Musician Dren Mcdonald podcast transcription

Ken Hada
He’s such a sweet guy. Josh Freese, I, I was at Chuck and Barb’s th anniversary at Bob Wackermans house, and I hear this. Ken, Ken, Josh, you know. Yeah, I couldn’t believe he remembered me. Yeah, he was so kind and he remembered so much, know so successful. He must be really good with people.

Dren Mcdonald
Oh, for.

Ken Hada
Sure. Okay. And, yeah, and. And the time I saw him previous was when Brooks and Jason Freese were in a show at Knott’s Berry Farm.

Dren Mcdonald
Oh, fine.

Ken Hada
You remember that?

Dren Mcdonald
I didn’t know that his brother played it.

Ken Hada
Yeah, there was a I can remember the name of the band, but this was around the time of when Brooks was playing with Steve, I.

Dren Mcdonald
Oh, okay.

Ken Hada
Remember that with Danny Cooksey and I don’t.

Dren Mcdonald
I don’t even know if I knew Brooks played with Fi.

Ken Hada
Yeah, they had a little band called Bad for Good, so.

Dren Mcdonald
Oh, that’s right. That’s about that. I forgot about that. Yeah, I remember that.

Ken Hada
Now, remember Danny Cooksey and. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And so, you know, they that’s last time I saw Josh and at that time he was in some cover band. I can’t remember the name of the cover band, but he had like a one of those little tiny ponytails in the back of his head. It was like eighties back in .

Dren Mcdonald
Funny. Yeah. Yeah, funny.

Ken Hada
So I don’t really know him really well, but every time he sees me, he always makes a fuss. Oh, that’s great. You kind person.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, he is. He is. Yeah, you can tell. Just by the way, he celebrates other people on his social media or whatever, that like he’s pretty not a braggy guy, pretty humble guy, and just himself is really excited for other people to do well.

Ken Hada
And that’s cool.

Dren Mcdonald
To celebrate other people. And I think that’s a that’s a great for someone who’s so talented, that’s a really good feature to have.

Ken Hada
Yeah. Yeah. And the other time I saw him, as I said, when I was a kid, I saw that same graduate just in me to take lessons from. Roy Burns was a famous drummer.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, I remember that.

Ken Hada
Yeah. And then. And after I’d finished, maybe I was playing with you. I’m not sure. But then, you know, I would see Josh because he began to take lessons with Roy.

Dren Mcdonald
Oh, he took from. Right.

Aquarian Drumheads

Ken Hada
Yeah. So I’d see him over at Aquarian like in one of the orchestra offices, you know, the practice pad or drums.

Dren Mcdonald
Right.

Ken Hada
But yeah. So this podcast is just about things that we think about regarding art lately. Of course, the big thing on my mind’s been I have actually been out there a little bit. Yeah, but, but I want to get more to you. You know, first, like you and I played in the band together.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah.

Ken Hada
And then you begin to do other things and you always had a good eye on, you know, finding your own voice and doing something that wasn’t like this commercial cliché. Like, you seem to explore music more bravely than some others at that back in the eighties. Is that true or not?

Dren Mcdonald
Gosh, I don’t know. I mean, think about it. The eighties, I feel like I was just trying to finally figure out if I was a good musician or if I could even hang with people to play music. You know, I if I look back on it, I don’t know if I was thinking so much about about finding a voice as much as yeah, just trying to be competent enough to play with other people.

Dren Mcdonald
And so yeah, I mean, I was obsessed with practicing and, and, and other musicians almost to the point of being detrimental because I think there’s a point you can get to be like obsessive about other musicians, what they do and their little tricks and, and think about that rather than thinking it’s kind of like not seeing the force of the woods, you know, you lose sight of the fact that you’re all playing music and trying to connect with people on emotional level.

Dren Mcdonald
And and sometimes you just get lost in the technique or the gear or things like that. And I’m sure that I went through just a lot of that in those days. Just trying to yeah, just trying to be good enough to play with other people.

Ken Hada
I’ve always thought you’re just a fantastic musician. I mean, you’re let’s go back there a little bit. Like what was your setup gear wise when you were in that garage? Oh, God, I remember it was a brown amp for some reason.

First Real Amp

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, I had the that was my first damped it the first real amp I got was a Marshall Country Combo I think.

Ken Hada
Well I bet that was loud.

Dren Mcdonald
It was loud. I think it was a watt. But the funny thing is for for a short time Marshall was trying to compete with Fender like a this must have only been a couple of years.

Ken Hada
Okay.

Dren Mcdonald
And so they thought we’ll do a Brenham phase EP.

Ken Hada
Oh, cool.

Dren Mcdonald
And at the time really all I just wanted was a regular Marshall. But this came up and I think I used to buy gear through the recycler.

Ken Hada
Yep, we all did. So that was the internet back then?

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, that was like craigslist. But there was no photos or anything. You just had to. True. You just.

Ken Hada
Had to write about those.

Dren Mcdonald
Words. Yeah, it was just words. So you just had to kind of. You see the ad for where’s Marshall and. Oh, it’s within the price range or what.

Ken Hada
Yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
I don’t, it just says Marshall amp what’s like cool on there. And so I remember it was like I finally talked my parents into buying me and and so we go out to, I don’t know where the hell it was, somewhere where you never go. If you’re like you don’t ever go to like Tarzana or West Covina or someplace like that.

Dren Mcdonald
We never go there.

Ken Hada
You know, us Orange County people especially. Yeah, yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
It was somewhere like in placentas. I don’t know. Sanchez It was a some area. So we make our way out there like we had to use our Thomas brothers guy to get the.

Ken Hada
That’s the hell out. Those are map system. Yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
So by the time you get out there, there’s no there’s no turning around. It’s like I got my dad in the car. He’s got bucks in his pocket. It’s a marshall and I go and see this brown animal and what the fuck is this really? He said, What’s the Marshall? If I’m like, I’ve never seen a brown one before.

Dren Mcdonald
And then huge. It was only later that he learned it was like they were trying to compete with with Fender or whatnot. And so I had I was like the only guy I ever met with a Brown Marshall amp. And that’s what I had then was this Brown Marshall amp and we get dirty would do the Marshall thing, but it was terribly unreliable.

Dren Mcdonald
And I had that terrible old Plymouth theory that it would put it in the back. I remember that it was a stupid, heavy amp, stupid heavy car, and every time I drove that amp, it would rattle the hell out of it. And so that seems to become dislodged. Oh, yeah, it’s always I had to carry extra tubes because they were always just getting rattled so much and falling out.

Dren Mcdonald
And I would show up to rehearsal. Oh, my God. Of getting another to be out of the car.

Ken Hada
Oh, that’s. I love that.

Dren Mcdonald
So that was my arm back then. And, you know, I didn’t know any better. It was like I didn’t have anybody giving me gear advice. It’s not like now where you could just go to YouTube and get all this information.

Ken Hada
It’s amazing.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah.

Ken Hada
Yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
So I just figured that’s the way it is. This is just life with a good amplifier. I didn’t know it was a thing to prepare. Yeah.

Ken Hada
I love that. You never told me that back then. Yeah, well.

Dren Mcdonald
You know, I think it was a little bit embarrassing or I just like with is just life with an amp. I don’t know. I don’t know. I better, you know.

Ken Hada
I love that.

Dren Mcdonald
So yeah. So I had that and then my dad and I built a pedalboard. I don’t know if you remember the giant pedalboard that I had that we had built. Oh, yeah. And helped you. Yeah, yeah. Help me.

Ken Hada
What, you guys, how did you construct that?

Dren Mcdonald
Just like plywood. And then we got some vinyl to cover it. You know, my dad was really into refinishing furniture, like recycling furniture, and he would always reapply through the furniture house when he got old.

Ken Hada
Right. That’s killer that he’d like to do that you got you lucked out.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And he went one day, helped me with that. So we built that pedalboard and I had five or six pedals on it and Velcro, right, that sort of thing. I think that was my set of that in Les Paul, which I still have either.

Ken Hada
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, sweet. Does that thing sound better today than it did then? Because the wood, the resident the wood harden. Or is that just a myth about old wood?

Dren Mcdonald
I don’t I mean, I haven’t ever compared it to a current Les Paul. I have I have older Strats too, not like super collectible ones, but I will like I have a Fender Jazz bass from a Fender bass from the seventies.

Ken Hada
That’s nice.

Dren Mcdonald
It’s beautiful. Yeah, it’s beautiful sounding instrument. And that’s not even like the wonderful period of Fender. Like, this is possible. So it’s. But it’s still super heavy and just plays great. And I think you’d be hard pressed to find a fender, a brand new like American Fender. That sounds as good as that one does. Right? I think I don’t know if it’s the density or I think it has to do with maybe the quality of wood that was being used.

Ken Hada
That’s a good point.

Dren Mcdonald
You know, in the seventies and eighties and sixties and fifties for sure.

Ken Hada
Mean jackets, agriculture in a sense. Right? Mean. Yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
And then they started putting limitations on that kind of wood and then then was really, really, really expensive by the nineties I think. And those.

Ken Hada
Things, it changes laws about what kind of glue they’re allowed to use.

Dren Mcdonald
Glue.

Ken Hada
And then that happened, you know. Oh yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. And then some, some wood was just completely outlawed like. Yeah. For a while to get rosewood scarce.

Ken Hada
Yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah. So, so wood would come off and on the scarcity of exotic wood lists and so, so back then I think the wood was better quality like.

Ken Hada
Right.

Dren Mcdonald
Because it was you know, you didn’t have to price out a bunch of different types of species of wood. So I don’t know, I think that might have something to do with it, but I don’t know if the aging affects it. That much. It certainly affects the color like all the the bands on the Les Paul that used to be whiter like this cream yellow color at this point, you know.

Ken Hada
Just maybe oxidation or something.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right. But it’s a quality instrument. I mean. Yeah, still happy I have that.

Ken Hada
And so, you know, you, we did that thing and then you went on and you did, you did compilation records with like the residents and right. Do I remember you like Holdsworth?

Dren Mcdonald
Oh God, yeah. That was high school and. Yeah, and just just after I was yeah, I went to that whole kind of fusion. Mm hmm. Era, you know, Jeff Beck, wired ear. Holdsworth. Mm hmm. I’ll return to forever, that kind of stuff.

Ken Hada
Yeah. Yeah. So the whole fusion deal. Yeah. And then where did the. And then, then, then at at that time, were you listening to more eclectic music or was it that it lead to that? Like, when did you start getting into things that were less, you know, refined? And do you ever just talk about the skateboard or the photography?

Ken Hada
Like, Yeah, the shop gave always different types of art, you know, when you’re always into all types of art, or was it something that evolved?

Biggie Biggie

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, definitely. Definitely evolved in sort of this rabbit hole discovery process that you kind of go through. I remember I remember well when John and I were in that band, which was right after I got out of high school. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s funny, given John’s background, but that band kind of had this anti jazz fusion kind of vibe about it.

Dren Mcdonald
Like, we were like, We’re not going to be those guys who play a million notes and it’s a little bit more of a punk rock attitude. That’s cool. It was. But still, everything sounded like we had a stick player in the band, for fuck’s sake. I mean, it was still going to be it was still going to be notes and and a little bit on the prog side of rocks.

We’re not going to be those guys who play a million notes and it’s a little bit more of a punk rock attitude. That’s cool. It was. But still, everything sounded like we had a stick player in the band, for fuck’s sake.

Ken Hada
And it was yeah, I went to a few other shows. It was really amazing. Like, it was like another level of because I played with you, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear you making music like that. It became this other like a new fusion in a sense was I don’t know exactly how to explain it. It was, yeah.

Ken Hada
Well, a lot of.

Dren Mcdonald
It, I think, had to do with John because he was doing such an innovative kind of.

Ken Hada
The drumming.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah. And his set up, I mean, you know, everyone flipped out when they saw his drum kit. Remember when he had the Simmons and the times of the album and all that?

Ken Hada
Yeah. Still does that sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. That old man gets his arms.

Sometimes it starts with drums

Dren Mcdonald
But that was that was some crazy stuff. And I think that that may have influenced that band more than anything. You know, I mean, when, when I look back and think about it, you know, like the guy who was kind of leading it, this guy, Gene, he had some general ideas. But if I really think about it, I think John probably influenced that the attitude and the direction of that band more than anything, you know, it’s interesting.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah.

Ken Hada
Can a drummer so a drummer can do that. A drummer can really influence the style of a thing.

Dren Mcdonald
Totally like an Zeppelin. I mean.

Ken Hada
Yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
They, I was reading somewhere about, about the theory going into recording Zeppelin and Page was always adamant that the drums need to sound as big as Bonham is. Like, that’s, that’s the first thing we have to do with the first thing we have to get right. Everything else is by God. Yeah. Everything else is is completely sidelined. If, if we don’t get the drum sound right, we may as well give up.

I was reading somewhere about, about the theory going into recording Zeppelin and Page was always adamant that the drums need to sound as big as Bonham is. Like, that’s, that’s the first thing we have to do with the first thing we have to get right.

Dren Mcdonald
And so they just knew that. Yeah, they knew that because of this, he was such an influential part of that band. Like we’re going to get Bonzo sound. Wow. And that’s why they would go places like Headley Grange and record in that house with putting the mix up on the landing above them and get that big booming sound or that room.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, think about like when the levee breaks, they were putting that through like a big delay. Even the kick drum just to get like this thick, big sound. And yeah, yeah, I think John was kind of like that for that band. I mean, it kind of seemed like we were at the time the kids in the band, and we were just kind of brought on as we weren’t hired guns because we weren’t getting paid.

Dren Mcdonald
But it was just kind of like, Well, yeah, you guys can be the man too. But the thinking back on it, it seems like.

Ken Hada
You guys have a talent though.

Dren Mcdonald
I think John.

Ken Hada
Used to play these amazing guitar solos and and then you guys had all kinds of, like, things you do on stage.

Dren Mcdonald
Oh, we just wrote.

Ken Hada
The but.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah. Yeah, there was definitely some Zappa influence there for for sure. Yeah.

Ken Hada
I was not the kind of thing you’d see at these grimy little clubs in Huntington Beach, normally, punk rock or something, you know, it was very sophisticated and it was a great breath of fresh air.

Dren Mcdonald
I felt I think very few people realize that. I mean, it was it seemed to always just be doing some kind of music that no one is like. There’s a few people that are like, Oh, I did that. But at that time there was like this cross between this kind of new wave band, like kind of there was a missing persons element to it.

Ken Hada
Yes.

Dren Mcdonald
And then there were first Zappa influence.

Ken Hada
I can see that. Yeah. And your tempos were pretty heart racing and the and it wasn’t just intricacy for intricacy sake, it felt if I felt that, that stuff felt good. Yeah, that stuff recorded anywhere.

Dren Mcdonald
I know we recorded one or two pieces. I have no idea where those recordings would be though. I think I probably have a cassette tape someplace. Wow.

Ken Hada
Killer, baby, killer to hear that.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, I know. We did go into the studio a few times.

Ken Hada
Maybe someday that will emerge on the on YouTube.

Dren Mcdonald
Hey, could.

Ken Hada
You know.

Dren Mcdonald
I remember, you know, John sounded great on that stuff. And there’s some stuff that maybe well, I don’t know, it probably sounds really dated. I was using a lot of whammy bar in those days and probably sounds.

Ken Hada
Really just what it is, isn’t it?

Dren Mcdonald
Wow. Yeah.

Ken Hada
So I never knew this, but. So do you have a you rough on yourself when you listen to your music.

Dren Mcdonald
Better now.

Dren Mcdonald
Although if I listen to something I did five or six years ago, like how did I let that go? But in a way that’s good because it’s showing you.

Ken Hada
Keeping a certain level of efficiency by doing it that way.

Dren Mcdonald
Or I think it’s.

Ken Hada
Your turn to progress. Is that what it is?

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, I think that’s what it is. I think it’s the idea of seeing that you’re evolving, that you’re making progress, that your ears are improving, that for me, a lot of it is just at least now when I look back on things, it’s not so much compositionally, usually the compositions or performance I’m usually okay with, although there are now some real niggly performance things that I look back on and think I would have improved that.

Dren Mcdonald
But it’s more of the production side and mic side is that I look at now and think about because I, I feel at this point that’s where I’m really focusing a lot of my area of improve to improve, you know, like really mixing is pretty fascinating to me and.

Using the internet to learn audio engineering

Ken Hada
It’s a fucking dark art.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah. Yeah.

Ken Hada
I mean, even with all the information we’re talking about on the web and it’s still not a thing I’ve really seen clearly represented do this. Oh yeah. You know, like it’s it’s you can go with volume up and down, but there’s way more to it than that.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean if you go and there’s that one mix engineer Dave he just the into the lair.

Ken Hada
Oh yeah. He’s, I love that guy. You know the guy. Oh I love fucking.

Dren Mcdonald
His last name.

Ken Hada
Yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
You can go and watch all his stuff and still not know what the hell to do. No, no. I mean he’ll go, he’ll, he’ll maybe instantiate a couple of plug ins and there’s so incredibly subtle.

Ken Hada
Right. It’s on. It’s all I know. It’s a world of different songs off your all.

Dren Mcdonald
Wait, what? Yeah exactly. Pensado. That’s his name.

Ken Hada
Auto. Yeah. I love that guy.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, he’s he’s really fun to watch but I can see people just watching a lot of those and talking about it and then still not knowing the first thing to do. If you get a mix, put it in front of you and trying to get it to sound right. There’s no substitute for the the hours. Right, that people talk about, you know.

Ken Hada
Yes.

Dren Mcdonald
And then if you’re in this kind of business or this kind of career path that I’ve gone on, it’s like, well, I put in easily the hours on just playing an instrument, but now it’s like the hours extra I got to put on composing and then the hours to producing and mixing. It’s like it’s never ending.

Ken Hada
Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the I’m not, I’m not an expert mixer, but I’ve just always had to do it because nobody would want to write music. And, and the thing I learned recently that really helped me was to the one of our biggest, I think, obstacles is the gooey, you know, because you look at that shooter and you’re on your, you know, some delay unit or whatever and you’re maybe playing with saturation.

Ken Hada
Well, I have it on a one that does go to a nine. And then what I heard from maybe was the lyric I, you know, like don’t even look. Yeah, just like grab the mouse and just yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
You know.

Ken Hada
And does it sound different, you know, because, boy, you can really look at stuff and like, I’m going to go on, I’m going to low pass everything, you know? Yeah, sometimes that’s a good thing. But how about every time you look past you listen?

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, right, right, right. You know.

Ken Hada
And all that and.

Dren Mcdonald
Right. Yeah. I mean, when I was first starting to do any kind of mixing at all, I didn’t I mean, this is someone, you know, I started on analog boards and working that way, but then I kind of didn’t do it for a long time, didn’t mix anything on analog or anything anywhere. I would have other people do it and then got back into it on computer.

Dren Mcdonald
And for the for the longest time, if I didn’t have like a equalizer that showed me the current sound wave as it was playing and then analyzer. Yeah, yeah. Like the channel. Q And logic will do that. It will show you what, what your track looks like as you’re adjusting your, your, your curves. If I didn’t have that to reference visually, I would have a hard time, you know, in the mix.

Dren Mcdonald
Now I’m relying on my ears more and I think that’s where you turn the corner.

Ken Hada
Yeah, right. When you get it lead, you straight to the analyzer.

Dren Mcdonald
Sure. It’s easy to get get caught up in that because. Because you’ll, you know, maybe you hear different side or say, you know, you’ve got too much energy at, you know, to to k, you know, your mix is going to suffer and things like that get stuck in your head. But then maybe you realize, oh, all the energy from this guitar part is it to K if I take that down right with this the energy of the whole song.

Dren Mcdonald
So yeah, it’s just a maturity that I think you develop after after doing it a lot and you just have to be confident with it. That’s the hardest part. Getting confident that’s true with your getting confident with your decisions and just going, yeah, I’m good with that decision.

Ken Hada
My, my, my strategies. I just make a really lousy shit and slowly it just becomes less lousy.

Dren Mcdonald
The polishing the turd.

Ken Hada
Yeah, but I’m not afraid to just fuck it up and it’s going to just.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, that’s good. That’s a good. I mean, in a way, I think if you can I think that’s a philosophy to help you, to help you in all things creative. But if it makes you can remember that, okay, I’m just going to save a copy of this mix this session.

Ken Hada
I do it all the time.

Dren Mcdonald
And now I’m just going to fuck.

Ken Hada
With it. Oh yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
And then that gets you to a different place.

Ken Hada
Yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
Of being as opposed to, okay, I’ve got to make this perfect and I’ve got to deliver it to it. Maybe you’re delivering to a client or whatever like that. For some reason you’re going to be a lot more tense if you just do. Well, fuck it. I’ll throw everything at the wall and see what happens. Yeah, mix. And then.

Dren Mcdonald
And then that might get you to a new place, you know, it’s just that creative process play you have to allow yourself, right?

Ken Hada
Yeah. Do you make stuff? You make stuff and then do you listen to it to the next day and everything? Oh, my God. What the fuck was I thinking?

Dren Mcdonald
Oh, yeah, all the time. I have a rule that if I’m doing any kind of work for a for a client and I do a mix at night, I do not send that out at night. Right.

Ken Hada
You don’t immediately. Perfect.

Dren Mcdonald
And that never happens.

Ken Hada
So that’s the thing we do in photography, you know, like there’s a thing about being distant from the thing, right? Being absent from it. You know, you get some fresh eyes or a mixing with fresh ears. Absolutely. A composition, too, right?

Dren Mcdonald
Totally. Totally.

Ken Hada
Because you’re on it. You can you can easily become too close to a thing.

Dren Mcdonald
Oh, yeah. You kind of eventually build that into the process, which is kind of that maturity that goes along with it. You know, I’ll like this week I was doing some music for for a client and I wrote a couple of the pieces and and then just finished for the day. I knew I wasn’t going to get any further.

Dren Mcdonald
At a certain point, you kind of part of that mature, you realize when you’re useless and so you think, okay, well maybe I will be useful again in hours, but for now I’m just gonna stop. And then the next morning, then I’ll go and listen to it with fresh ears. And as often it’s often the case. So I was like, What the hell was I thinking?

Dren Mcdonald
Or Where is the focus in this song? And and then then I make a few mix changes like, Oh, okay, that’s the thing that needs to be forward. This thing that I had forward needs to be back here. Your brain has a way of like spilling this all out, and you just have to let it spill out.

Ken Hada
Yes.

Dren Mcdonald
And then you put on another hat to come back and kind of refocus it and edit it.

Ken Hada
That’s killer.

Rick Rubin

Dren Mcdonald
There’s a I don’t know if you’ve read that Rick. Rick Rubin book is out now.

Ken Hada
Oh, no.

Dren Mcdonald
I like creative act. Yeah. Yeah, it’s he does a great job of kind of breaking down the creative process, which I totally resonate with. I read that and I’m like, Yeah, that’s what it’s like. That’s a, you know, it’s like almost yelling out loud. I guess it’s like he puts names to things and and like the first one he calls, you know, just collecting seeds where you’re just kind of spitting anything out and you’re just like, Anything is an idea.

Dren Mcdonald
And it could be valid, it might not be valid, but you just get that.

Ken Hada
Kind of word vomit the thing.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, totally. And it might he might plant it and something might come out of it or, you know, it might not.

Ken Hada
Throw it away.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah. You just like there’s this whole process and that and then the next process is editing those, those ideas and kind of that’s where the hard work is. And that’s where I think a lot of people get stuck. It’s like you get all these ideas out and it’s super fun to do that, but then you have to put on this, this hat of finding what works and those things.

Ken Hada
Yes.

Dren Mcdonald
And that’s harder. And that’s where your craft really comes into play. And it’s really hard to get started in that phase, I find. But if you put a day or so into it, like I had this one piece of this song that I’m working on, I think writing, writing a song is harder than just writing a piece of instrumental music for a game or something like actually writing a song.

Ken Hada
Of your own. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

Dren Mcdonald
And so I had all the seeds for that together and I had this whole thing actually John is helped me with. He did a, I asked him to just do a bunch of drum beats for me and then I kind of edited them down and I got this whole it took me like a week to edit down all these little seeds of ideas that they had into something cohesive.

Dren Mcdonald
But like I was saying, your brain spits this stuff out and it kind of knows, like you’ll start to see these patterns emerge as you’re looking at what you spit out, you know, like, Oh, this makes sense. If I put it over here, if I turn this around and like, it’s kind of like starting to see the matrix to use a hackneyed Yeah, yeah, metaphor.

Dren Mcdonald
But yeah, it starts to be like, Oh yeah, I can, I can see what my brain was doing there, where I was like, Your brain makes these connections. You’re just not consciously aware of them. And I think you just got to get it out right. And then you start to see where the connections line up. If you spend some time in that editing kind of crafting process and on.

Ken Hada
That particular piece you’re talking about, where are you at with it now? Like how far days wise are you into it, you know, chronologically.

Dren Mcdonald
Oh, you mean how much time I spent on it? Yeah, that’s a good question. I’m not exactly sure because I don’t I don’t think I really counted the how long I spent. I’m just kind of collecting the different parts. I can tell you just the process though. So I like one of the speaker. Bonham One of the prompts that he just gave to John was like, Do a bottom beat as if he was Brazilian.

Dren Mcdonald
So I want a Brazilian, Brazilian influence, bottom kind of feel and the bottom two I used what other is up to me is was poor time up that coda album it’s got a very you know that thump thump at home tap up.

Ken Hada
It’s very Brazilian yeah drumming kind of yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, yeah. It’s kind of got that feel nice. And there’s an artist I’ve been listening to named Renata Rosa, who’s not very well known here, but she’s Brazilian and she plays a different kind of this Brazilian folk music is a little bit more from Spain than than in Brazil. And anyway, I’m trying to get her to sing on the song.

Dren Mcdonald
And so that was the impetus was like, okay, give me this Brazilian thing. And so I took that. I cut up some little pieces of his thing, and then I came up with this. I have this idea to make it sort of a Zeppelin esque Brazilian piece with acoustic guitar sort of concept. So it’s all that because I love that kind of acoustic zeppelin that not too many people think about.

Dren Mcdonald
I mean, they think about Stairway to Heaven, but they think about, you know, that’s on Friends or Led Zeppelin three or some of the stuff from the acoustic stuff from physical graffiti, things like that.

Ken Hada
Oh, that’s brilliant. Yeah, yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, yeah. Great, great stuff. I love that kind of grooving with acoustic guitars, kind of. Yeah, I think that’s just great. So I had this and Renate, his music, there’s one piece on her in contention is I think is the name of the album. It’s a blue cover that’s got a Zeppelin feel. Really. What the hell’s going on here?

Dren Mcdonald
There’s there’s this kind of symbiotic something. There’s something happening here. So. So I had this idea to try and do something like that, so it’s been impossible to get a hold of her. I’ve tried to a booking agent. I’ve tried her through Instagram. I had a friend of mine translate it into Portuguese. I’m still trying to get a hold of her.

Dren Mcdonald
So now I’ve got, like a message in to the recording studio. I know she worked out last week. Look, I don’t get a hold of her, right? So I’m trying to get a hold of. But anyway, so I’ve put this this at this point, the song is basically complete. I’ve got lyrics, I’ve got melody, I’ve got the whole arrangement and everything.

Dren Mcdonald
And this will be part of the whole Polyhedron project that I’ve been doing, which is just a collab. The whole idea is to do collaborative writing with other musicians and bring other musicians collaboration process, because I have it all written, but I could do something if I get a hold of her and might have something that turns the whole thing upside down.

Dren Mcdonald
And I may completely change that.

Ken Hada
Or sure, of course is all open. Yeah. The art should speak to it.

Dren Mcdonald
Right, right, right. Yeah. But with that particular project, depending on who I’m going to collaborate with, for the most part, I try to give them as complete a thing as possible to contribute to, because I don’t know how much time they want to invest in it. Right. If I can just say here, you could just sing this for two or hours and it will be done.

Dren Mcdonald
Or if you want to do more, you can write. When I gave that to Nels Cline for the last album, like he did a ton of shit.

Ken Hada
Give me a.

Dren Mcdonald
Bunch of stuff. And so I had my version of that piece and then he gave me so much stuff. I just did a whole remix version to include all of his.

Ken Hada
That’s awesome.

Dren Mcdonald
Is his work on it because he just did a lot of really great things.

Ken Hada
And you don’t have any control over how that’s recorded, correct? Right. Right. Mm hmm.

Dren Mcdonald
I he’s collaborating with his wife. She was in that band that’s escaping me. The two person band that was big in the nineties. Two women from Japan. I like chicken. You got to love your chicken. Cheap tomato. Yeah, cheap amount of rice.

Ken Hada
Cool thing about podcast. If you don’t remember thing, you just text me later on.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, right. Yeah. So hit the links. His wife, she helped him record it and I think she edited it down. So in a way, she was she was a collaborator, though. He didn’t ask me to add her name to it. But so yeah, I don’t have in control of how, how that recorded, you know, but that’s okay. That’s.

Ken Hada
That’s fine to bounce back to our beginnings, you know, we didn’t have to be engineers when we were kids. We envisioned a life of just being a musician. That’s right. Having to fiddle with knobs now like I have some friends are like some of the top studio drummers in the world and they all are basically making it out of their garages.

Dren Mcdonald
They’re just recording remotely. Yeah, yeah.

Ken Hada
You know, and this is stuff that goes like to Disney and I mean, big stuff. Yeah, sure. So what is it like to have to do that to work? Because you talk about wearing hats before.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, yeah.

Ken Hada
And it took me a long time only for if I ever got used to being able to hit record and then go play and play as if I’m a musician just playing. Yeah. So my brain, I’m thinking about, oh, is it peaking out? Is it.

Dren Mcdonald
Sure.

Ken Hada
You know, did the hard drive stutter?

Dren Mcdonald
Right.

Ken Hada
Does that ever affect you at all or did you learn pretty quickly?

Dren Mcdonald
I mean, it’s a it’s a double edged sword because a lot of times I wish that I had like I when my daughter was younger, I used to just get her to hit record for me and lost that work.

Ken Hada
Or did I lost her?

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah. My son could do it, but he’s too busy, like he’s doing his own thing. So. So, yeah, a lot of times I wish I had somebody just hit record for me and. Or like.

Ken Hada
You think you played differently or do you think not?

Dren Mcdonald
I, I think it’s it’s a it’s a time issue. I we get to where I want to be faster. If someone else is doing it, I can get there. But it just takes a little longer because I’m a little sidetracked. But, you know, you can just set your set your dog to just keep looping the part and just record every version that you do that.

Ken Hada
Takes the time. I love to take folders straight.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, right. Yeah. So you can do that and it’s possible. And that helps you just get in the zone a little bit, a little bit easier. So yeah, it would be nice to have someone else do it, but I see a double edged sword because I think had I been able to have this technology of a DA and a computer unlimited two tracks, I would have been doing it a long time ago.

Ken Hada
Yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
So like I would go back and I think about the records I did with Giant Ant Farm.

Ken Hada
Akai Akai MJG . Right. With Jimmy Farm, yeah. It was not that recording the Akai Unit.

Dren Mcdonald
Oh no. That Oh you don’t about the track.

Ken Hada
Yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
That was what we had at South Bay Sound in Gardena here. They had two of those but joining in from was a little bit later and then we recorded. Oh, we recorded. We recorded.

Ken Hada
It. Oh, Jennifer, I’m sorry. Yeah, I recorded drums on one of those things for you. Did you really? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
Was that the first cassette we did?

Ken Hada
Might have been. I have one of your cassettes in my shelf.

Dren Mcdonald
Oh, funny. Yeah, I know. We’re recorded with. We did some recording with a guy that did play drums with us for a while. Anthony or you know.

Ken Hada
Anthony I don’t know. But I think I played something after that because either he couldn’t come do it or he Oh.

Dren Mcdonald
Okay, you’re going.

Ken Hada
Between drums or something. I remember playing some song. Okay. Oh, kind of uptempo thing.

Dren Mcdonald
I had a better memory than me, but I remember when we recorded that stuff like so we did a couple of different cassettes and then we did a full length CD and then another EP after that. And I just remember being so frustrated that the production never turned out the way I wanted.

Ken Hada
Air vision.

Dren Mcdonald
And had I had access to and I have now, I would have been able to to do that. And I just wish that I had access to those part times, you know, because it was you have limited time in the studio. Yeah, we didn’t have any money. And so does that.

Ken Hada
Changes the product?

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, yeah, it really does. And you know, you’ve been in this band and we’ve all been playing the songs forever, so in theory it should be perfect, right? You should be able to just go in and get the right feel with the people that you’ve been playing this music with and that gets you part of the way there.

Dren Mcdonald
But then I had all these other ideas about what to do with for production. I think I’ve always had that producer since that, you know, that esthetic that I wanted to get someplace different with it. And to me that’s like, well, the songs are kind of represented in a very bare bones, skeletal kind of way that they’re not fleshed out the way I always imagined them, you know?

Dren Mcdonald
So, yeah, well, while it is a bit of a burden, I think it’s better to have those chops, to be able to learn how to do that stuff, to see your vision through, if you’re that kind of person. Yeah, everyone is that kind of person.

Ken Hada
True. So for you as a you’re happy that it happened? Yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, yeah. I mean, just going down that rabbit hole of virtual instruments and then and then adding that on top of, you know, in the box processing now and where it’s at now compared to even when I started really getting serious about it, you know, going back or more years to the in the box kind of recording, it’s just come so far.

Dren Mcdonald
I mean, you know, compare early waves, plug ins to what we have now. Yeah, it’s it’s like it’s quite a leap. Yeah.

Ken Hada
The the evidence video on the whole time that it wasn’t recording was just oh yeah. So like it was getting all hot. Oh yeah it, I remember I got to know Bunny Burnout out pretty well. Oh, right. You and I both have kids are the same age, so we hung out a lot for quite a few years. And I remember he was selling all this rack gear back in something and I thought, why she sound always sugar.

Ken Hada
He knew.

Dren Mcdonald
Oh, computers were.

Ken Hada
Yeah. Like it was starting to sound good in the box, you know.

Dren Mcdonald
And right.

Ken Hada
And I was like, why really? Better than Lexicon, better than, you know? But he was right. I mean, it, it got to a point where it was all usable. The stuff that’s in the box.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, yeah, right, right.

Ken Hada
Now. What a revolution. You look at a studio, I’ve taken two classes at this college and what a studio looks like. I mean, they kind of have one here that kind of looks like a studio, but nothing. But I remember it being in when we were kids.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, well, it was such an investment in not only the board, but then all the upward gear that you would have to have to actually properly do a mix.

Ken Hada
In like your tubes and your amp, the tape machine. You basically have to be a mechanic to.

Dren Mcdonald
Oh, that shit breaks down all the time.

Ken Hada
You’re in it all the time and cleaning it all the time.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, yeah. Even just the amount of guitars that I have now, every time I pick one up, there’s something wrong with it. I’m like, It was just hanging on the wall. How did it get screwed up? Why isn’t making a sound now? I don’t even understand the truth.

Ken Hada
That’s a good one.

Dren Mcdonald
But yeah, you have a broad holy cow friend of mine in Nashville, has a really nice studio and he has this beautiful Neve and he’s basically at the level of like an electrical electrical engineer. He’s a fantastic audio engineer, but he could pull out one of those channels and or on it and fix it and put it back like he’s one of these superhuman people that has this ability to do this.

Dren Mcdonald
And he had this Neve that he just held on to forever because it sounded great. But a certain point, he’s like, it’s taken too much time. I just yeah so he upgraded like to a new API or something he just couldn’t deal with it.

Ken Hada
You certainly can’t. If it’s a money thing you certainly can’t compete with the on analog with with the the digital world.

Dren Mcdonald
Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Ken Hada
I mean it’s delivering shit.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah. I mean, at home I still I have a lot of really great software, but you know, everything is run through a, um, a channel strip that I have at home. I don’t record that. I don’t need that much.

Ken Hada
Your knowledge inputs.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah. So. So, you know, I have this one single channel, universal L.A. is the L.A. two compressor plus the preamp. Yeah, everything sounds good through it, basically. But I have another summit preamp that I use and a couple other compressors, so I have some options, but I don’t need that much. But the point being is I don’t necessarily rely on the sound going in to be manipulated on its way in by software.

Dren Mcdonald
I choose to use the hardware going in. Yeah, after that then I’ll play with it.

Ken Hada
Yeah. And in the photography world it’s the same you if you photograph a certain things, they put an esthetic on there that you’re happy with some way less work on the back end. Mm hmm. Yeah. Because in a sense, digital and it’s the same in audio digital so wide open that it’s overwhelming, you know, what do I do with the do I make it more, um, do I make it neve do I make it?

Ken Hada
You know, there’s so many things you can do with it, right? Sometimes it’s easier to make decisions on the front end.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s. That’s kind of what I’ve been doing a lot lately is just because I think I think that’s maybe another sign of maturity when you’re early on and you’re like, I don’t know how this is going to go. Like, maybe I want this sound, maybe I want that sound. So I’ll just record very neutrally and then I’ll play with it later and then it get to a certain point.

Dren Mcdonald
You’re like, I don’t want to play with it later. I just want to get it in sounding good. Yeah, yeah.

Ken Hada
Yeah, yeah. Time’s important.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pterous

Ken Hada
Yeah. So. So tell me about this work that you did that I was so I mean, I had the thing on my I was listening to your music, this guitar orchestra that you were doing. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
Thanks for listening to it.

Ken Hada
Yeah, it’s phenomenal.

Dren Mcdonald
Thanks.

Ken Hada
How did it come about?

Dren Mcdonald
So, yeah, how did it come about? So let’s see. I had just finished the Polyhedron record that came out last year, so I had just finished that, and I think so. This came from when I was writing some music for Facebook. We would get these we get these prompts like, you know, the music department wants. They would give us like a list of things.

Dren Mcdonald
And one time we get the list came in and it was minimalist type of music. And I thought, Well, that’s odd. Why do you guys want minimalism? And this is for their sound collection, which they have a collection of, you know, tens of thousands of songs that people can use in their own videos and certainly like a Facebook or whatever.

Dren Mcdonald
So, so, so I was like, okay, I’ll try doing something kind of minimalistic. And I tried some things and, and it reminded me when I get started doing it, remind me of that. Steve Reich recorded different trains on that record. The first half of the record is with Kronos Quartet and the second half is with Pat Metheny. This piece called Electric Counterpoint, which is which was written for him for for playing guitar and it’s a bunch of layered guitars.

Dren Mcdonald
So I thought, well, I’ll try doing maybe some like that and see what comes out. So I kind of did these. If I look at them now, they’re just like really rough versions of what eventually became Taris. And so. So that was kind of the first like experiment. Like, Okay, I can come up with this kind of phrase based, minimalistic kind of piece and it’s not terrible.

Dren Mcdonald
Sounds like, okay, so there’s really there’s something there at that point. Yeah, it wasn’t terrible. So like, okay. And it was fun. Like it was like, this is a different way to compose that I’ve never done before because I would just kind of record different phrases on top of each other and then use use logic basically as a compositional tool to move phrases around in time, right?

Dren Mcdonald
In a way that I, my brain wouldn’t work in. Like, like it’s hard for me to do math, so I can’t break up a seven phrase with like a three phrase and figure out where they’re going to meet. Eventually, there’s several, but I can put it down on the logic and I can see where they’re going to line up and see if that sounds as you see it.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, you can see it. Yeah. See the clips in there. And then if it feels right, I’m like, okay, well that’s some place that wouldn’t have gotten to working on my own. That’s interesting, you know? So I like some of that process of doing it that way. And then, oh, on the last track that I mixed for that Polyhedron record, there was a track with Evil Beethoven was fantastic chick singer.

Dren Mcdonald
And the last thing I added it was this little guitar part and it didn’t sound right. And I was like, Oh, I’ll just layer it and then I’ll layer some more. Ended up putting like I think layers for this really short little like four bar guitar phrase. And finally I was like, That feels right.

Ken Hada
Yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
Wow. And I started layering it and using two guitars, using different like distances and then harmonizing it. And I was like, okay, now starting to feel like, like what I wanted there because it’s kind of a big it’s a, it’s a small song. It just has the same it has the same chord progression. So the whole thing, which just repeats six times, I think, and then the lyrics repeat three times.

Dren Mcdonald
But it’s a really long melody and she just sings it three times and there’s a part where she just does improv. But every time there’s a section of that of the chord progression that starts over again, I wanted it to feel like a totally different experience every time. So So at one point I have these background singers doing sort of like a Fela Kuti kind of African voice thing, very syncopated kind of voice parts.

Dren Mcdonald
And then there’s another part where all these, again, Fela Kuti kind of saxophone parts come in and then there’s always evil singing on top of it. And then they’re bringing some drum parts. And then at the very end, it’s like the saxes, the vocals. And then at a certain point within that, there’s guitar stuff happening. So every section was much different.

Dren Mcdonald
Anyway, long way of going about saying that. I came up with this layering thing.

Ken Hada
And you’re staring at .

Dren Mcdonald
And that’s on top of everything else in the song. But I love.

Ken Hada
It. You subbed the ?

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, yeah. I would create in Logic and do these tracks next.

Ken Hada
Year.

Dren Mcdonald
And love tracks. Yeah yeah. It’s a it’s a nice rather than just creating a new new auxiliary bass it’s a nice way to kind of organize them just because you can free your brain. Yeah, exactly. It does it. Yeah. Because otherwise you’re looking at all these tracks, but you can just hit the disclosure track on the disappeared, too.

Dren Mcdonald
I was like, Oh, this great. Yeah. So. So I had those two things in my mind and then I started thinking, Wow, I should really play with that. That layering thing.

Ken Hada
Do you liked it?

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, I like.

Ken Hada
Did you like about it?

Dren Mcdonald
I, I liked trying to create the feeling of, of a lot of players in a room, which is something that I got from that best Pat Metheny record. And if I just think about well, now I’ve listened to it a lot since I finished my record, but if I in the past I remember thinking that record, which I used to listen to a lot, and for some reason I remember it being bigger than it was.

Dren Mcdonald
If you listen to it now, you don’t hear more than maybe a dozen or.

Ken Hada
Interesting.

Dren Mcdonald
guitar tracks at any time, but I remember it being feeling bigger and a lot of that is because of Rick’s writing. He would do this. He would do some things in the writing with phasing and whatnot that would kind of make it feel a little bit bigger and so I like the idea of trying to create this, the sound of a lot of guitars doing the same part.

Dren Mcdonald
And in a physical space it created kind of a bigger physical sound. You know, if you would taken guitar players and put them in a room, you couldn’t, you probably you could get a sound. Yeah, but it would be different than what what I was doing. But I was trying to create what that sound might sound like in your head.

Ken Hada
The concept of that.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, because if you went into a room and did that with three guitar players, you’d just probably have a stereo, maybe a couple stereo pairs. You look.

Ken Hada
At them as one instrument as opposed to.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. And I knew I wanted to mix this in at most, so I wanted a little bit of that separation. So it would feel like as you turn your head around, oh, you’re going to get a mix, you get a little bit of a difference.

Ken Hada
Yeah, yeah. Okay. You couldn’t do that with just two mikes, right?

Dren Mcdonald
Exactly. Exactly, exactly. So so, you know, that’s not to say that I wouldn’t like to record but three guitar players in a room and have that stereo pair because that’s really good for certain things. There are certain parts of some of those arrangements that would sound great for that. Right. But then there’s a lot of parts where we want that separation, too.

Dren Mcdonald
So in an ideal world, I’d be able to do both, right, you know? So yeah, I actually had a break from I actually took a leave of absence from work and just to work on the record.

Ken Hada
That’s cool.

Dren Mcdonald
Because it was I.

Making art to honor someone

Ken Hada
Could you would you like okay and you just felt like something you wanted to do.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the other thing about this record too was it was all every piece was about someone who I’d known who had passed away recently. Okay. Yeah. So it really short amount of time, a lot of people I knew pretty well all passed away, like within three or four or five years. And there was one spell where three or four people kind of in less than a year died.

Dren Mcdonald
And you always that when something like that happens, you’re going to have this time to process it. Like at least I did. I thought, well, you know, there’ll be time to grieve and you’ll figure it out. You know what? What this feels like you needed to absorb it. And I don’t know what it is. It’s like this feeling of you have to honor their memory somehow.

Dren Mcdonald
And I don’t. I didn’t know what that meant. I still don’t know exactly what it means, but it just didn’t feel like I time to do that. Right, you know?

Ken Hada
Right.

Dren Mcdonald
So one of these people was my dad. One of these people was Hardy Fox who was in the residence and really was one of was one of the people that believed in me early on. Like, I think Chuck was one of those people to Matt Hardy was another person and.

Ken Hada
So like a mentor.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah. Yeah. I think if Hardy hadn’t been encouraging because he was the one that was in touch with about doing that Resonance Tribute record.

Ken Hada
The first.

Dren Mcdonald
One. Yeah. And then when I moved to the Bay Area, like he basically helped me like work for them, work for us, America. Like he believed in me. And I often think, where would I be if he hadn’t believed in me? Like if he had not embraced me and just kind of blew me off as some other dumb fan, you know?

Dren Mcdonald
Like he.

Ken Hada
Saw something.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was something there. So, you know, I got to honor that, you know, and that person and what that relationship meant. And, you know, I didn’t really know how to approach it. And it sounds really cheesy to think, Well, I’ll just write a song about it.

Ken Hada
I don’t.

Dren Mcdonald
Know. I mean, it seems like a lot of people may be just wild about a song about someone that died. And and I don’t know, it seems a little hackneyed, maybe just even though people are probably very, very earnest about it. I think there’s some something maudlin about that as well. At the same time.

Ken Hada
You know, I think that anything that would come out of you regarding somebody that meant that to you would be sweet and beautiful and.

Dren Mcdonald
Well, that was what I hoped for. But and I wanted to make something, something that honored, ah, this time we had together, you know, and whether that turned out to be something that was going to be good for releasing, I wasn’t really thinking about it was more like it was almost like the process of doing these repetitive phrases over and over again and recording them.

Dren Mcdonald
And every time I did, I was really thinking about this person for each one of theirs. I knew whose song I was doing when I when I wrote them. And so it was sort of this meditative.

Ken Hada
I was going to say, it’s almost like a chant.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, absolutely. Right. Yeah. It was like this kind of mantra, right? Musical mantra. And so when I would record them, I was thinking about this person a lot and thinking about, you know, memories that we had together and things like that. And that seemed to be like an important part of that process of dealing with memory of that person.

Dren Mcdonald
And for me, it was like what I had to do, you know, crazy. Yeah.

Ken Hada
I wonder if that’s what I heard. Yeah, maybe they never told me that, but there’s something about it. I actually called you up. Yeah, right, right. Call you up. And. And, you know, just kind of always think you’re busy or whatever, right?

Dren Mcdonald
Right.

Ken Hada
But something about that work, I was like, Man, this is really good.

Dren Mcdonald
Oh, thanks. I mean, it meant a lot to get your call and just to hear that it moved you because, you know, you put that kind of thing out there. Like I said, been thinking about what kind of response it would have. I just thought, well, this seems like a beautiful thing and I want to honor these people.

Dren Mcdonald
And I didn’t really everyone I mean, I’ve had surprising response to it. Everyone who’s who’s reached out and told me that, you know, they didn’t have to like, you know, they didn’t have to get a hold of me. But I’ve had some people, you know, get back to me and I’m like, yeah, that was really, you know, I really enjoyed this.

Dren Mcdonald
Even people like electronic music and things like that listen to it or whatever. Like this kind of has that quality, but it’s not sense.

Ken Hada
That it does. And you know, some people don’t know that. I remember I bounce around this podcast, you know, when I had a maybe as Waxman’s sampler in my house, I can’t remember it, but you came over and you did some stuff where you you had a little L.L. Cool J moment where you. Oh.

Dren Mcdonald
I remember.

Ken Hada
That. It was it was like something about the beat. It was at talking.

Dren Mcdonald
About I know.

Ken Hada
All about the beat of Jack Kerouac. Was it Kerouac or somebody? Yes.

Dren Mcdonald
Remember sampling some.

Ken Hada
Spoken language stuff and some James Brown and yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
I think we sampled that. Momma said, knock you out, beat some of that stuff.

Ken Hada
It was fun.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, but I love sampling. I mean, sampling is wonderful. And even though.

Ken Hada
You play that acoustically, I mean, you do you’re not prejudiced against, you know, music is music.

Dren Mcdonald
Oh, yeah, yeah. For sure. For sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love samplers and things you can do with them. So and you know, I have almost as many synths in my room as I do guitars.

Ken Hada
So yeah, you know, that’s the big thing. Now in college, if you’re a musician, right? Did you know that?

Dren Mcdonald
Was that?

Berkley School Of Music

Ken Hada
Well, if you go to Berkeley School of Music, that’s the hot piece of paper is synthesis.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah. Yeah. I a friend of mine is one of the professors there, Michael. Michael Burleigh. And when we were we were back east last summer, and I wanted to connect him with my wife because she runs the afterschool music program, Bay Area Music Project, and sometimes they’re looking for people to staff up her music program. So we want to make connection with Berklee School of Music.

Dren Mcdonald
And so I wanted her to meet him and then he took us on tour, the new stuff and the new building at the electronic music section, and they’ve got amazing, amazing setup now for they’ve got. So we went in the modular synth room where they’ve got I think about five or six different modules, identical modular synth setups for people to learn, module synthesis.

Ken Hada
Decay and release. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
And they’re all plugged into the same. And so whoever the teacher is can, you know, put, can change the mixture so that they’re hearing different people’s music or all those people can collaborate together. It’s pretty, it’s cool setup, but they even have like a whole setup for people to learn how to create circuits and electrical designs for.

Ken Hada
Physics or whatever. We do that.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, they have whole soldering room and everything for people on that. And yeah, some really interesting stuff going on there with sense.

Ken Hada
Yeah. Well, that brings me to the last question. Yeah, because I have to I have to do that because you and I will talk until I know which is, you know, what are your thoughts on. I have you played with it at all? What are your thoughts on it?

Dren Mcdonald
I have I have played with with the Dali image thing. And I actually use it for because I do this little YouTube series of called Ghost Notes where I just talk about stuff that I’m going to watch.

Ken Hada
Okay?

Dren Mcdonald
Okay, yeah. Yeah. You know.

Ken Hada
Ghost Notes.

Dren Mcdonald
Ghost Notes, it’s on YouTube. Yeah, it’s.

Ken Hada
Subscribe to that.

Dren Mcdonald
I just cover things that are about mixing or about the creative process, cool things like things that I think are interesting. I don’t cover new gear. Like there’s so many people that do that, Oh.

Ken Hada
That’s a job in itself.

Dren Mcdonald
That’s totally a job in itself. Yeah. And I don’t think I’d bring anything interesting that so I just talk about the things that I think maybe someone will find interesting. So, so all the covers, all the cover images for that series A whatever the topic is, I’ll plug a phrase into Dolly and try to try and get some kind of image out of it.

Ken Hada
And then it does it work every time or is it what’s that process.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah. Doesn’t work every time.

Ken Hada
Yeah, it does. It does. Yeah I do wet stuff with Amy. It’s not.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah.

Ken Hada
Perfect yet but you could see how it could. Yeah. Pretty damn.

Dren Mcdonald
Close. I saw how hilarious a hilarious phrase the other day like it was aimed at graphic designers or artists and says for air to work, the client actually has to know what they want. So we’re good. I’ve got nothing to worry about because famously clients never know what the hell they want. But it.

Ken Hada
Is astounding. Like, if you if you look at because I know you’re you’re a literary major. Yeah. If you take a I and you say make a make a caption for me about creativity, daily creativity, you know, year old man playing the drums, you you bullet point it. Yeah. It gets at least one of the paragraphs that it spits out pretty fucking good.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, I know. I haven’t used graffiti as but I did use it for I was doing and I decided to make an audio ad for Spotify and I didn’t want to write the copy and I’m like, This is hard. So I just gave a few prompts in a chatbot to give me some copy. It was too flowery and a little bit silly, but it did give me something quickly that I couldn’t.

Ken Hada
You say to it like something more?

Dren Mcdonald
I did. Yeah, I did. I did do that, whittled it down a little bit and then I just edited a little bit. It took a lot of the initial creative lift, the word.

Ken Hada
Vomit, right? Yeah, yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah. Because I didn’t want to spend that much time on it. I was just like, okay, maybe this will work for this. So my wife is using it for grants for her grant writing. It helps. She can put it in a purchase.

Ken Hada
Started.

Dren Mcdonald
And she can get started. Yeah, exactly. And that’s the hardest part with writing grants, you know, so I have used a little bit, I, I am quite concerned about what it’s going to do, especially the library music and that whole industry.

Ken Hada
I heard that it’s going to kill that.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, that’s.

Ken Hada
What I heard.

Dren Mcdonald
I mean, if you think about, you know, I have friends that have huge libraries of well recorded, beautiful sounding library music with esthetics and just like they thought deeply about this kind of thing and the use cases and whatnot and put a lot of art and craft into it just to watch that kind of effort be lost. I think it’s going to affect that industry first.

Dren Mcdonald
And, you know, for anyone who doesn’t know what that is, it’s just, you know, if let’s say a small TV show, public TV wants some music for something and they just want to pay a license real quickly online, they can pay a hundred bucks and use this piece for this piece, use it for a video that they post online or whatever, whatever that might be.

Dren Mcdonald
And then that just scales up from there to a series or whatever. Interestingly enough, the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme is from library music. Oh, okay. So is the music from Sunny, always Sunny in Philadelphia. That’s just straight library track secular world, right? So a couple of famous ones. But I but I’m worried about that industry because a lot of engineers and composers and musicians make money doing that and that could conceivably really go away.

Dren Mcdonald
I mean, I can see I can see maybe it’s not going to affect a lot of those people if a is just making chill electronica music like it’s not.

Ken Hada
But it’s not. I mean that I heard that people believe that Spotify will get rid of the studio and the musician and Spotify will just generate music.

Dren Mcdonald
Well, I wonder if that’s their goal. They have banned a lot of these AI labels now. They just did that recently, a couple of weeks, because what’s happening is it’s if you just get a bunch of people flooding Spotify with a generator, then that no one’s to find anything.

Ken Hada
That stresses their oh, so it dilutes.

Dren Mcdonald
It dilutes the whole product and a pretty damaging way I think because that’ll fuck up their algorithms and everything and point people to the right, the right kind of music. And you know, people can put whatever they want as far as their descriptors of the types of genres and it could really foul things up you know where it because the thing that Spotify and everyone else counts on for making their algorithms work is that artists want to develop themselves as that artist, that brand of that artist.

Dren Mcdonald
Yes. And you just got thousands of bots. Just don’t care about any of that. It just completely throws a monkey wrench into the whole thing.

Ken Hada
I heard that to speak to that love, I heard that is it. Drake Was that the famous story about AI where somebody used they created a new song for this artist. I think his name is Drake. It could be wrong.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, I think you’re right. They were copying a Drake.

Ken Hada
And they literally used just the phonetics of his voice. They didn’t have him go and record it right. And they put it on Spotify and everything, and it began to rise. Yeah. And then that person said, Hey, this is a guy thing. Yeah. And then the part that was really sort of scary was that certain Drake a lot of Drake fans were like, Well, I kind of liked it.

Ken Hada
Yeah, right. So they didn’t need Drake.

Dren Mcdonald
That’s right.

Ken Hada
They didn’t need the engineers. They didn’t need the musicians. Right. They like what the robot made. How’s that going to get worse? Like the robot’s not going to get worse. It making.

Dren Mcdonald
Well it did take somebody to collect those things and put them together. Yeah. Esthetic way that artist David Guetta I think is actually say his name the electronic music.

Ken Hada
Okay.

Dren Mcdonald
For one of his shows in the last couple of months, he had done something similar where he he wrote he got a prompt put in a prompt to write lyrics like Tupac. He got a voice and a voice to sound like Eminem, to rap to the Tupac lyrics. Yeah. At a tempo that he designated. And then he recorded it and added some stuff and played it at the beginning, one, two shows.

Dren Mcdonald
And people thought it was Eminem doing something new with David. What? I’m right. And he didn’t say anything. He didn’t. I don’t I don’t think it’s the show he said, by the way, that was it. He just played it at the beginning of his set and people freaked out and then later revealed what it was.

Ken Hada
What do you think about that?

Dren Mcdonald
Wow. Overall, I just can’t help but think about Terminator, you know?

Ken Hada
Yeah, I mean I mean, the guy that the of the that who whoever owns Chachi. Did you see that he was I saw this footage. She was literally like before some government body begging for them to regulate. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dren Mcdonald
Why would he do that? That’s the same thing Facebooks been asking for for years. Because they keep getting fine the like. Well, regulators give us.

Ken Hada
Some bozos for money because regulation will protect them in some sense.

Dren Mcdonald
I think that might be part of it. And I think that’s also to help competition to to solicit the guardrails on this. Okay. So we know how far this stuff can go because it can go pretty far. And we better get some regulations on this. And so I think that that’s where some of that comes from. But I can’t help but think that it’s like as artists, we I think we look at the potential of what this can do, like how can this help us like, Yeah, I can write copy real quick from today.

Ken Hada
It can assist you.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, today can assist you. But you know, I don’t know the effect of what it’s going to do to jobs, especially for for artists. That worries me. But what’s I think is this bigger concern is we already have trouble figuring out what’s real and not real with fake news and. Yeah. And the internet and yeah, this is already a huge problem.

Dren Mcdonald
How far are we away from just deciding what the news is going to be and then spreading that everywhere? I mean, I’m not necessarily thinking of, you know, AI becoming selfaware.

Ken Hada
It’s what humans will do with it.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It seems like it’s going to be one more step to it to make it easier to manipulate people.

Ken Hada
It’s like a little digital army.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly.

Ken Hada
Propaganda for right. Right.

Dren Mcdonald
Propaganda is like a huge boon to propaganda, right?

Ken Hada
Yeah. You can literally you don’t need to be. You can be very prominent with very little.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah. Right, right. So yeah, I’m, I think overall I’m skeptical and concerned. I, I, I like the, I think the potential of what it could do for creative people. But I don’t, I think that’s too big of a price probably.

Ken Hada
Right.

Dren Mcdonald
You know, I think we’re going to be depending on how this goes, we might be very sorry that this is taken off.

Ken Hada
And do you think we can put back in the box?

Dren Mcdonald
That’s a great question. I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, it’s open source. So the chances that are pretty slim, right?

Ken Hada
If it’s useful, if it puts money in people’s pockets or gives them well puts, if it gives people power, it’ll exist.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, right, right, right. Yeah. I don’t know. I mean it’s certainly interesting and, and a certain sense is fun to play around with today. Today.

Ken Hada
Yeah, but we we’re you and I, we know that it could be something. Yeah. Oh, yeah, it could be a it could be a bad thing.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah. It’s going to be something. I mean, it’s, it’s yeah. To see where this goes is going to be interesting. Possibly dangerous, right? It’s like. Yeah, like you say, we can’t really stop it, though. This train is taking off. It’s taking off. Yeah.

Ken Hada
Well, thanks for talking. Yeah, yeah. You know, let’s do this every years. Okay.

Dren Mcdonald
You got it. Well, we’ll just have the bots do it for us in years.

Ken Hada
It’ll take your brain the way you think. Mine? Yeah, our voices. And I’ll just do podcasts.

Dren Mcdonald
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, that should be interesting.

Ken Hada
I’ll see on one of those. All right.

Dren Mcdonald
Good.

Ken Hada
Thank you.