.878)

Yeah, the ends.

Hahaha.

Philip Röder (46:41.326)

The modular or the child?

Brian Funk (46:43.474)

Well, definitely not the child. I'll definitely patch that thing the wrong way.

Philip Röder (46:50.85)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (46:53.078)

But yeah, who knows? You never know what's around the corner. I'm kind of satisfied with my synthesis world right now, where I've got a lot of fun tools and there's endless software. But yeah, every once in a while someone comes along and like makes me think again, like maybe.

Luckily, there's no shop nearby. You know, if I would live closer to say Brooklyn or someplace else that like, I went to Portland, Oregon with a friend a couple of years right before COVID and um, they had this really awesome modular synth shop and we were in there for hours. And they had so many cool things and I wanted something, but I didn't know what I wanted, so didn't get anything. And.

I would have had to travel with it anyway, but, um, tough man. You get lost real fast. There's so many cool things. There's turning knobs and putting cables in places, not hardly even known what I'm doing half the time, but yeah, it does come up every once in a while. Luckily, like I said, I don't have a place I can go where they can help me.

Philip Röder (48:04.45)

Ha ha ha.

Brian Funk (48:07.318)

which I've been in this really kind of heavy phase of trying to get rid of things I'm not using anymore. So a lot of stuff has been going on eBay and the space it's making.

is making all the stuff I have feel so much more important and I'm more excited about it. So it's like, oh yeah, this thing right here, like it's in with hands reach or as opposed to like it's behind that thing or this is over here and I can't even see what I have anymore. I'm really enjoying just having like a few things dialed in really nice.

Philip Röder (48:48.73)

Yeah, that's great. I'm a big fan of simplification. So absolutely.

Brian Funk (48:54.838)

Being like, you know, when I was younger, you know, before we had like eBay and things where you could get something you don't like, you could just return it or whatever, you really spent a lot more time with your stuff. You really learned it. Even if you didn't love certain things about it, you figured out how to work with it.

And I get much less of that these days, especially with software. If it's not exactly fitting into what I want to do, it kind of just goes away and it's just clutter on your hard drive after a while, but really enjoying getting like familiar with things again.

Philip Röder (49:30.905)

Yeah.

Philip Röder (49:36.27)

Yeah, and that holds true for even within your DAW. Even if you don't buy external plugins, that's something that we also talk a lot about with our coaching students that we tell them, okay, first of all, if you now want to create a specific bass sound or lead sound, you just pick one of the synthesizers within your DAW. It doesn't really matter which one it is, just pick the one that's most attractive to you right now.

And instead of learning all of these synthesizers superficially, you go into this one thing and you learn it as deeply as you can. Like literally figuring out how the presets were made, figuring out how the modulation works, how the cross modulation between the modulators work. And going super deep into this until you can create the types of sounds you have in your head as closely as possible. And then you can allow yourself to move on to the next thing and learn that.

you can transfer so much knowledge from one thing to the next. And limitation, I think, is your best friend as a creator. It's like artificial limitation in so many ways is super beneficial. Whether you try to set yourself like a time limit, you set yourself a limit of only using certain tools.

I mean, you know this as well. I've seen it in some of your content as well. There's like restriction in certain formats. And it also shines through that sometimes limitation seems to be something that's available in your philosophy as well. Right.

Brian Funk (51:08.418)

Definitely. Yeah, I guess that's what I'm talking about too with getting rid of stuff is limitations and that's such a good point you make about like learning that one synthesizer Because that translates into all of them, you know, once you understand what's going on and you say oh, that's an envelope That's an envelope and this other one and no itself. That's the thing that I know over there and I've even heard this for education. Um here in America

The tendency is to like, like take math, right? Like we have like a state test that the students take at the end of the year and it covers all of these topics and they have to memorize all this stuff. But I've also read that like they're just kind of superficially understanding it and they're doing it for the test and then it goes away. But in other places in the world, and I think especially in like.

some of the like higher performing schools and places like um, I'm drawing a blank here like Finland and you know those areas where the highest education marks you know however they figure that out but they don't do that they go deep into a subject and they learn it and they learn like why the math is that way. I had a math teacher in high school who showed us the derivatives

of the math formulas, instead of just saying, here's the formula, use it on these problems. He was like, this is how we got the formula. So let's start at the beginning. Two plus two is four, right? And he just showed how whoever figured out Pythagoras or whatever, he got to this conclusion, took us through it. And it just like opened up so much understanding for me that this is all kind of simple, but it's a lot of things put together.

that makes it complicated. And I think what you're saying is so true with your DAW, with your plugins, to really learn them, the basic ones, it opens your eyes to so much and you can open any synthesizer after a while and just start to get a sense of what's going on. There might be some features or some oddities about it, but it really gives you a lot more understanding than

Philip Röder (53:02.456)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (53:28.514)

trying to like learn them all, like you said, superficially and not really coming away with the understanding of what's actually happening in there.

Philip Röder (53:38.51)

Yeah, it's funny that story you told about your teacher brings him back to modular synthesis because in a way that's what you have to do. You have to if you don't know where to plug the very first cable from A to B, you will never hear any sound.

Brian Funk (53:55.424)

Right.

Philip Röder (53:55.694)

and just by understanding the first principles of like control voltage and audio voltage and then at the same time voltage is voltage so you can also use control voltage as audio voltage of course so if something just is a trigger you can also just plug that into an output and listen to this and it might be your kick drum but these kind of little

first principles revelations that you have in the process of learning a modular synthesizer, this is what helps you massively understand

the deeper layers of synthesis in the digital world also, which I find quite fascinating. So does not mean anyone needs to get into modular synthesis. And if you want, you can also use this like free tool. Oh, don't know. Yeah, VCV rec, yeah. Which is great for learning modular synthesis or you learn Max for Life programming, which is basically also form of modular synthesis, of course.

Brian Funk (54:41.89)

Vcv, right? Vcv.

Philip Röder (54:54.522)

So you don't need to spend that much money to get the benefit of those first principles of learning. But I think there's something to be said about understanding these first principles. And same holds true for mixing and mastering. If you understand the first principles behind, let's say, psychoacoustics and why certain things in our ear have developed thanks to evolution in a certain way that we hear these frequencies louder than other frequencies. And that has to do with the human speech and understanding each other.

If you understand those like underlying first principles, it makes you a better mixing and mastering engineer.

Brian Funk (55:30.902)

Right, right. Yeah, I could see how the synth, modular synth would do that because you get an oscillation, it just goes, ooh. Then you're like, all right, how do I change the pitch? How do I change the tone? How do I make it fade in and fade out and stop playing? Yeah, but it makes a lot of sense. Like mixing too, I think we get so sold on all the tools.

EQ compressor and you know you need to do this you need phasing you got to worry about this and we forget like well first we got to get the volume right just like really basic thing like your volume tool your volume knob is the most important thing really but I know myself like

in watching my journey. I'm reaching for all these plugins or devices that I don't even know what I'm doing with them yet, but I just understand that they go in here somewhere and you're just kind of feeling around in the dark.

It's an important thing because I think those basic principles really get you like 90% of the way in a lot of this stuff. And the rest is almost like coloration and detail and small things.

Philip Röder (56:52.19)

Yeah, I'm a big fan of the...

Brian Funk (56:53.426)

I know a lot of my, sorry to interrupt, I just finished this thought, but a lot of my earlier mixes would have been better if all I did was use the volume fader and nothing else. It would have been a lot better.

Philip Röder (57:02.338)

Yeah.

Philip Röder (57:06.134)

Totally, absolutely. We tend to overcook things in the beginning. And what I was about to say is that I'm a big fan of the 80-20 rule, this Pareto principle that 20% of the input dictate 80% of the outcome and the other way around. Or with time, like 20% of the time you spend on a mix will...

will kind of give you 80% of the results and then you spend 80% of the time doing the last 20% of tweaks. And if you have this pattern in the back of your head and it doesn't really matter if it's 595 or 8020 or 7030, the exact number doesn't really matter but the principle that everything is distributed as a power curve, I think is the expression for that.

This is really helpful to think about that concept in so many contexts and trying to figure out, okay, what's for example the 80-20 that I need to know about modular synthesis to get all these benefits or what is the 80-20 of mixing to get my song in good shape before giving it to mastering. And like you said, great leveling and panning is already a big chunk of the final result. You don't need to do any super crazy moves.

To be honest with you, the most mixes that I get are actually overcooked and I have to talk to the artists to dial things back a bit. And sometimes I get super good sounding mixes by very inexperienced artists who basically didn't give themselves permission to do crazy things in the mix. And that is great. And I tell them like, wow, that's impressive that you... Man, they tell me, yeah, just focused on the sound design and a little bit of leveling. And I'm like, exactly. That's what you're supposed to do.

Brian Funk (58:49.294)

Hmm. Well, probably even before we talk about mixing, it's arrangement, composition. It's picking sounds that complement each other and work together instead of fight with each other. And if you get that right, you know, like that's why like orchestras...

are composed of the different sections that they have, or like a rock band is bass, guitar, drums, maybe a keyboard and vocals. Like those instruments all kind of fit together already. So if you get that right, you don't have to do quite as much, then it's a much simpler job.

Philip Röder (59:30.902)

Yeah, absolutely.

Brian Funk (59:32.974)

And that's really, that's even more of a basic building block than any of your tools, any of your plugins.

Brian Funk (59:43.314)

So you were mentioning some of your, I guess, students or clients, like you've got a little bit of a community going, right? Do you wanna tell us a little bit about that? Sounds interesting.

Philip Röder (59:56.69)

Yeah, so at some point I figured out that I don't want to do just mixing and mastering for the rest of my life. Like I told you, it's a pretty lonely process in the studio and yes, I thought for a certain while that I want to do this for an extended period of time, but then I'm the kind of person that wants to constantly grow and learn new things and I'm also relatively social even if I'm slightly more on the introverted side.

And with mixing and mastering, you're just sitting in the studio all day, listening to music, working on it, and then delivering a product. And that didn't feel as satisfying to me as then actually talking to the client when I figured out that they were in the interaction, learning something that literally changes the way they will make music from that point on.

I noticed that this, that I was doing as like an add-on service for free with every project, and this felt so much more satisfying than delivering the end product. And that told me something about myself, about something that needs to be expressed in a certain way. And so I started experimenting, first of all, with doing a couple of one-on-one coaching sessions with the existing clients that I already had from the mixing and mastering side of things.

just to get some practice. I also, for a certain while, did some music lessons at Catalyst Institute, which is like a music production school, similar to Berkeley where you work right around the corner here in Berlin. And that also helped me kind of sharpening my teaching skills. It was just a lot of fun doing this and having this like live interaction with people. And suddenly I felt like this deep level of satisfaction of like...

Helping shape lives in a way sounds cheesy, but that's essentially what happens because they take much more from you than, you as a teacher, you know this, like they take so much more from you and your personality that will influence them for the rest of your lives in the best case, in a positive way. And so.

Philip Röder (01:01:52.162)

The more I thought about this, the more it became clear that I actually want to formalize this in a certain way and create something that's a bit bigger, because I also noticed that a couple of one-off lessons don't make that much of a difference. But the people who kept working with me for an extended period of time, let's say six months at a minimum, they literally had very, very different results compared to the rest. They broke through a certain mindset and limiting beliefs.

got rid of certain creative barriers and they suddenly unlocked their creative potential which was fantastic to see and some of them are working with me since I don't know 2018 or so which is like a long time now and yeah

Then I built a coaching program that is just going all in on that specific thing, like teaching people a certain methodology, helping them create a formalized creative process that they can rely on, where you know exactly if I throw so many ideas into the top of what we call the creative funnel, you can expect this amount of songs to come out at the other end. You can repeat that process reliably.

just have this more relaxed feeling of trusting the process what Seth Godin talks about. And yeah so right now I'm working with Jacob who's the other guy I mentioned for the 3D concerts and Dominik which is the second mastering engineer who works at my studio and both of them are also coaches in the program and

people work with us for six months to a year is typically the time that they get and they get true one-on-one sessions. So a creative sparing partner and also like a community of other artists who are in the program and some like group calls also with me and sometimes guests. And it's funny like the way I designed all of that was just to just thinking about

Philip Röder (01:03:47.31)

what would help the person on the other hand the most and I'm not sure if you're familiar with that like scene of coaching programs and music but it's actually a pretty scammy field I must say and I'm not going to mention names but there's so many also big youtubers who have these kinds of programs yeah this is like the salty part that you then have to edit out no but I'm like no I'm never speaking bad of anyone so that's just not my vibe but I need to say this like there's a lot of like scammy stuff out there

Brian Funk (01:04:03.918)

Come on, man.

Brian Funk (01:04:11.374)

I'm just kidding anyway.

Brian Funk (01:04:15.38)

Mm-hmm.

Philip Röder (01:04:15.702)

which I really didn't want to do. They offer you, for example, group coaching programs for thousands of euros or dollars, where you basically are in a Zoom call together with 20 other people, and you talk about some project someone made, which is helpful in a way, but it's definitely...

not helpful in the way where you pay several grand for that and actually in the sales process very often they also get kind of lied to so people tell them yeah you will get one-on-one attention and so on and it's just not happening in the desired way on the promised way and all these kind of shady programs this is where my kind of DIY punk rock hardcore attitude which is like where i originated from this comes back here and i wanted to deliver something with like true value just

promises something stays true to this and In the best-case scenario even delivers more than that. I'm just to also show them that there is a better way of doing this and yeah, that was just what is a huge change in overall what pick yourself became because now it's kind of an more like an Online

school, I wouldn't, I don't really want to call it a school, because that has also this connotation of traditional education. It's more like a transformation place for where you can go there, you get real support from people who actually give a damn about you. And connect with like-minded people who are more on the positive side of things, because there's also in so many discards and Reddit threads, there's so much negativity and so much pulling each other down, being jealous and we have this like more, we call it the go-giver.

mentality which is from a book called The Go Giver. I personally like a lot which has this philosophy of yeah you give without asking for something in return just because it's the right thing to do and automatically a lot of good things will happen. This is kind of the general vibe that happens in this community. So basically created the place for myself where I wanted to be surrounded by the like-minded people and yeah it's a lot of fun.

Brian Funk (01:06:24.75)

That's smart. I mean, to make that place kind of for yourself, if you're enjoying it, then it's likely others will as well. And also just that you recognize that too.

It's important, like you said, it's lonely. It's weird that music has gotten this way because for all of time, it was something you did with people, it brought you together. You needed to play with other musicians if you wanted to make anything more than a solo, you know, arrangement. So nowadays you can sit in your cave and, you know, do what you want to do in the dark all day and never see another soul. And you can kind of like...

You know, we need that even if you're introverted. We're social creatures, you need that. And it's cool that you recognize that and brought that. And it sounds like it's something that's been really beneficial to you as well, which probably allows you to bring more enthusiasm to the project as a whole, as it is.

Philip Röder (01:07:28.338)

Yeah, exactly. And it's, it's making me think, how can I make it even better? Instead of like, how can I squeeze the maximum profit out of it? Because I could easily say, yeah, okay, the one on one stuff was nice to begin with, to get a feel for it. Now let's just do group coaching. And so basically maximizing the revenue per coach that I hire and squeezing the hell out of stuff. That would be kind of the best business move on the kind of.

Brian Funk (01:07:51.381)

Yeah.

Philip Röder (01:07:57.07)

from a larger perspective looking at it. But it's exactly the way that I personally don't want to do business. I want to go all in and create just the product that people will recommend to everyone that they know.

That's the kind of thing that I want to create. And I know that this will also, of course, lead to a super profitable healthy business in the end. And of course, that's my responsibility running something like this. But it's just the right way to do it, in my opinion. And that's exactly what people also want. They don't want a group coaching program. They want something where they have a direct one-on-one interaction with someone who actually cares and gives them direct feedback on specifically the thing that they are doing right now.

And yeah, that has been getting people great results. So actually releasing music, actually being proud of that. That's also something that before they were always hesitant of putting stuff out and now they are proud to share it with the world. We also connect them, for example, with graphic designers in that specific field that specialize, for example, in techno artwork.

Because they know that this has this like check mark Okay what I put out really is something that can compete in the market with the stuff that is on bigger labels or Sounds like my idols. They also get free mastering from my studio, for example included in the coaching program as a benefit for them to or as an incentive for them to Finish and release as much as possible just to get them into this like rhythm of putting out stuff and getting that feedback cycle going What does the market even say to what I'm putting out?

And that's been great to see because people, also on a personal level, develop in a really nice way. They are just more relaxed in the end. People who used to be really stiff and holding on to things and super perfectionist, they start to loosen up a bit and it's almost like oh yeah.

Philip Röder (01:09:46.314)

Yeah, it works. I can trust this process. And that's great to see because that has been a game changer for myself as well. And I had to learn it the hard way over many years. I'm a 100% autodidact. I never studied music or engineering or whatever. And I always chose the hard way. I had some mentors on the way, but I wanted to create something that makes it a bit more easy for people. Doesn't have to be that hard.

Brian Funk (01:10:11.81)

Yeah, it's a funny thing that happens when you start getting a little more serious. You get more uptight about it. Um, but becoming relaxed about it is really helpful. It, it allows you to, again, have fun with it and trust in it a little more and also not see it as life and death as we can sometimes it's, um,

It's cool that you're able to do that for people and it's got to be more rewarding. It's a very, you know, again, like you mentioned, Seth Godin, but, um, it's a lot like that, you know, he's talking about that all the time, like if you were to expand it and try to squeeze as much money out of it as you could, that's very short sighted, you know, it might look good like this year and next year maybe, but the thing that you have, this sort of core value would, would kind of be lost.

And it sounds like that's the thing you're enjoying about it. And you would probably be pulling that right out from underneath you if you went at it a different way.

Philip Röder (01:11:16.282)

Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's a reason why I went 100% freelance at some point. The main reason was to create freedom for myself, to just do things on my own terms. And if I were now to be submissive to certain expectations or certain ways that other people are doing things, I would not be true to that reason why I originally set out to go into music.

Seth Godin talks about the minimum viable audience is what he calls it. So can you create something for the minimum viable audience? And what would that look like? And this is exactly what I did there. Yeah, of course, um, A lot of people will not join that program, but it's completely fine. Um, same thing with the youtube channel. I Don't care about having the largest youtube channel in the music production space at all and would much rather speak to the right kind of people but

Brian Funk (01:11:46.413)

Yeah.

Philip Röder (01:12:11.086)

kind of resonate with them on a really deep level and create a meaningful interaction also with the people who sign up to my email list, for example. I kind of filled out as much as possible because I want the depth of connection and not the kind of width or breadth of connection. That is something that.

my way of doing things and I take a lot of pride also out of once again in all aspects like doing things my way be it the my perspective on mastering is probably quite unique my perspective on creating this program is also something that I don't see anyone else currently doing and for the youtube channel I mean of course you have to do certain things to get some exposure on your videos like if you don't think about your title your thumbnail and the way you present stuff of course it's just

Brian Funk (01:12:55.382)

Right.

Philip Röder (01:12:56.968)

no one's going to care in the end. But in the video itself, like I put so much effort into how can I break this down in a way that really gives people as deep of a value as possible in the shortest or in concise way that I can put it.

And if I don't reach that goal, and it's just because of my own shortcomings, that I need to do it even more and even more and even more. But I'm not thinking about the next month, I'm thinking about the next 10 years that I will be doing this. And it's really rare that people operate on these types of time horizons, but that is something that I really commit to. I want to do this type of thing, this teaching and improving and trusting that kind of process for myself for the next 10 years. And it's exciting what comes out of that in the end.

Brian Funk (01:13:32.346)

Hmm.

Brian Funk (01:13:45.482)

Well, you can hear the enthusiasm as you talk about it. And it's. And you're really leaning into who you are, right? Like you're, you're doing it your way. You said, you know, in your manner of doing it, there's other formats you can follow, especially with YouTube and especially with like an online school. Um, but that's.

Philip Röder (01:13:48.118)

Yeah. Yeah, that is something that gives me joy.

Brian Funk (01:14:13.33)

I think that's like what we all have. Your superpower is that you're the only one who's you. You're the only Philip in the world that's you. You're gonna have something special and leaning into that is a great way to just kind of have that competitive advantage, right? Because there's gonna be certain, there's gonna be people that don't want what you have.

That's fine. We're already in a small enough niche where there's lots of people that we don't have as our audience anyway in music production. But for the people that it really clicks with, it's really gonna click. It's gonna be really important to them. And for you, that's gotta be very rewarding to see that.

I don't know, you probably get this, I get this a lot too with the teaching I do, is like, I always kind of feel like I'm the one getting the most out of it because like I'm learning the most because you got to prepare for it but that like lasting value of being like, wow, you know, like I can't believe like I can help.

Philip Röder (01:15:11.088)

Yeah

Brian Funk (01:15:23.882)

And then like this, I was going to ask you about this go-giver mindset, but you kind of explained it, I think. But that's, it's such a great way to think because it really does come back to you. You don't have to pull it back. You don't have to.

ask for something in return or, all right, I'll do this if, it just kind of naturally comes around. And it might not be from that person, you know, it might not be completely even, but it does attract like another kind of person too. I think when you look at the whole picture, you wind up ahead, ironically, the more you give.

Philip Röder (01:16:07.162)

There's a saying, a rising tide lifts all boats. I really believe in that. And it's quite funny.

Brian Funk (01:16:10.443)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Philip Röder (01:16:15.562)

I never think about competition, so to speak. So I literally don't care about other YouTube channels. I follow them because I find it interesting to see what happens there or what happens there. But I'm never like jealous of someone having more subscribers or having a huge growth. Like if they're putting out great stuff, then more power to them. And if not, then I can just not care about it. That's fine. But the go-giver mindset overall, this has to do for example, with offering people resources

Brian Funk (01:16:38.135)

Right.

Philip Röder (01:16:45.476)

or introducing people to one another. All these kinds of things that you can do on a really small scale that just helps someone out there. That's fantastic. So.

I sometimes even hop on a completely free Zoom call just with someone from my audience who seems to struggle with something very specifically. And if I happen to have a little bit of a time slot available and they reach me in the right moment, I might just say, hey, let's hop on a Zoom call. I try to help you for a moment and then that's completely fine. Or giving someone feedback and not kind of charging for like one feedback.

Of course right now this has grown to a size where if someone just writes me, hey can you give me feedback on that? There's a high chance that I just don't have the bandwidth for this. But this doesn't mean that I will never do this. I try to always find these like little moments of where I can give something to someone or answering comments on the YouTube videos. Of course the amount of comments now is insane and I could never have enough time in this phase of life at least to answer these all of these comments.

But even if it's like two months back, I still might see a comment pop up where I notice okay that person really cared about the video, has a specific question and when I'm in the tram on my way home from the studio I might just answer this to help that person no matter what because it's just the right thing to do.

And this mindset of being a go-giver also in the small things. And if you can also, of course, on a larger scale, I think that's, that's a very, very healthy perspective to live your life.

Brian Funk (01:18:21.254)

refreshing because so much in our culture and our world is like what can it do for me, how can it benefit me, and I got to make sure I'm getting my fair share.

everybody just adopted that mindset. We'd all be living in all kinds of abundance all the time, just because we're all giving to each other. We're all trying to help and share. It's so true about the rising tides raises all boats. Um, it's crazy to, it's not, I mean, I understand. I've, I've felt it too, where you feel competitive or you feel jealous of what other people are accomplishing. But it's a very.

poisonous way to think. It's so much more beneficial for everybody if you celebrate that one because it proves to you on one hand that it's possible, that it's not impossible. Like look, he did it, she did it, look where they are. It didn't happen by magic. It wasn't some fluke or something, some lightning bolt. Sometimes it is even, but still, if you...

enjoy that and celebrate it, that's, it's a win for you in a way. And if you're the kind of person that's there helping others, you never know. You might get that coming back around to you too. It might be, if one of your students, for instance, somebody you coach from the beginning stages say, suddenly becomes a huge success, you have a choice, right? You could be like, I taught that person everything they know. Or, you know, you can feel proud of that.

what's gonna be a happier, you know, night's rest for you when you lay your head down on the pillow at the end of the day for you to know that maybe you had something to do with that. That's great. Or you could be mad about it. Which seems silly. Yeah.

Philip Röder (01:20:18.966)

Yeah, it's all about the perspective. The funny thing is that it becomes habitual. This like go-giver mindset. Once you start infusing that into your life and the framing that you adopt for certain perspectives and the mental models that you use, it starts to creep into all aspects of life.

which I find fascinating. And it might start in the sense of music, but then you suddenly see it pop up in your relationship or in your, in how you talk to your neighbor or whatever it is or how you help someone on the street. It starts to creep in very positively in so many different facets of life. And I've just only gotten positives out of that. Not once did it kind of hurt me. In the worst case scenario, you just get intrinsic value from it.

Brian Funk (01:20:54.038)

Right.

Philip Röder (01:21:12.658)

and in pretty much every other aspect something comes back in whatever form.

Brian Funk (01:21:19.11)

Right. Yeah. And don't we really want everyone to be a little better off? Wouldn't just everything be better? I mean, if everyone had a little bit of a happier day, we'd be seeing less violence. We'd be seeing, you know, just more community and all these things that I think we all want, but sometimes we just don't get maybe because we don't have enough of that kind of thing.

Philip Röder (01:21:47.917)

Yeah, absolutely.

Brian Funk (01:21:49.13)

Does that, I don't know if you mentioned it, I apologize if you did, but where does that come from? The GoGiver, that's a good, catchy name too.

Philip Röder (01:21:58.222)

There's a super short but incredibly good book called The Go-Giver by Bob Berg, I think, and David Mann or so. And it's a short parable. So a story of someone in whatever office job who tries to get to the next level in his job and...

is very competitive, is a go-getter. And then he meets this kind of mentor figure by accident. And that mentor figure introduces him to the go-giver mindset and gives him some like little tasks to practice it on. And he starts to implement the go-giver mindset in different ways throughout this short story.

Brian Funk (01:22:26.926)

go get her, yeah.

Philip Röder (01:22:43.718)

and sees how his own mindset changes but also how the people that he's facing, how they change in their reaction to him. And it just illustrates how it literally happens in real life. So it's a very condensed version in that book.

But if you extrapolate those key lessons from that book onto other areas of life, and especially on the grand scheme of things, of living like that for an extended period of time, you can extrapolate of what's gonna happen in terms of positive impact in your life. So yeah, it was pretty influential, that book, to me.

Brian Funk (01:23:19.974)

It reminds me of that, I don't know what it is, the crabs in a bucket thing. If you heard of that, like where if one crab is like climbing out of the bucket, they'll pull them down. Right. But if they would just work together, they could use each other to climb out and they'd all get out.

Philip Röder (01:23:26.253)

Yeah, yeah.

Brian Funk (01:23:39.682)

but it's this like kind of pull each other in. And, you know, we have these like dog-eat-dog world, the go-getter, which I didn't realize was a play on that. That's cool. Where this idea of where you sort of have to like climb over everybody to get to the top. But probably if you're the one like boosting everyone up.

Eventually, one of those people is going to be like, hey, let me reach down and pull you up too. Let me help you in some way. Or it would just create an overall culture of, we help each other here. We support each other.

Philip Röder (01:24:19.33)

There are many meta levels to that and also related areas that have to do with this gogiver mindset. For example, what I'm thinking of is...

seeing what we do in the world of be it YouTube or running a business or making music seeing this as an infinite game versus a finite game. I'm not sure if you've heard that concept before but also for the listeners like a finite game is for example a game with certain rules where you can win or lose so that could be a football game or so. Or in a lot of in a lot of like business or short-term negotiations also people treat it like a finite game.

But in the end you're much better off if you treat everything that's meaningful to you as an infinite game. And the only goal of an infinite game is to keep playing and not to win. And I find this so beautiful to think about this. Like, are we treating music as a finite or as an infinite game? The finite game would be like, okay, I try to just get more streams than everybody else. I try to get the best out of this release and being always in this competitive mode. Or are you just...

playing to keep playing the game, putting out music, releasing it, growing as a person, growing as an artist, which I find a much more charming way. And in the end, over the time of 10 years, that other super dense and tense and competitive person might have already given up because they were so frustrated because they never reached that outcome, they never won the game. But you being the player who plays the infinite game, you're still on it and you have grown massively over the long haul.

I think that's just such a healthy perspective and it's really related to this go-giver mindset because obviously if you want to keep playing there's no better way than to just lift all the players up because otherwise you end up alone.

Brian Funk (01:26:10.314)

Yeah, that's a great metaphor because yeah, like a sporting event, you're trying to win. And we think about that a lot. So it could be an album release, like, okay, this is the one. And like, if it doesn't hit and you lose, that could totally drain you. But if you're just trying to keep going, you could be like a boxer, say, you know, and sometimes

You gotta like throw in the towel or otherwise you're not going to fight again. Right? Like you could maybe fight to the death and maybe you'll win or maybe you're not, but you might not be able to ever do it again. But sometimes just okay. Like let that one go, go to the next one. Keep staying the game. Keep playing. It makes it much more about developing, growing. And I think it just thinking that way.

If I say I'm going to release an album this month, I'm not going to totally put all my self-value in that. I can put all my hard work into it, but I'm not going to question myself and my own integrity and my own abilities. It's just a step on the journey now. It's just part of this long story that has many more chapters to go.

Philip Röder (01:27:29.978)

And it's great that I think that whole framing has helped me deal with my ambitious and competitive nature that has kind of baked into my personality a little bit. So I'm a very ambitious person, like I said in the beginning, I set the bar really high for myself and...

obviously have great goals and things that I want to achieve, but this framing of looking at it through the go-giver perspective, treating it as an infinite game, shifts us to this beautiful journey of personal growth, which allows me to feel like I'm working towards my ambition, but I'm not doing it from... I'm not running on dirty fuel, basically. That's the key difference. And yeah, I can just...

just say like everyone who listens to this might just think about at least one way where they can try this out in their life. Just try it out. It's also something that I use as a mental model. It's like seeing things as an experiment rather than a fixed thing. So whatever you want to incorporate as a new thing in your life or you're at least considering it, it doesn't have to be black and white or a decision. It just can be an experiment to see like how does that feel. And once again,

Philip Röder (01:28:44.236)

continue with that if you want to deepen it or not.

Brian Funk (01:28:47.278)

Hmm. Right. And then in a way, your maybe shortcomings or your room for growth is exciting now because it's something to strive for and, you know, travel towards rather than being the thing that caused me to lose and I failed. It, you know, it's exciting to have room to grow and potential. And if.

You were perfect at it and it was easy for you. It probably wouldn't matter as much anyway. So the fact that there's room to grow gives you reasons to keep playing. Keep going through the game. It's cool. Really nice way to think. And I, I see that in your work. Like I see this overall philosophy come through and, and your delivery and your videos and, and what you've got online with your community, it's pretty cool to see like philosophy in action.

Philip Röder (01:29:44.362)

Yeah, I should distill that even more and present it. Yeah, it's something that I really want to come through, which is great that I have this podcast as one way to verbalize it. Like we said originally, sometimes you have to surface these things to make sure like these are kind of the cornerstones. And that is something that I deeply care about and something that I actually want to highlight in everything that I do. And

Brian Funk (01:29:57.342)

Yeah, right.

Philip Röder (01:30:11.39)

I also like this idea of showing people that this is not for everyone. It's okay that so many people might not resonate with this, who probably come from a really fixed mindset and will never have the open-mindedness to say goodbye to this way of looking at things. That's perfectly fine. I'm just not the right resource for them.

The world is so huge, so many people who I can potentially reach where this has an impact that I just literally don't care about. Not appealing to others. That's perfectly fine.

Brian Funk (01:30:47.562)

Yeah. You know, even in my classroom when I teach, it's been a big help for me to know that I'm not going to reach everybody. You know, like that's your goal. You can become a teacher. You're going to, it's going to be like, you know, those movies you see where some teacher comes in and suddenly everyone's a poet and, you know, like reading the classics. It's, that just doesn't really happen, but

You kind of have to know like you're just not gonna click with, but you might, there might be some people where you really do hit and I'd much rather have that like, yeah, like really made a difference here than like a little bit for everybody, like a little, okay, yeah, it's kind of like, dude, but you know, I think that's where the real magic happens. So, you know.

you've got your way of doing things and there's certain people that it's just gonna be the thing they need. And that's probably gonna have a bigger impact than just a lot of people saying like, yeah, that's okay, all right.

Philip Röder (01:31:59.606)

Yeah.

Philip Röder (01:32:03.374)

That's the vanilla death zone.

Brian Funk (01:32:03.85)

So, yeah. So let's see, pickyourself.com, right? Is that generally the main place you like to send people?

Philip Röder (01:32:16.662)

Absolutely. So pickyourself.com is the main website. If someone is interested in the coaching program, just go pickyourself.com slash coaching. And yeah, if someone wants to just get some free guide that helps them finish more songs. So my goal for everyone is to have like the possibility to finish one great sounding song per month. This I think is a very beautiful goal. No matter how you release it in the end, you can package it as an EP or an album per year, whatever you want.

But I have a result that might help people there. It's called the Finisher Framework, three simple steps that they can use to get a little bit more organized in the workflow. And that is something that they get at pickyourself.com slash framework. Yeah, those are the best ways to find me. And I mean, YouTube, pick yourself, just look for it and see if the videos really resonate with you.

Brian Funk (01:33:04.542)

Yeah. I'll put it all in the show notes so people can just click. I have the Finisher framework. I downloaded it a couple months back and it's great. It's lots of great advice. And I like that goal of a song. It's actually kind of what I'm thinking for this year, myself actually, is try to do a song a month. It's manageable. It's not.

crazy, you know, but it's still a little bit of a challenge. It's enough to like keep you busy, keep you honest. And I think that it's kind of a nice place to be where you're challenging yourself, but it's not impossible. And if you do that for the month, for the year, I mean, you've got 12 songs and you could package that as an album. And even if you whittle it down to 10, you've got, you know, some, a good body of work. And I think if...

You know, anyone can produce that each year after year, you know, again, in the infinite game, if you're going to do this for say another, who knows, 50 years. I mean, that's a serious body of work.

Philip Röder (01:34:16.158)

And in the streaming world, everything is about the catalog, which is... I find it quite charming, so a lot of people see it negatively, because they think, yeah, people are just churning up music like crazy. But if you do this purposefully and you think about creating a body of work, like you say, and it is music that you really care about, that you deeply connect with, I think it's fantastic to have that catalog available for people and to then dig around later on.

Brian Funk (01:34:44.978)

Yeah. Yeah, why not? I don't know. Why not, you know? I love discovering artists and finding what they have. And like, there's certain artists out there where you just like can almost never get to the end of their work. And for some of them, that's I love that.

I'm always hearing a new Neil Young song. He's always releasing something new. And it's just like, it's great. It's to the point with certain artists that you love, it almost doesn't matter. You just love what they do. You love their way of seeing the world, their way of putting their work together. So even if it's not all their best, highest quality, biggest hits or whatever,

There's still, for like the people that are really into it, you know, I think it's cool anyway. I'm sure there's people that would argue, no you should curate it and it should be more streamlined and only the best and you know if you're doing a song a month though I think you can also...

Philip Röder (01:35:40.974)

Yeah, definitely.

Brian Funk (01:35:53.206)

you can still have some sort of vetting of your material. It's not like every day or every week where you just have to get something done. It's enough time to kind of, your best representation of the month.

Philip Röder (01:36:08.634)

Exactly. I mean, my whole philosophy is to do this 80-20 principle also with the songs, because 80% of your original ideas will probably not be that great, but 20% of them are much better than these other 80%. And so if you throw in enough ideas into this, like, beginning of the funnel, you can then look at those ideas and see like, okay, what are the 20%? What are the 80%? And then just focus on finishing those best 20%. That is like part of my overall workflow philosophy.

to speak. So just don't waste time on the ideas that probably don't end up anywhere anyway.

Brian Funk (01:36:44.918)

Yeah, I think one out of five is a bad ratio for your work. You finish one out of five things you start for music anyway.

Philip Röder (01:36:50.97)

Absolutely.

Philip Röder (01:36:54.803)

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Brian Funk (01:36:58.67)

Cool man, I know it's getting late for you, and I appreciate you spending time with me. You know, what is it, probably, is it about like 12 something there? Six hours difference for me, I think, in Germany.

Philip Röder (01:37:09.882)

Yeah man, it's like 20 minutes past midnight. Hahaha.

Brian Funk (01:37:14.39)

So you're in tomorrow. Everything's still okay in the future.

Philip Röder (01:37:17.338)

I am in tomorrow already. Yeah, it's fantastic over here.

Brian Funk (01:37:23.15)

Good, good. I know you've also been working all day long, but I really appreciate you taking the time. I appreciate the work you're doing. And now after speaking to you more than ever, I really appreciate the energy you're putting into the world and this positivity. I think it's something we all could use as much of it as we can get. And I think you're doing a great job getting that message out and reaching people with it. So thanks for sharing that here.

Philip Röder (01:37:48.75)

Thanks for having me. I really appreciate the kind words and kudos to you for keeping that podcast going for such a long time. It's really fantastic, outstanding work and I know how hard it is. So kudos to you.

Brian Funk (01:38:02.274)

Thanks. And thank you to the listener. We appreciate you hanging out with us. Have a great day.

podcastBrian Funkmusic production podcast, Philip roder