Helping Creators Create with Output CEO Gregg Lehrman - Music Production Podcast #366

Gregg Lehrman is the founder and CEO of Output. Output is a music-creation software company created by musicians for musicians. Gregg is an ASCAP award-winning musician and producer who has worked in television and film.

Gregg, the founder of Output, shares his journey of creating innovative music software and tools. He emphasizes the importance of creating tools that help musicians be creative and reach the 'goosebump moment'. He discusses the need for imperfection in music and the desire to sound unique. Gregg also talks about the challenges of balancing speed and creativity when working on film and TV projects. He shares lessons he learned from working with Hans Zimmer, including the importance of building a team and not being lazy with music.

In this conversation, Gregg and I discuss the importance of focus and prioritization in creative work. We explore the balance between generating ideas and editing them down to the most impactful ones. We also discuss the role of technology, such as AI, in the creative process and how it can be used to enhance creativity rather than replace human expression. Gregg shares insights into Output's approach to product development and their commitment to creating tools that musicians themselves would be excited about. We also touch on the value of time management and intentional decision-making in both music production and life. Gregg also shared details about Output's latest work, Co-Producer. 

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Episode Transcript:

Brian Funk (00:01.401)

Greg, welcome to the show. Nice to have you.

Gregg (00:04.074)

Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it, Brian.

Brian Funk (00:07.145)

I think the first thing I want to say to you is thank you. I've been using output plugins for many years, portal, thermal. Movement, I think, was the first one I got involved with. And I've always really enjoyed the fact that they were different, they were exciting, and they kind of were almost like a collaborator in the process that you do something with the plug and then you go, ooh.

Like, you get excited about it and you respond to it and it's a fun way to interact with music software. So, you know, I just wanted to let you know that I am a fan of what you guys do. So, thank you.

Gregg (00:47.03)

Thank you. That's awesome. Yeah, I mean, look, output is our mission. Our goal is to help you be creative. And so the tools we build are it's all about how quickly can we get you to the goosebump moment. So if we, Brian, if we've gotten you to the goosebump moment a few times or many times, that's awesome to hear. So thank you.

Brian Funk (01:07.893)

Yes, I have gotten there a few times. Thank you. That's kind of what the fun is about making music and producing is when you kind of get to something that excites you and you want to push forward through it and see the idea to its end. And you guys have done a nice job in creating stuff that really helps us get there as music makers. And, you know, we were kind of talking a little bit about this, but I've picked up on the fact that you,

started this company out of a desire to have these tools as a musician yourself.

Gregg (01:43.946)

Yeah, exactly. So I was writing music professionally, spending my time writing music for film and TV and also producing some artists and making music for myself. And I was kind of frustrated with my own music and the process. I found that...

I was in some ways being rewarded for the speed in which I could write music. And so at some point, the more projects I took on, the more money I made. And as you know, making money in music isn't always the easiest thing. So I got to a point where I was really trying to write a ton of music. And I felt like the amount I made and the creativity behind that music was almost inversely related. And so I really started thinking a lot about...

my own music being something that, you know, where I pushed myself and it was, every piece was really different and unique and I was looking for tools that were, that helped inspire me. You know, so many of the plugins that were out there and the instruments and the effects, it was all emulations of old hardware or it was instruments and samples of, you know, perfectly recorded musicians and...

I just, I wanted to sound like me. I wanted to sound different from everybody else. And I was looking for things that really helped me, you know, solve that blank slate problem of I'm sitting down to a blank page and where do I go from here? How do I make something that sounds unique but.

but also like me. And that was the birth of output because when I started on our first product, which was actually an instrument called Rev, it really was for me. It wasn't, this wasn't a company I was trying to launch. It was, hey, I wanted a cool tool or two that I could use for myself, for my own music. And it was for exactly that. How do I push the limit creatively? And what was interesting is,

Gregg (03:44.432)

into it, a lot of people were interested and they wanted it themselves. And you know, like anything, creating a product is so much harder than you think and takes so much more time and energy and money and there was more interest at the same time. And so I said, okay, well, I think we've got something here and double down and that became the birth of output. So yeah, that's kind of our mission.

Brian Funk (04:07.893)

I think those are always some of the best origin stories, you know, because it's, it comes from like a genuine place from an actual musician that's actually working on stuff. And you remind me of myself a little bit in my Ableton Live Pack creation journey where I would be recording music, writing my own music, and then you use the stuff you find, um, whether it's your presets, your plugins or whatever, and they're like almost too perfect.

where I put in this like amazingly recorded grand piano. It just doesn't fit in my mix because everything else is a little more ragged and a little more my personality, my playing. So I started doing exactly that, recording things myself. And one of my favorite instruments I have of mine is my piano in my house, which is a hundred year old piano. And I've recorded that and it's got clicks and clanks and weird buzzes.

but it fits and it sounds like real people playing something. I think that's just like, it's such an important thing.

Gregg (05:08.746)

Yeah, we have a pillar at output. One of the things that we talk about a lot is the concept of being beautifully imperfect. So sounds shouldn't be perfect. There should really be this theme of imperfection, but it should be beautiful. Because in many ways, a lot of our, the musical tastes of everybody at output are so different. But.

I think we all appreciate when something is beautiful and imperfect at the same time. And that's kind of like one of the themes behind all the instruments that we make and the effects that we make and just our ecosystem is can we help you to generate something that is both beautiful and imperfect at the same time? Because you don't want it to sound like a computer was involved. You don't want it to sound like everything else.

Brian Funk (05:58.837)

That's a great kind of like mantra or guiding light because that works for pretty much any genre.

I found when I first got my computer to record, I was like, yes, this is it. I can make everything perfectly in time, perfectly in tune. And I started doing that and I'm like, what happened to my music? I like the demo I recorded on my four track better. It has like soul or something, but when you really just like fine tune everything, you kind of squeeze all the personality and life to it.

Gregg (06:31.23)

It's funny that you say that, you know, I found that I was kind of a lot like you where

You know, I played instruments before I ever made music on a computer. And the demos that I made had so much heart and soul. And it was, it was music that I had been building up towards for many years. And then I got my first, you know, digital workstation and I, I was working in the box and my music actually completely shifted. It was no longer my sound. It was like, I was just exploring what you can do on a computer. And so then everything, the tempo started to change. Everything was perfect. It was to the click. It was.

It was like a whole different type of music, which was cool, but it didn't sound like me. And it took years for me to say, okay, got it. I'm now in a whole new workspace and there's a new flow here, but let's go back to what made me and bring back my instrumentation and maybe get off the click every now and then and be human about it. And so I think a lot of people, as soon as they go in the box,

they change who they are musically speaking and they start sounding like everyone else. And I think what's so important is to take a moment and say what's most important is to sound like myself. So whether I'm in the box or I'm playing live instruments, it doesn't matter, sound like yourself.

Brian Funk (07:51.225)

Hmm, right. I think it kind of reveals what your sound is a little bit too, because you suddenly stripped that away. Cause you've got all your presets, your plugins and your instruments that really everyone else has too. So you're maybe like the content of the music itself.

is you, but suddenly the delivery is so different. And it was jarring for me. It was a little upsetting. I was like, oh man, like I have to learn how to play the drum still. I have to learn how to sing still in key.

Gregg (08:15.702)

Yeah.

Gregg (08:25.278)

Yeah, well, I mean, you can hide so much in production. If you're playing live, there's only so much that you can play and you gotta be able to perform it.

when you're producing something, all of a sudden, you've got, you might have a track where there's 40 different layers of things going on, and you're hiding so much in there, and I think that we all need to kind of strip back the amount that's going on at once, and think about it like, hey, if I need it, maybe you can't perform these types of tracks live, and that's totally fine, but.

I would think about it like that. Like, instead of having, you know, 40 different layers of things, how do I have four or eight really good layers that say something musically? Because when I look back at my sessions, the songs that are the best don't have 40 layers of things going on. They've got four to eight, you know? I always know that when I'm layering a whole bunch of stuff it's because the track is not going well, and I'm trying to figure it out just by throwing more and more at it. And the ones that go well,

pretty minimal and they sound great and they were done quickly. So yeah I think that we have to figure out what works both in a live setting and also in the box.

Brian Funk (09:44.013)

That's funny. My band literally went through this about two weeks ago. We started recording on an eight track reel to reel and we fed it the signals through the computer. So I was able to kind of mix the drums first and compress them and stuff and then put them into the tape and then everything from there, we just used the computer as sort of an effects box. And we came down to having six tracks.

which were the main things we had to record, and we had two left over, and we're trying a bunch of things, kind of like we would in the computer with Infinite Tracks, you know, tambourine, shakers. And I think a lot of these elements would have made it into the mix, but because we only had two tracks, we were like, nah, that's not moving the needle enough. It's not worth it to burn these two tracks for something that hardly does anything, so we gotta rethink it. And it helped a lot with the songwriting.

You know, it's the limitations, I guess, that makes you really go through some quality control and makes you look at things a little harder because we can only burn two tracks. In the computer we can do 2,000, but it wasn't worth it and it was a really eye-opening experience to go through that with a couple of the guys at the same time too, as we're all trying different things on the mic and it's like, no, no.

Gregg (11:11.979)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (11:12.045)

We ended up just recording an acoustic guitar and that really added like some texture and emotion to it. So I don't know, we would have had a lot of other junk in there hiding a lot of the emotion in the parts that we actually played and recorded.

Gregg (11:30.25)

Isn't it funny, you can write about 75% of a song in the first couple hours, you know? But figuring out what you need to finish that song could take you weeks, months, years, you know? It's so hard because every time you're adding something, you get to a point where you're making it worse.

Brian Funk (11:39.277)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (11:46.581)

Right.

Brian Funk (11:54.794)

Yeah.

Gregg (11:54.858)

In the beginning, it's like you add something and you're building the foundation, and then you hit that point where adding something just makes it worse. I almost wish that there was a DAW out there just called eight track and it was limited. And there was only eight tracks. You know? Like give me a DAW that won't allow me to put more than eight things in at once, and I'd be a better writer.

Brian Funk (12:02.375)

Mm-hmm.

Brian Funk (12:08.77)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (12:18.721)

Yeah, you'd be thoughtful and you'd commit more. You'd be like, okay, I'm sticking with this. I'm not gonna backtrack. We probably in the DAW would have said like, hey, what if we change the drums around a little? We'll just edit them here. Then we'd have to change the bass and then we'd have to change the guitar and then we'd probably decide the drums needed to be changed again and just kind of get in this loop of indecision. But having something like that where you have to commit is.

Gregg (12:22.62)

Mm-hmm.

Brian Funk (12:48.669)

It's an important thing I try to enforce on myself as much as I can, but the temptation is always there to just keep stacking and adding.

Gregg (12:58.122)

Yeah, you know there's a parallel in the world of like health technology. The more tech, the more research, we just learn get a good night's sleep. You know, eat good quality food. It's like go back to the basics. And I think the further we go into music technology, we realize spend the time and energy just write a good part. You know, don't rely on the computer for all the editing and all the tweaking. Just like spend the time and energy to write a good part and then.

at another good part. It's like go back to the basics. So sometimes the more advanced we get with our tech, the more we have to go back to our roots.

Brian Funk (13:32.597)

It's so true. And I ran into this with exercise where you start looking for like the perfect workout and it gets paralyzing after a while. I don't even know what to do. I don't know if I should do that because that's not going to. And it finally came to the point where like, how about I just make sure I do some workout every single day, you know, how about I just use body weight exercises. And it was so much better. It was such a turning point because at least

Gregg (13:50.975)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (13:59.113)

You just show up and you do it instead of having this long extended period of time of deciding if this is what I should even be doing. If this is what I should try. And the same thing happens with making music where you have like all your plugins, your toys, your synths, your guitar. Which guitar should I use? Which synth? Which plugin? Which of my EQs that I have do I need to use? Working on that tape machine, it has an EQ on the board. That's it.

It was so freeing to just be like, I'm just going to use this. This is what I got. Let's go.

Gregg (14:31.702)

Yeah, you know, there's a good parallel because when you talk about the creative process as a whole, right, one of the things that we're talking about is, again, going back to this blank slate problem. And what you're talking about when you use exercise as your analogy, it's like, okay, sometimes it doesn't matter, just put a foot forward and start heading down that path. And...

I think what people forget about with playing slate and writing music is you just have to do it all the time. You have to accept the fact that most of what you're writing is not going to be your favorite music you've ever done. And that's okay. But if you're stopping because that track that you're working on isn't your favorite song ever, then you're not developing the muscle that you need to improve and do it every day.

And the writers that I know and the producers I know that are really, really good, they write every single day, even if it's for a couple hours or an hour. I think you just have to start moving. Write a bit of music every single day, develop that muscle, and you'll start to realize that you improve and you get better and better at what you're doing. And eventually you sort of develop a bank of starting points that you have.

And then you give yourself a little space and you come back to it days, weeks, months later, and you say, oh, actually, that idea I started, that's a great idea. And you kind of double down. So very much like what you were just saying, you just have to take, go step by step and move towards the thing you wanna do.

Brian Funk (16:07.477)

Hmm.

Brian Funk (16:18.189)

You know, I do exercises like this with my English students with writing. And it's creative stuff. It's the same process, I guess, but sometimes you don't see it. You don't see the connection, but yeah, like a lot of their writing is just in a notebook. It's a quick question. You got two minutes, just write whatever comes to your mind. If your mind wanders, wander. That's fine. If you don't know what to say, write, I don't know what to say. Just move the pen, keep it going. And.

Gregg (16:23.851)

Really?

Brian Funk (16:47.989)

It's all about building momentum and getting ideas. And I'll say to them, like, you can't edit nothing. You need something to edit. You need something to develop. And it's really like that with music. You can intellectualize it. You can think about what you think you want to do. But you can't do anything until you're actually putting your hands in it and doing it. It's about getting the work. I want to ask you, because you mentioned about

kind of, I guess, like your film and TV days, how you were getting rewarded for just finishing fast. How does that kind of factor in when you have that sort of work where you have to keep producing stuff? Does it, do you start throwing any concern of how it comes out, out the window, I just gotta get something done? Does it increase the creativity or does it sometimes take away from it, do you think?

Gregg (17:45.346)

Well, it totally changes the process by how you work. You know, I mean, there were, I would work in TV, for example, and I would get an episode maybe on a Tuesday, and it would air on Friday. So you had a couple days to write the music, record musicians if you're going to, mix it, deliver it. They're doing the final dub and mixing everything together with dialogue and everything else, and then it's airing. And so you knew that you had about 36 hours to turn it around.

So it's a very different process than, hey, I'm gonna write a song from scratch and I can go any direction. With a show or a film, you're developing a palette, you know, your sonic palette before you ever, you know, you start scoring that first episode. And so what I would do is when I would work with a director or a producer, I'd figure out what the musical direction was before we'd actually start scoring the show. So I'd write a ton of different music. We kind of narrowed down on what we liked and what we didn't like and we'd have it.

And I'd build a template with all the sounds that I'm going to use for the show. So if I'm using certain types of drums, I have them already pulled up in my template. If I'm recording myself on guitar and bass, I have the amp that I'm going to use and the pedals. And the sounds are really, the palette is dialed in, and everything is mic'd up. If I have musicians I'm bringing on, I've already brought them on and figured out exactly

what the recording's gonna sound like, how I'm gonna use it, how it's gonna be mixed. So you're kinda like, you're ready to go, and then the process becomes, okay, it's time to start just actually writing the music and not thinking about the sonics and everything else, because that's already sort of been thought through. The other thing is that, when you're scoring media in general, you tend to have thematic content, right? I mean, there might be themes for...

Brian Funk (19:18.336)

Hmm.

Gregg (19:40.166)

different characters on the film. There might be themes related to, here's the romance theme, the anger theme, like whatever it is, right? I mean, this is like film scoring 101. And so you've also established some of those basic themes beforehand, and you're kind of working in variations of it. You're figuring out how to connect pieces. And so I would say that writing music for media is really a different art than writing music for consumption, just for.

Brian Funk (19:48.769)

Hmm.

Gregg (20:09.878)

listening to music. And the difference is you're much more of a storyteller. You're meeting with the producers and the directors and you're thinking through, okay, what are you trying to accomplish here? What do you want the audience to feel? How do we kind of get them to that emotion that we wanna get them to, but without sort of like being too obvious about it, right? And it's an art that you...

Brian Funk (20:35.95)

Hmm.

Gregg (20:39.942)

learn and I spent a lot of time learning under other composers and working for other people and getting an idea of how to do that craft and scoring a number of projects and over time you sort of learn more and more but yeah the speed is pretty important because usually music is the final part of the of the project.

Brian Funk (20:59.57)

Yeah, but that's...

interesting because a lot of those decisions have already been made, right? Like what, like you said, the sounds, right? If you're doing something sci-fi, like, okay, we're probably not going to have acoustic instruments and like old ragtime piano is going on in there, right? So like things have been cleared away and then we have probably the emotion of the particular scene you're working on. And that's another thing that's set up so that you can just get to work instead of some of the, some of the times when I come down here.

and I want to make a song tonight. All right, let's like, you know, feel the breeze. What's going on today? What sounds? Nothing has been decided. It's going from zero.

Gregg (21:33.847)

Yeah.

Gregg (21:43.678)

And you do that in film and TV, you're just doing that in an earlier point in the process. Like as soon as you get the job, you talk to the people that are in charge of it, you get an idea of what they want musically speaking. And then that's what I do. You go into your studio or your bedroom, your living room, wherever you're making music, and you spend days or weeks figuring out that palette and figuring out what the sonics of the project you're gonna be, and it's a lot of fun.

But when you've got 36 hours to write 10, 15 minutes of music, you don't have time to open a bunch of plugins and say, oh, I wonder what sounds I should use or how I should start busing things. You just don't have time. So you've got to have that teed up and ready to go and a template that you can focus mainly on writing and a little less on production, if that makes sense, because you have so much music to get through.

Brian Funk (22:21.593)

Thanks for watching!

Gregg (22:40.242)

And that's really if you're scoring a project that works that way. A lot of other TV shows or films, more so TV shows, they'll hire you to write a catalog specifically for the show and then they want their own editors cutting it. So that's kind of a whole different scenario. But it's very different from working on a song where you're saying, okay, what do I want this to sound like and I'm gonna start from scratch and every song is gonna be completely different and unique. It's a different process.

Brian Funk (22:55.841)

Hmm. Oh, interesting.

Brian Funk (23:11.966)

Well, I can see that could be helpful. When I started playing some music with the guys I'm playing in a band now, we got together and jammed a few times and just, we were all over the place. We had like these kind of slow acoustic songs, we had fast punk rock, you know, it basically covered our entire range of musical interests. But we did sit down and listen to stuff and say, hey, let's make, let's follow this thread.

You know, let's go with this kind of style, this energy. And that really helped a lot in retrospect because first of all, it thinned the herd of all those ideas. And it gave us like the sounds, you know, and with a band, especially more so than when you're producing in the computer.

even though we use the computer a lot. You know, I don't know if you can see it, the drum set behind me is the drum set we use. That's the snare, those are the cymbals. That's the guitar I have. That's the bass you have. You know, the end, and here we go. And everything kind of goes through that funnel. But when we write, a lot of times we can do anything. And that's also a fun liberty, but it can lead to that blank canvas syndrome of like, now what, where do we go?

Gregg (24:27.785)

What did you end up choosing, direction-wise?

Brian Funk (24:31.633)

We went with this, we had a couple songs that we thought had a sort of like joy division, almost maybe even the cars a little bit, but this kind of like a lot of eighth note guitar work, you know, and we kind of went with that because it was fun, it was exciting, you know, it's fun to get together with your friends and you know blast out all your energy as much as you can. So

That's kind of where we went, but we had decisions to make along the way, but every time we decided, let's go in this direction. When we recorded our album, it was like, well, I've got all these tools here. I've got all these synths. I've got all these plugins. I've got... We were like, no, let's make it sound like the band. Let's try to keep it true to what we actually sound like. So I was like, okay. Those things get knocked off the shelf right there.

Here we go. Instead of like, what should we do on this song? Should we have like a crazy like, you know, space atmospheric intro or what?

Gregg (25:41.61)

It really, it helps you, it helps you narrow down on your sound. You know, I also have a, we have a bit of a garage band going on and shout out to the Closeouts. And we, you know, we, the band is, you know, it's made up of people that have actually done sound design or have produced music in the past. And so we mic up every jam. Like we get together on a weekly basis and we just.

Brian Funk (25:52.769)

Nice.

Gregg (26:09.726)

You know, we improvise a lot and come up with stuff and it's really well mic'd up beforehand. And then we just listen back the following week and it helps you to figure out, okay, we're kinda all over the place, but this has potential, like this one direction. And then we take that and we double down. And so I've been finding, I mean, it's such a, it's a nice juxtaposition between a lot of my days spent on the computer.

working on creation software, working in the box, to then go once a week and be in a dingy old room that doesn't smell great, doesn't have air conditioning, and it's got 70s vibes, but there's no computers and we just make music live. For me at least, I need both. I don't care what's going on in the world with AI and technology and everything else.

Brian Funk (26:50.252)

Yeah.

Gregg (27:07.534)

Knowing that I could still walk into a room and, you know, play the guitar, some keys or whatever it is, and just make music is, I need both of those.

Brian Funk (27:16.829)

Yeah, I found kind of the same sort of refuge in guitar.

like almost no pedals, just like a tuner and something to make it louder. And that was it. And compared to like what I'm doing normally where I'm sound designing and really trying to produce things up, it's such a fun alternative. And even sometimes when I pick up my acoustic guitar, I'm almost like blown away. I'm like, as if it was like some new technology because I didn't have to plug it in and have to charge it. I don't need to do anything. It just makes the sound on its own.

Gregg (27:27.734)

Yep.

Brian Funk (27:52.737)

You know, a lot of things are coming up. I've got the Ableton Push 3 and it's standalone and it's amazing. You can just take it anywhere, but it's almost like it's going in the direction of the acoustic instrument, you know what I'm saying? Where you're getting rid of a lot of the technological stuff and sometimes just picking up that guitar is just like, ah, you know, or just sitting on a piano and just playing, all you gotta do is touch it. It's, it almost feels futuristic in that way.

Gregg (28:20.042)

Yeah, I agree. See, we take a step forward in technology and it just brings us back to our roots. So, yeah, the theme is definitely there.

Brian Funk (28:27.689)

Yeah, that's true. Yeah. And that's a direction we got to go in this conversation. Uh, before I go there though, I do want to, cause I feel like we're moving away from the film and TV part of the conversation. Um, I'd read that you'd done some work with like Hans Zimmer and I was curious what that was like, um, what kind of work he did and if there were any lessons you picked up from a guy like that, it was so prolific, so successful and just seems to.

hit it out of the park every time. Were there any kind of pointers or like, oh, look at how he works on that, look at that. I'm gonna take that for myself.

Gregg (29:07.69)

Yeah, sorry, I'm just taking some notes here. You know, look, my first job out of school was with Hans Zimmer, and I was young, right? I wasn't, of course, I wanted to, like, absolutely. I wanted to go and write music for a living, but no, I mean, my job there was...

Brian Funk (29:20.237)

Like a lot of young people out of school.

Gregg (29:29.67)

I was involved in a lot of the technical aspects of his setup, making sure that the rigs worked and we hired musicians and there were always musicians that were being recorded. There's a lot of conforming, so you would have the team or Hans would write music and then the edit would change overnight and they would give us a new cut of the film.

And sometimes start points or end points had to be conformed. And again, I wasn't doing anything musically speaking, but I was always just kind of making sure that the entire infrastructure was set up and working. Also just helping with coordination and driving people around and getting food and making coffee and doing all the boring things that are, it's not necessarily where you think you're gonna do out of school, but honestly, you gotta start somewhere. And...

Yeah, I mean, what's amazing about remote control and Hans's facility was I worked really, really hard. You know, the hours were tough and I had no life. But I remember we were about a month in and they did a live performance over at Amblin, which was part of Universal. And there was, so it was for Spielberg and his team. And I'm there a month into this job and...

I go to the bar at some point to get like a glass of water, I remember what it was, and I look to the left of me and there's Spielberg standing there, and I look to the right and there's John Williams, and I'm thinking, holy shit, look at where I am. And so you have to put in time, you have to start from the bottom. And yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things I learned. The first was be easy to work with, you know?

Brian Funk (31:05.219)

Right.

Gregg (31:16.738)

Don't complain that you're making coffee. Don't complain that you're working crazy hours. Understand that there are so many people that want that same job that you've got to be an absolute pleasure to work with, because there are thousands of other people that will take it if you don't want it. So you've got to work as hard as everybody else. I think I also learned over at Hans's team that it's not about just doing the thing. It's about.

building an infrastructure and a team to support it. And I use that at Output on a daily basis. When Output was first launched, there was myself, I was the founder, and then my first two hires who are now co-founders was John Nye and Neil Halleman.

Gregg (34:23.106)

There are times of charm. Yeah, so I learned a ton of lessons from Hans, and one of them was he was so good at not just writing and producing music, but also learning how to build a company, learning how to build an infrastructure and a team, and I take a lot of those lessons on a day-to-day basis in what we do, right? It's no longer about just me making a good product.

It's about me hiring and building the best team and guiding them to make the best products, right? If it's just me, that's fine if we're a company of three or four people, but we're about 75 people these days, like I, my job is to kind of set the vision and where we're going and oversee the product roadmap and kind of what we're working on. But I need a team to come in. Now,

What Hans was able to do with Remote was far more than just him writing his own film scores. He created a company where lots of people are working on music for lots of different projects and at the highest level. I learned that you can scale volume and still keep quality and how to do that. I don't think I ever realized that I was learning that lesson at the time, but now that I look back on it, it's really amazing what they pull off at Remote.

Brian Funk (35:51.258)

Well, and I think whether you knew it or not at the time, just to have that kind of attitude when you're getting coffee, say, to know that we can't have Hans getting coffee. He needs to be doing something else and there's other people that need to be doing something else. And probably to see it from that perspective.

and then to start your own company and have other things that you wanna do, the more creative vision, the bigger picture stuff, you understand the importance of every little brick in the structure of a company and a group, whether it's a band, whatever it is, they're all super important.

I just saw a post recently about who's the most talented Beatle. Or it was specifically like Ringo is the least talented. It was like, that's not even a... That's silly. First of all, he's one of my favorite drummers ever. But that's not what it's about. It's about the structure it creates all together and output or Hans Zimmer's facility, his company. It's not about the individual piece. It's that whole...

conglomeration of stuff that makes the whole thing work together.

Gregg (37:07.018)

Yeah, and I think a lot of people have talked about Hans in particular because of all these other people that are involved. He's a great composer on his own. He doesn't need all these other people to write music for him. I think what he's done is he's built an environment where he can mentor other people and sort of bring them.

bring them through the ropes and get them to a point where they have their own careers and I think that's pretty amazing. The other thing that I learned from him and from that company was don't be lazy. There's so many times where the music sounds great already and yet they'll go further and further and further to make it something that just goes beyond your expectation.

right, whether it's recording, whether it's production, they might have samples and it sounds fantastic and they say, okay, let's go hire 20 French horn players and stick them in the rafters somewhere. You know, it's like, they, I love that they go so far above and beyond to sound unique and different and I think we all need to learn something from that, which is.

Don't be lazy with your music. It doesn't mean you have to record everything live. It doesn't mean you have to record 20 French horn players. But don't stop until you've pushed yourself to the point where you really feel like, man, I've done something completely new and different or something that I am so proud of.

Brian Funk (38:41.377)

You know, that's an interesting balance, I guess, is the word, because, you know, we all know we can overcook our cakes here in the music world. You know, there's a point where diminishing returns. We even kind of touched upon that a little bit. Do you think you started to see where that happened through this experience? You know, go beyond your expectations, but if you...

reach your expectations maybe you're thinking, well I don't want to overdo it, I don't want to squeeze the life out of it, or I don't want to... That must be a tricky... You get what I'm saying?

Gregg (39:24.182)

Yeah, I do. It's a tricky thing to balance. On one hand, we're saying before, keep it simple, don't overdo it. Now we're saying one of the things that we learned from Hans Zimmer is the fact that you push it so far above and beyond. Look, I think with a great writer, a great composer, a great producer, you have to know when you've hit something good, right? There was a quote I heard years ago that we have a left brain and a right brain.

Brian Funk (39:30.765)

Right.

Gregg (39:53.042)

and I don't know which one's which, but one of them, let's call it your left brain, is the idea generator. And it's just cranking out idea after idea, it's like a monkey on a typewriter, right? It's just, you're just generating lots of stuff. And the right side of your brain is an editor. And it's there to say, hey, all this is, none of this is any good, but wait, that one idea you just had, there's something to that. And I don't think it matters if you're a 15-year-old making a hip-hop track in

a bedroom using FL Studio or your Hans Zimmer and you're recording 200 people on the next soundtrack. You have to be a good enough editor that you know when something is right and it's done and it feels good. And you have to know when to continue on because it's not there yet. And I don't know what it's gonna take to get it there. It could be adding more, it could be removing some elements in the track. It could be pushing yourself to do

some kind of instrumentation that you've never done before, but you have to hone in on the editor side of your brain in knowing when it's good and when it's not quite good enough.

Brian Funk (41:04.569)

How do you apply that to your work and output? When you're working on a plug-in.

Gregg (41:08.21)

I don't know. I mean, yeah, that's a great question. Ideas are never... yeah, go on.

Brian Funk (41:14.485)

Well, just to give you a... Please, I don't want to cut you off. Go ahead.

Gregg (41:20.01)

I was just going to say, I mean, when you have really smart music makers working at your company, right? And we're filled with some of the most brilliant music makers out there. Ideas aren't the problem. We have lots of ideas of tools that we should be working on. It's the right brain. It's the editor. It's knowing that if you try to do 100 different things, none of them are going to get done. So.

what's better to work on lots of different things and have them each move slowly and take years to get done or really be kind of like heads down focused on one project or two projects and get everybody kind of on it. And that tends to result in products that get completed and released. And so the editor side of my brain and of the other leaders at output, we're really trying to prioritize the things that

we think are most impactful. Because we understand there's 100 different things that we could build that people would like. And they're requesting features and new products all the time. But we have to stop for a moment and say, what is going to have the most impact? And help forward our mission to all of our music makers, which is really helping people be as creative as possible. Breaking through the blank slate problem.

breaking through the issue of finishing a track, helping them write and create and produce their music. What's gonna have the most impact? So again, it goes back to idea generation on one side and editing, and you can have a million ideas, but at the end of the day, you need to focus on the one or two that are most important and double down on those.

Brian Funk (43:04.921)

Hmm, right, because kind of just letting things slowly move along without focus too. I guess all your resources are divided and that would be the same thing, whether you have 75 people working for you or it's just you trying to make something. And yeah, the follow through is a really key element to everything we do, right? You mentioned we can get the...

Gregg (43:29.631)

Yeah, I mean.

Brian Funk (43:31.137)

first 80% of a song done in a few hours, but then we have to work on the next 80% of it. The finishing part of it's like.

Gregg (43:39.51)

I mean, Brian, how many songs, Brian, how many songs have you started, right, compared to how many songs have you finished and published and released to the world?

Brian Funk (43:53.761)

Yeah, it's a crazy, probably embarrassing ratio. You know? It's, yeah.

Gregg (43:59.862)

Yeah, but it's not unique to you, it's everybody. And so what you're doing is exactly what I'm saying. You have one side of your brain which is cranking out ideas and trying things all the time, which is so good. It's important to be utilizing that muscle of just writing all the time. But then you have the right side which is, hey, let's not double down on every single idea I've ever made here. Let's figure out which ones are actually worth pursuing.

and then let's take those to completion. And so everybody, it doesn't matter if you're making music or running a company or making software or just in your day-to-day life, we all have too many things that we wanna do. We have to prioritize and we have to edit the ideas and decide which ones are actually worth our time and energy, because unfortunately time, there's a limited amount of it and we can't do everything. And I think you find that people that try to do everything and are running around and they're

frenetic in their day to day, they're not actually happy. What makes people happy, one of the things, is being very intentional about what it is you want to accomplish, and then accomplishing that. And I would give some examples, how I run output on a day to day basis. One of the things that I do is every six months, I will stop what I'm doing, I will write down on a spreadsheet,

where should I be spending my time? Not where am I spending my time, but how should I be spending my time? And I'll actually write down, okay, 30% of my time should be on developing new products, and 30% should be talking to customers and figuring out what's working, whatever that percentage is. And then I will look at my calendar, and I'll actually see where I'm spending my time, and I'll compare it. And usually, it is far off where I wanna be.

And at that point, I will delete the entire calendar and I'll rebuild it to match where I should be spending my time. Now I have the benefit of being the CEO of Output and so I can do that, right? I can change my calendar and say, okay, everybody's gotta conform to this a little bit. But the process of looking at where you're spending your time versus where you would like to be spending your time is, it's really important. It's about prioritization. It's about taking

Gregg (46:28.15)

moment to see how intentional you're being. Because it's so easy for me to spend most of my day responding to email and responding to slack and all the inbound things. And if I do that I'm gonna finish the week and I haven't done any of the things that I actually wanted to do. So do I prioritize everyone else's priorities or do I prioritize the things that I'm saying are most important to myself and to the company and to our customers and where we want to go. So this is something that I would recommend for everybody.

Look at where you want to be spending your time and compare it to where you are and be intentional about it. And if where you are today is pretty far from where you'd like to be, change it. Make changes to your life.

Brian Funk (47:13.313)

Yeah, that's real life advice right there. I mean, when you ask people what they value in life, they'll say things, family, friends, relationships. And then you look at how you're spending your time. And those are always the things that get kind of pushed aside. I'm going to do another couple hours at the office or whatever you're doing with life. To really do that comparison is a great idea. I mean, what a valuable activity to just

honestly assess where you're putting your really most precious resources, which is your time and attention. And if you're not focusing on things, and I found this myself where if I'm not enjoying something, it's probably because I'm thinking about all the other things I could be doing or wish I was doing. But as soon as I start focusing on it, I tend to enjoy it. And

It helps to remind myself that almost everything in this world, there's someone that's fascinated by it. You know, there's someone that's fascinated by like watching the way the wind blows the leaves and that particular motion. And when you think of things that way, you can be like, oh wow, you know, like there's something to appreciate here. But.

Anytime I find myself saying, oh, we're here, you know, I really could be doing this instead, that zaps it away immediately. And I guess like what you're saying with all the creative projects you could be doing with the company or whether it's even music, you know, different songs I could be working on, once you decide to commit to something and not worry about what else you could be doing, it tends to be a much more enjoyable experience.

Gregg (48:56.106)

Yeah, well I mean I think that we're in the world right now of it's like hustle culture, you know, and it's like you gotta be doing a million different things and multitasking, and I think the reality for music makers is you kinda do have to do a lot of multitasking because no longer are people just musicians, you know? You're now your own head of A&R, you're head of marketing and you're head of content and social media and all the things that a musician has to do to make it. You have to be kind of focused on all these different things, but.

It's about intentionality, right? Spend your time and energy the way that you would like to as opposed to just responding to things being inbound. If you're saying, hey, I'm a musician and so I wanna spend 50% of my time making music and I'd like to spend 50% of my time pushing that music out to the world, then look at your calendar from the last week, see where you actually spent your time.

And if those numbers are off, recalibrate, right? It's as simple as that. And everybody's got their own path and what they're making. But music now, there's so many things that you have to do. So again, it just comes back to the same thing over and over and over, which is we all have way too many things on our plate. There's too many things that we could be doing at once. And what we're actually working on doesn't usually match what we would like to be working on. So recalibrate if you're off.

Brian Funk (50:26.129)

Right, yeah. We want to do so much. We have all the fear of missing out. And you can do anything you want, but you can't do everything you want. Yeah, I'm gonna have to do that myself. I'm gonna make a note to like recalibrate. Yeah, yeah, just to, it's worth the while to just to check in once in a very, every so often, just to see.

Gregg (50:37.045)

Agreed.

Gregg (50:44.451)

Recalibrate life, yeah.

Brian Funk (50:56.213)

Yeah, because we are being pulled in so many directions. And if I looked at just my screen time on my phone and thought about those hours, it's like, oh, yeah, forget it. I'm off somewhere. Yeah.

Gregg (51:09.422)

Oh, it's embarrassing. I don't know if you've ever looked, but there's a way, at least in an iPhone, where you can actually go in and see how many hours you've spent, on average per day, or per week, or per month, and you see how many hours you're on your phone, and it's like, you know, I wanna start crying.

Brian Funk (51:28.765)

I do that exercise with my students and I've figured out that every hour you spend a day doing something equals about 15 days a year. It's one 24th of the year and if you think a month is one 12th of the year, so it's like 15 days, half a month. So an hour a day on your phone is like over two weeks solid, nonstop. And sometimes we look at it and I just, I...

Gregg (51:40.843)

Mm-hmm.

Brian Funk (51:56.169)

You know, I'm not judging you guys. I'm not judging me or anyone, but like, if you're spending five hours a day on your phone, you know, you're giving up a long time. You know, you're talking like months of your time right there. Two and a half months. Like, do you want to be doing that?

Gregg (52:13.43)

Well, and if you're going to be on your phone, no, I completely agree with you. You don't, because it compounds. It adds up. I just think we've all gotten used to, hey, we're in line at a takeout place. Or you're in line somewhere, and like, oh, you're going to use your phone. You're in airport. You're going to use your phone. Can we use our phone to learn something new or to

Brian Funk (52:21.666)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (52:32.929)

Right.

Gregg (52:40.678)

work towards our music or our goals as opposed to, I'm just gonna scroll on Instagram or TikTok or whatever it is, you know? And I think you can. I think there's so many cool educational things out there or even ways to start using, I mean, shameless plug but we have Output's co-producer and co-producers, basically you're creating sample packs. Whether it's that or anything else, can you sit there and come up with something that will help you?

for the next time you're going to sit down and make music. My kids, I have them on music notation apps. And they're sitting there, and they don't have phones. But if we travel, they get to use an iPad. It's the rule. Like, you don't get iPads all the time, but when we travel, you can use one. And you sit there, and you'll see them. They're doing rhythm tutorials and lessons. And they're sitting there trying to get the beats right to match the music notation. And I'm like,

That's actually a pretty good use of time on technology, right, and it's teaching them something that will be valuable. So the question is, you know, if we're gonna be on our phones that much, can we use some of that time in a creative and helpful way, or in an educational way, or in a way that helps set us up so that the next time we sit down to write music, we kind of already have that palette ready to go.

Brian Funk (54:09.537)

Right? Yeah, being productive with that. Yeah. Yeah, it's smart. Because you're right. There's a lot of range of how we spend our time doing stuff. I look at my screen time on my computer, which is kind of scary sometimes. But I also say, well, I am working on music. You know? Or I'm.

Gregg (54:11.798)

Be productive. Exactly.

Brian Funk (54:33.929)

I'm not just browsing the internet, or a lot of it I am, but still, if it's something I can be comfortable with, then that's a different story.

Gregg (54:45.206)

I knew a mixing engineer back in the day, he was a friend of mine, his name is Greg Townley, and he used to have one of those little hourglass apps where you'd see sand falling down the hourglass, and he would turn that on the moment he would start mixing or producing. And the minute he would stop to start surfing the internet, the app would pause. So he would say at the end of the day,

and he would know exactly how much of that was real work versus I needed a moment and I started scrolling CNN or whatever he wanted to look at. And I thought that was useful to actually know what percentage of your day is work versus tricking yourself to think it's work because you're sitting in front of your computer. You know?

Brian Funk (55:26.68)

Mm.

Brian Funk (55:34.985)

Right. I like that a lot. Yeah, because you see all these studies about people at their job, and in an eight hour day, they work like 45 minutes. They're at the water cooler, they're at the browser, whatever they're doing. But if, yeah, that'd be a nice thing to have. I'm going to look into that for myself.

You mentioned it, I want to bring it up anyway. So Co-Producer is a very interesting new thing. This is a pack generator. So this is an interesting use of AI and all this artificial or generative, whatever you want to call it, intelligence, where you can type in kind of what you want to make. And this generates sounds for you. So it's kind of like a palette, as far as I understand. I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but it looks, at first when I heard of it,

like, oh no, you know, here we go, it's gonna make the song for you. But that doesn't seem to be what it is and especially after talking to you, I can't imagine that would be the kind of thing you would want to put your finite time into, something that will do that for a person. You know, you're all about like being creative as a musician yourself.

I want to hear more about this because it seems like a very interesting and also useful way to use this new technology coming at us.

Gregg (56:56.554)

You kind of nailed it right there. I mean, look, technology is coming whether or not we like it. And let's start by saying, I'm a music maker, you're a music maker. I think AI scares all of us a little bit when it comes to music and when it comes to everything else, and I think rightfully so. And um.

The way that we approach this is, look, we're a company that is 100% about helping music makers make music, that's what we do. So we're not looking to build generative AI tools that replace music makers where computers write songs. That's not what we're about, that's not what, that in no way helps our customers, right? And everything that we do is for the end goal of helping our customers be as creative as possible. So.

you know, as you start to get your hands on certain technology, you start to think about it from the lens of not how do we make money by creating generative tools, but rather how do we utilize this technology to make tools for music makers so that it could help them in whatever way we think would be cool or in whatever way they would like, you know? And specifically, you know,

The technology that we've been building is called Co-Producer. We announced that, and there's an application that'll be coming out likely later this year. And it's going to be pretty awesome. It's something that we ourselves at the company already are using. And I can tell you that when we ourselves, when we use these products to make music, we know that it's a good thing. That doesn't always mean that it's going to make a fortune or anything like that. It just means that it's cool and useful.

And what we decided was, as various elements of this technology were ready, instead of just waiting for one app to come out, we would say, hey, let's release some of these tools online. So the first was what we call Pack Generator. And Pack Generator is exactly that. It's a language model connected to basically output's entire sound ecosystem. And so what that means is, you can type in anything. You can say, give me...

Gregg (59:10.122)

drums that sound like Led Zeppelin or what would the child of Led Zeppelin and Bob Marley sound like or whatever you, what would a Blue Tuesday sound like, anything like that. And what we're doing is we're really converting what you're saying into a musical description and we are building a sample pack around that. And instead of building one, what we do is we give you...

essentially four kind of like little snippets of music so that you can pick which one of those would most accurately represent the direction you're going for. And just like a chat GBT or a language model, you can kind of go back and forth and you can say, okay, let's do this again, but you know, this time I want it to be brighter. Or you can say, you can be very specific about your tempo or key, right? Hey, I need everything to be at 114 BPM and C sharp minor, like whatever it is.

By doing this, what we're trying to do is help reduce the amount of time you spend searching for content on your computer. Because if you make music, you're very well aware that you spend hours and hours searching for sounds. You know, whether it's kick drum sounds or samples or instruments or loops or whatever it is, we spend so much time. So how do we get you to that sound that you're looking for?

much quicker. And the way that the technology works is it starts by looking through our content library. And this is all content that's 100% owned by output and royalty free. It's our content, right? This is one of our superpowers where we are content makers. And it doesn't just stop with the content as is. It now, based on the prompt, can do a lot of different things internally. It changes the tempo, it changes the key.

It could add reverbs if you're like I'm looking for a 1960s thing, you know It might manipulate a lot of our macros and our effects and put the right reverbs on it could chop things up and rearrange And that's just what's out today later on that so your starting point is real Samples real recordings, which means that you are continuing to support music makers that we are hiring to make all that content It means that we don't have issues from a copyright infringement

Gregg (01:01:35.102)

scenario. We're not trained on other models that have royalty issues. This isn't like, you know, we're stealing from Drake or, you know, other famous people. Like, it's not that. This is our content and our own AI. And again, we're not trying to write songs. What we are doing is giving you a full sample pack. So you'll click on one of the kind of the musical directions you like and then you'll get a sample pack of 20 to 30 unique sounds in exactly the path you're

If you're starting from a blank slate, you have a blank session, you don't necessarily care what tempo, what key, it's just like, hey, this is the direction I'm going. If you already have a track that's in progress, right? Then you might say, oh, well, hey, I really need it to be in this key, and I need it to be at this tempo, and now I'm looking for stuff, and so it just becomes such a quick and useful way to grab stuff and, you know.

it's royalty free and it's free. So it's like, check it out. It's good. It's not perfect. We are at about a 67% thumbs up rating right now for each search, which means that when you use it, you can tell us, vote whether or not the results were any good. And part of this is about learning. We wanna learn what's working well and what's not working well. And for the things that are not working well, why?

and we want to continue to tweak our algorithms and get it better and better. But all this in pursuit of helping people remain in the driver's seat and remain focused on making music as opposed to replacing people with generative tools. That's not what we're.

Brian Funk (01:03:22.105)

I like what you said about reducing the time searching for stuff because you're right, that's, it's brutal.

Gregg (01:03:26.398)

Yeah, that's the goal. Imagine if you could spend most of your time doing the fun parts of making music. People ask me, where is AI gonna be in a couple years? Where are things going? And whether it's from us or from other companies, there's going to be tools out there that do everything. But we still wanna remain in the driver's seat, so.

Brian Funk (01:03:33.409)

Yeah.

Gregg (01:03:53.778)

you're going to be able to rely on certain technology to help you do the things that you don't want to do. If it's, I don't like searching for sounds for hours, well, you could probably have some help there. If it's, hey, I don't feel like editing my guitar part, I just want it to be a little tighter. I mean, that stuff's already baked into a lot of the tools we use and that's gonna get better and better. It's kind of like, we still need to write our own music, or we should, if we're serious about our art here.

But as a music maker, just because I always like writing and producing music doesn't mean I love doing every aspect of every song. There's things that I think I'm better at and things that I'm worse at. I might be a great writer and producer and a terrible lyricist. I might be a great lyricist and terrible at arranging. It's like you're going to be able to rely on that technology to help you in the areas that you're not as good. So yeah, I think there's gonna be generative music out there.

You know, like fully generative, like hey, these can, you know, here's a Spotify for generative music. And I can kind of go on and on this one forever, but I think that we all, we care about music that's written by people because that's what inspires us. It's not just about the song, it's about the community that's built around it. Sharing that with other people, it's about what the person stands for and what their.

what they're singing about or what inspires them to make that music. It's about going and seeing people live. It's about all these other things. And so you're going to have fully generatively created music and you're still gonna always have music created by people because art will always remain the center of what we as humans do. That's still what pushes society forward.

Brian Funk (01:05:47.137)

Yeah, I think in my optimistic view, is that this might really...

highlight the humanity in the music and the art. Because I don't think there are many people, at least people that are really interested in music, that wanna hear generated music. They wanna hear, like you said, the story. I mean, take someone like Taylor Swift. People aren't just relating to the sounds that are coming out of that speaker.

they're relating to her, you know, who's she dating? Like we all know who she's dating right now, right? These are important things, like the computer's not gonna be dating anyone, AI is not gonna have these interesting backstories that they bring to their music, AI is not gonna make me wear flannel shirts and ripped jeans when I'm 14 years old listening to Nirvana. You know what I mean? Like that stuff's not gonna happen, but to remove some of that...

kind of annoying stuff from the music making process sounds really nice and allowing you to really showcase that humanity by getting some of that annoying stuff out of the way with it. My self-expression is not enhanced by searching through my presets folders and sample libraries. Even sometimes there are plugins that will help you with mixing. Tracks communicate with each other to

frequencies, that's helping me give you a clearer picture of what I'm trying to express. It's not taking away from it. Now, I think at the same time, it still leaves room for people to be artistic with their mixing because that's another form of, you know, people are into that too. People are interested in...

Brian Funk (01:07:35.577)

unique mixes and the technique that goes behind it. And I still think there's room for innovation and expression there, but to kind of help you focus on the part of it you love is a... I hope that's the way it goes personally. I found that a lot of music...

I appreciate the more human stuff, the free form playing, the less quantized, the less auto-tuned stuff, because I've heard the auto-tuned and the quantized stuff. I don't want that perfection anymore, kind of like what we were saying in the beginning. Once I got it, I was like, oh, it's missing all the stuff that makes it nice. So to have it go in that direction would be, that would be great.

then maybe, I just activated Siri somehow, but it would be really nice to allow people to be expressive and creative that way and remove some of the technical barriers and the hurdles. And I guess when you're speaking about your work with Hans Zimmer, that's kind of what a lot of people were hired to do to help set things up, to get things ready so that the work could be done, the art could be created.

Gregg (01:08:56.138)

I think Siri heard you talking negatively about technology and just wanted to remind you that Big Brother's listening and paying attention.

Brian Funk (01:08:59.629)

She's... I'm listening. That's true. I just brushed that off. What a funny time for her to chime in there.

Gregg (01:09:10.346)

I know. Look, if you're trying to be in the optimistic view of all of this, guitar hero helped so many people realize that hey, maybe I could play guitar. It was almost sort of a pathway into learning an instrument. You know, it didn't threaten.

Brian Funk (01:09:25.238)

Yeah, right.

Gregg (01:09:32.942)

guitarists around the world. It was a fun video game, and as people were playing it, and they were like, oh, I'm actually pretty good at this, you had so many new people that jumped in and said, hey, I should actually learn how to really play the guitar. Yeah, and I think that you already have text prompt music out there. People could type something in and have a song. That's gonna get better and better. It's gonna be around just like Dolly and any of these visual programs like Mid Journey.

Brian Funk (01:09:45.094)

Yeah, turn people onto that music too. Yeah.

Gregg (01:10:02.914)

But what can come of it is there's going to be a percentage of those people that get really into it. And then they're gonna realize, hey, there's a lot of limitations here because there's only so much you can do with kind of like an already merged audio file that's like it's done, it's fully baked, right? And so you might have this as a pathway for younger people to get more and more into production. I could see, I have kids, I could see them having fun typing in something and getting a song.

and then saying, oh, but I don't like that. I wanna change these things. How do I actually do this, Dad? And I think that it, my optimism here is that it could be a good thing for creativity in that it gets a lot more people introduced to the world of music creation and a certain percentage of them end up jumping in and making music because the way that I see it,

The more people that make music, the better the world. I'm not looking at this from a competitive landscape of, oh, I don't want a million other music makers out there because then nobody's gonna hear my music. I look at it like, people that tend to make music are creative, interesting people, and they tend to be a bit, I'm not gonna say they're all happy because obviously there's lots of musicians that are not, but they're...

I think the world is a better place with more people making music. And so I think if generative AI helps a new generation of people approach it and get involved in it, and then a lot of those people end up becoming actual music makers themselves, where they learn an instrument, and they learn production, they learn real skills. I think that's a good thing. So I'm not sitting here saying I'm.

you know, ever gonna make generative AI at output. That's not what we do. We're here to support music makers. But I think anything that helps drive more and more people to be creative and eventually get into the world of making music could be interesting.

Brian Funk (01:12:11.082)

Yeah.

I agree. Yeah. I mean, I've learned a lot of valuable life lessons through doing music. And even in our conversation where we're talking about musical things, but there is a lot of life that goes into that too. A lot of takeaways you can apply. And I'm also kind of interested because I guess I've always been really, I always love like abusing the tools and seeing what happens when you do what you're not supposed to or stretch it to its limit. But I liked

Blue Tuesday sound like. Like, put in weird prompts to almost confuse it in a way. Just to see what you get to be, because there's almost an art to that, even now. We're starting to see the kind of like creative prompting of some of these like large language models and how you can steer it to get unusual results. I think that could possibly be a really interesting thing we do with some of this new technology.

Gregg (01:13:09.462)

Yeah, well I'm bored. I mean, I don't know about you, Brian, but I've always been bored of just tagging systems. You know, I gotta click like, okay, guitar, electric. Okay, I want synths, it's gotta be an ARP. I want it to be fast. I want it, you know, it's very, it helps, right? It helps you filter down and get to where you wanna go, but it's not very descriptive. It's not very musical.

And so the difference between tags and a language model is you could describe whatever you want, right? And it doesn't have to even be in musical terms. It could just be describe a setting, a scene, anything, and can we convert that into what the musical palette might be, you know? But it's...

It's just an easier path, I think, than trying to get where you're trying to go from tags, because tags are very limiting.

Brian Funk (01:14:15.061)

Well, Ableton Live is my DAW of choice. And in Live 12, they've got a new tagging system in the browser. And it seems it's really powerful. You can come up with your own tags, you can tag whatever you want. I haven't gotten too far in tagging stuff because number one, if we look at my percentage of how I want to be spending my life.

tagging stuff is not even on it, right? So I don't want to be doing that, but yes, it would be really helpful to have that stuff. So I'll get into it a little bit, but it would be a lot nicer if I could just write, yeah, I want this and I want that. Does that mean you guys are doing a lot of tagging on your end or is it just being analyzed by the soft intelligence software? How's that working?

Gregg (01:15:09.186)

We do both. No, no, no. I mean, we've had a tagging system for years that we utilize in Arcade. And if you don't know Arcade, it's kind of our ecosystem for samples and instruments. And it was really one of the first cloud-connected plug-ins that delivered content on a daily basis. And so, yeah, we've used a tagging system for a long time.

Brian Funk (01:15:09.461)

Is there someone right now doing like, okay, guitar.

Gregg (01:15:33.854)

And a tagging system is very, very good if what you type in is exactly how it's tagged. If you say I'm looking for guitar harmonics and we've tagged something as guitar harmonics, that is gonna have an unbelievably high quality result. At the same time, we also put all of our content through analysis models and sort of more generative tools where it could analyze it in a musical standpoint. And...

You know, we've had to build technology to actually connect all these pieces. How do you connect, you know, language to what the sounds are? And then once you have that, how do you not just take the sounds as it is, but how do you actually try to get them to be right for what somebody is asking for? You know, because they might ask for something that we don't have. And then we kind of have to take something that we've already built and really, you know, manipulate it to become that, you know.

So it's a combination of all of these different things. But no, I think that just the old school model of somebody manually tagging each sound, you're never gonna think of all the possibilities it could be used for, it's impossible. So that's what's exciting about the tech is moving towards something that is a bit more open.

Brian Funk (01:16:50.994)

Mm. That's pretty cool. This is a nice mixture and you get what a person actually thinks and then what a computer kind of picked up on. Which is probably...

Gregg (01:17:01.546)

Yeah, and then the challenge for us is figuring out how to weigh those based on the quality of the results. When do tagged results succeed? When do the results that are coming in more from our generative tools, when are those better? And then how do we kind of like, so it's like we're really trying to think about all this as one search engine, even though

Brian Funk (01:17:08.961)

Hmm, okay.

Gregg (01:17:31.254)

things are coming from different places.

Brian Funk (01:17:33.369)

Mm-hmm, right. Yeah, that's good. And that's, it's good to have a little human oversight and also some of that assistant, co-producer. So this is not the end of it then, I assume from what you're saying. It's not just gonna be this finding your sound palette, but also you have some other ideas. Yeah, I guess.

Gregg (01:17:53.47)

No, no. Oh yeah. No, this is, 24 is a big year for output. We haven't put out a lot of, we used to come from the world of, we made a plugin, you put it out, you spend a year on it, you get it to the world, and you move on to the next plugin, you put it out. I was always jealous of companies like Ableton that got to work on fewer products, but that got to iterate on them and improve them, and over time, really make them magical tools.

And it's the perpetual business model versus sort of the cloud connected model where you're actually listening to people and improving it. And so yeah, we've got two big releases coming out later this year, one of which we haven't spoken about. And we're keeping a little quiet at the moment. But the other one is Co-Producer. And so there's a lot more in this direction that we're working on. And even when it comes out, it's not the end of it.

This is a whole line of product that we are going to, we're fully invested in. We have a large team working on it, and we're deep in it on a day-to-day basis. And as our R&D teams and the product teams present to the entire company what we're working on, we have, there are so many holy shit moments where we're like, oh my, okay, if it does that, what if it could do this? What if it...

And again, it all comes from the standpoint of how can it help me the music maker, not how can it help the non-music maker. So they're very specific things that we're trying to do. But it all comes from what we talked about early on, which is we have all these ideas of wouldn't it be amazing if technology could do X? How do we pick the ones that we think are most impactful? So yes, you'll see Co-Producer coming out. I never like to say the exact time.

we believe it'll be out later this year. Whether or not we hit exactly end of the year or late in the year is TBD.

Brian Funk (01:19:55.045)

That's cool.

Brian Funk (01:20:00.393)

Right, technology. How fast the machines learn.

Gregg (01:20:03.306)

Yeah, when you're trying to build something that's really never been done before, there are so many unknowns. It's much easier to say, okay, we're gonna build a reverb and we know how to build reverbs. We're gonna build a cool delay. We know how to do that. But building something that has never been done, we have a roadmap and a plan, but once you get to the next step, it's like you don't know if it could be done for sure. And then...

Brian Funk (01:20:09.217)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:20:15.225)

Mm-hmm.

Gregg (01:20:28.99)

once it gets built, you don't know if it's gonna be any good. So there's multiple layers of editing and reviewing. So a lot of our products have gotten pretty close to release and then we stop and we really analyze it and we put it in front of a bunch of people and we see what's working and not working. And that is one of the things that we do at Output is instead of just putting something out to the world, we test it with lots of people and get an idea of.

Really, where are we succeeding and where are we failing? And we kind of go through a couple rounds of that before we release a public product, which honestly in the world of technology isn't very unique. Most companies do that now.

Brian Funk (01:21:05.793)

Right. Well, you guys, it's been like 10 years, right? Since you guys have been putting stuff out. Um, and you know, if you look at

the number of things you have. It's clear you've put a lot of work into each one. And that shows in, if, you know, I open Portal, for instance, and someone asks me like, what plugin, what kind of plugin is that? I'm kind of like, I don't know, it's Portal. You know, I can't say like it's a delay or it's a, it's not.

really anything else, it's its own thing. Movement, ugh, move stuff, you know, these type of things. Arcade is like that too, it's not really a sampler, but it is a little bit. I think that's a cool way to go, and it's probably why you guys have had a lot of success, and why your Goosebump moments come clearly, and having these...

maybe less about getting as much out there, but like keeping, you seem to have a lot of guiding principles behind what you guys do. And that seems to really lead you on a path that yields cool results. And I think that's, again, you know, we're talking about music and making plugins, but that's a good way to live life, to have those bigger picture things and to make sure you're staying aligned with it along the way.

I like it.

Gregg (01:22:44.118)

I appreciate that. We have predominantly music makers at output. And even if you simplify the goal to say, we have to make plugins that we ourselves would get excited about, or not just plugins, but just we have to make tools that we would be excited about.

That's enough right there to work hard to make really cool things. Because we have, you know, Output is a company built by musicians for musicians, and so we have to satisfy our own interests and our own needs. And that's really where a lot of this starts, is just, can we make something that we ourselves want? And do people...

start using the products and make music with it. And if they do, we know we're onto something. And that's kind of always been the testament to success, is whether or not our own team likes something. And frankly, if our team really likes something, it tends to be a successful product. And if our team's kind of like, eh, it doesn't usually do as well. So I think that's a good.

Brian Funk (01:23:51.522)

Hmm.

Gregg (01:23:54.082)

It's good advice for anybody that's building, wants to build a business. Build something around a world that you know really well. Build it for yourself. And if you like it and the people around you that are also in that world really like it, then you're onto something. If you just try to jump in and build a business around something that you're not an expert on, it's really hard to know whether or not you're going down the right path.

Brian Funk (01:24:16.441)

Hmm. It's been how I design my devices and packs myself. And I know when I start getting distracted by, I'm just playing with it now, you know, from finishing it or building it, like that's a good sign, you know, cause I'm enjoying it. I'm having fun with it. And that's probably a great way to think about our music and, uh, our lives in general, cool stuff.

Gregg (01:24:42.358)

Yeah, agreed, agreed.

Brian Funk (01:24:45.897)

So listen, it's been awesome having you. Thank you for carving out some of your time. I'm especially appreciative after knowing of how deliberate you are about that. So thank you for that very much. I know we can send people to output.com. They can get a good look at all your stuff, a lot of the stuff we've talked about. Anywhere else you like to send people?

Gregg (01:25:11.67)

Yeah, so output.com, it's our website. Go there for all of our products, our blog. We have Output Mag. You can follow us on social media or Instagram output. We're on LinkedIn, we're on TikTok. You can follow me personally, Greg Lerman, I'm on Instagram and LinkedIn.

And also our YouTube channel. We have a ton of educational content. Obviously there's plenty of videos around our own products, but there's a lot of videos that are also about things that have nothing to do with us. We really just try to open the stage for other music makers. We try to help people share how they make music, whether sometimes they're famous people, sometimes they're not, but it's really about building community and building education. So I would say our YouTube channel

great place to go.

Brian Funk (01:26:02.537)

Yeah, agreed. I follow it. So there's a lot of good stuff and it's like you said, it's. It's inspiring. It's not, you know, sometimes when you follow a company's YouTube, it's just commercials, but you guys don't do that. It's really cool stuff. Um, and it fits in with that overall philosophy.

Gregg (01:26:23.114)

Yeah, yeah, 100%. I appreciate it. Brian, thank you so much for having me and for doing this for helping people learn about music production. It's, it's a great thing. So thanks again. And thanks to everybody who's watching. So yeah, appreciate it and have a good one, Brian.

Brian Funk (01:26:29.398)

pleasure.

Brian Funk (01:26:37.685)

Cool. Thanks, you too.

Gregg (01:26:41.291)

Alright, take care.

Brian Funk (01:26:43.005)

Alrighty, we did it. That's great, man.

Gregg (01:26:45.262)

Cool, and that's a cut.

podcastBrian FunkGregg lehrman, output, music production podcast