Lanier Sammons - Engineer, Composer, and Educator: Music Production Podcast #344

Lanier Sammons is an engineer, composer, and teacher at California State University, Monterey Bay. He teaches recording and technology, and has worked on many records, films, concert hall works, and installation pieces.  

Lanier and I spoke about his work as a teacher and producer, as well as his new track, a cover of ZZ Top's "Waiting for the Bus." We discussed our experiences together at the Monterey Songwriting Retreat, and how collaborating with others helps bring out new ideas and opportunities for music producers.

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Show Notes:

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Episode Transcript:

Brian Funk (00:00.458)

We'll start it up. All righty. Hello everybody. Welcome to the Music Production Podcast. Thanks for listening. I'm your host, Brian Funk, and this is the show where we talk about all things making music. And on today's, I already know what I've messed up here. I just, I wasn't sure of the pronunciation of your last name if it was... Okay, that's what I would have guessed. Maybe I should have just done it. Yeah. I didn't want to get that wrong, but I don't think I heard it actually said.

Lanier Sammons (00:16.509)

No worries.

Oh, uh, Sammons. Yeah. Simmons with an A. No, appreciate it. Yeah. Lanier is usually the one, but, uh, you've got that one down already. Yeah. Sure.

Brian Funk (00:32.094)

Yeah. Okay. All right. I'm going to do that again. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Music Production Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Funk, and this is the show where we talk about all things making music. And today I have Lanier Sammons on the show. Lanier is an engineer, composer, teacher. He works at California State University in Monterey Bay. He does mixing, mastering, film scoring, installation work, concert hall pieces, and some podcast themes as well.

Um, Lanier and I got to meet when we were on the Monterey songwriting retreat a couple of weeks ago. And if you've been listening to the show, you heard my conversation with Peter Bell, where we were both on that and Peter and I were roommates and Lanier was on Peter's team for the songwriting retreat. So, um, we had a great time and, um, enjoyed talking to the linear while I was there and I'm really happy to.

get to sit down and spend a little more time. So Lene, welcome to the show. Good to see you again.

Lanier Sammons (01:32.481)

Thanks so much. Really happy to be here. And, uh, yeah, big fan, uh, of the podcast and also the music you're making, of course. Yeah. Thanks.

Brian Funk (01:39.426)

Thanks man. Loving what you're doing too. Your work has lots of cool elements to it. There's guitar, there's rock stuff, but then there's almost orchestral elements. Lots of nature in there too.

Lanier Sammons (01:54.325)

Sure, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, thanks. I appreciate that. Yeah, I'm a big fan of keeping things in multiple directions and yeah, makes it more interesting for me at least.

Brian Funk (02:07.402)

Yeah, right. I don't know if that's sometimes to my detriment that I like to go in lots of different directions. But I don't know. There's so much you can do with music, right? So...

Lanier Sammons (02:13.835)

Yeah, yeah.

Lanier Sammons (02:18.469)

Yeah, yeah, there was this, uh, the production expert, you know, that blog, um, article a couple of weeks ago that was, uh, about how we shouldn't all try to be Jack of all trades. And I felt a little personally attacked, but, uh, I think it's kind of more fun that way, right. And, uh, I like all the challenges.

Brian Funk (02:32.493)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (02:37.846)

Yeah, well, I guess there's like a million different jobs you do sometimes, even just producing one song in any genre. You're wearing lots of hats. And then if you're going to do lots of genres, it is tough. Like, for instance, the last couple of nights, my wife and I have been trying to watch horror movies because it's getting into Halloween season. So we're having fun with that. Some of the campy stuff, but we were looking at movies by Stephen King, like just as the search basis. And.

Lanier Sammons (02:42.346)

Yeah.

Thank you.

Lanier Sammons (02:56.645)

Mm-hmm, sure, sure. It's that time of the year.

Lanier Sammons (03:04.542)

Hmm?

Brian Funk (03:09.691)

If he would suddenly have had a film that was not in that genre, we would be like, hey, what's going on? Even though I know he does some writing like that. But I guess like...

Lanier Sammons (03:15.033)

Yeah. Yeah, the Stephen King romantic comedy would be, uh, I don't know. I'd probably watch that, actually.

Brian Funk (03:22.542)

Yeah, that sounds pretty good if I'm going to like a romantic comedy. But I guess from the audience perspective, you do come to expect certain things from artists. But yeah, I'm with you. It's just more fun to spread your wings and explore the world a little bit.

Lanier Sammons (03:34.701)

Sure.

Lanier Sammons (03:41.449)

Yeah, yeah, I hear you. I do worry sometimes if, you know, I think there's something to be said about having that identity that folks can, can attach to you and go to you looking for. Um, and, and yeah, I wonder, you know, how much your audience will go with you. But, uh, I'm also fortunate in that a lot of the work I do is sort of not, not as much, you know, attached to my own name as it is, you know, other artists or it's a film project and, uh, you know, I think maybe that.

Maybe that helps too, right? It's an excuse to, to stretch out.

Brian Funk (04:13.578)

Yeah, that's definitely a cool aspect of working with other people and organizations and stuff, that you get to try weird things. I've definitely had some fun making music for situations I never would normally do. And you learn a lot that way. A lot of the production techniques too.

Lanier Sammons (04:28.525)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, absolutely.

Brian Funk (04:36.898)

You know, I found so much about like EDM is online and there's how to make like all everything. And it's not really the type of music I make, but a lot of it applies to other stuff. It's a great way to add spice.

Lanier Sammons (04:45.417)

Mm-hmm. Mm. Yeah. Yeah, I always feel like with the teaching too, there's, you know, any time I'm going in some direction, even if it doesn't turn into something I'm gonna use, there's probably somebody sitting in my class that'll find that thing useful. And yeah, that's another good excuse to pull on all those strands.

Brian Funk (05:04.536)

Hmm.

Brian Funk (05:09.258)

Yeah, that's one nice thing about teaching is it takes you into unexpected places. And even if it's just the questions your students ask, you kind of like, Oh yeah, let's see, let's figure that out. So you're teaching at California State University, Monterey Bay, right?

Lanier Sammons (05:18.813)

Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (05:23.083)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (05:27.533)

That's it, CSUMB, yep.

Brian Funk (05:30.146)

So tell me about that. What kind of classes do you teach? What kind of work are you guys doing?

Lanier Sammons (05:35.049)

Yeah, absolutely. My official title there is Associate Professor of Recording and Technology, and I'm in a music program. So it's a little unusual. One of the things you mentioned, the episode you did with Peter and YouTube, we're talking about a bunch of the ways that Berkeley is really distinctive in being a spot where tech is kind of foregrounded and built out. And we're fortunate at CSUMB to-

Brian Funk (05:58.679)

Hmm.

Lanier Sammons (06:02.081)

kind of have the opportunity to do that. I think in a much different way. I mean, we're tiny compared to Berkeley. But we've got a pretty commercial grade studio set up there. The campus used to be Fort Ord, and we are in a building that was a chapel. So we've got the big chapel space as the live room.

Brian Funk (06:21.43)

reverb and yeah.

Lanier Sammons (06:22.857)

Yeah, big old, well, it's not that old, but old looking MTA 980 analog console, 40 channels, second control room with a hybrid console, a matrix remote, and a bunch of outboard gear, monitors, a surround setup in a different space. So it really is a chance to really teach and for the students to learn in a genuine studio setup, which I think is...

a little bit different than a lot of other schools. Everybody's got their music tech offering, but a lot of times I think it's sitting in a lab and you learn Audacity and maybe GarageBand and this is a little different.

Brian Funk (06:59.422)

Yeah, that's been a nice change that's starting to happen and has been happening maybe the last 10 years or so. And schools recognizing that this stuff, even from the perspective of a bedroom producer, is legitimate. I mean, there's been great music made that way. And I love that it's being embraced.

Lanier Sammons (07:13.149)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (07:20.393)

Absolutely, yeah. Another thing that I think is distinctive about us doing music at CSUMB is there's not an audition requirement. So a lot of folks come in not really, you know, in many cases their primary instrument is really the DAW, you know. You know, you know, once they're with us they'll take a couple semesters of piano and do some other performance for sure. But we get folks coming in who are, you know, pretty virtuosic on their instrument and folks who

who really haven't spent that much time, you know, with an instrument in hand at all. So there's a tech entry point too, which I think isn't always there other places.

Brian Funk (08:00.194)

Right, and really, you don't need to play an instrument to make music anymore. Somehow along the way, producing music has been democratized where you don't have to have that. It's helpful, of course, but it's another instrument in itself.

Lanier Sammons (08:08.333)

Hehehe

Lanier Sammons (08:11.798)

Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I think there's a strong argument for, for DAW as instrument, you know, for, uh, for really having its own kind of like performance practice and, um, uh, but at the same time being something totally different, cause for so many people, it also is a, like a non real time performance practice then, right? You know, you don't have to make the decisions and execute them.

Brian Funk (08:39.927)

Right.

Lanier Sammons (08:43.345)

in the moment in the same way. Um, but yeah, I think that's super interesting and you know, very curious, uh, the AI question seems natural here too, right? Like, is that gonna even further democratize what it means to make music? And then, you know, yeah, inevitably, I guess, what does that mean for the rest of us too?

Brian Funk (09:02.474)

Yeah, democratize it so much that you don't even need a person to do it.

Lanier Sammons (09:06.397)

You're right.

Lanier Sammons (09:10.537)

Yeah, yeah, that seems tricky, but I'm sure we'll all... We don't have to stop just because the machines do it well, right?

Brian Funk (09:19.134)

Yeah, yeah. Right. I mean, people still record to analog tape for fun, you know, because it's got a certain charm to it. And we don't lose the tech. I mean, maybe it's harder to get some of that old vintage stuff, but it's not like it disappears. It's not like we're trading it.

Lanier Sammons (09:24.617)

Absolutely. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (09:34.957)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That I did have a sobering moment last, last semester, I was teaching a student who wanted to do independent study on sort of like working with vintage media. And I thought, all right, we've got, you know, a couple of tape machines around the department, there's some other stuff and, uh, like our first or second meeting, he brought in like a task cam, four track cassette player. That's the same one I had when I was a kid and was like, here's my vintage, vintage media. It's like, all right. Yep.

Brian Funk (10:00.11)

Cool. Yeah.

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (10:06.288)

I'm feeling the generation gap. My original is vintage now.

Brian Funk (10:10.562)

That's awesome. Do you remember what machine it was by any chance?

Lanier Sammons (10:14.557)

Oh gosh, I'll forget the number. So it's a TASCAM and 4-track, you know, straight to cassette. It's sitting behind me in the closet somewhere. I've still got it around. They probably haven't plugged it in a decade. But, yeah. Yeah.

Brian Funk (10:19.938)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (10:28.623)

I had one of those too, that's why I asked. It was the cheapest one you could get. It was the advertised as the meat and potatoes for track. I think it only had two inputs and maybe even two faders and you had to switch between them with a little slider that kind of, that's possible. I could be wrong about that, but I was so much fun though.

Lanier Sammons (10:31.105)

Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (10:36.977)

Sure. Yeah, yeah.

Lanier Sammons (10:42.001)

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Lanier Sammons (10:50.129)

Hmm. Mhm.

Hehehe

Yeah, yeah, those were great things to learn on too, right? You had to figure out some stuff about signal flow and, you know, actually old school bouncing between tracks to get more than four things on there. And yeah. Okay. Yeah. Sure. There you go. Yeah.

Brian Funk (10:56.529)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (10:59.693)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (11:04.375)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (11:09.558)

Yeah, I don't think mine had that feature. I don't think it had like that. I think of meat and potatoes for tracks. So yeah. But I vividly remember when I first set that up, I started playing all the guitar parts to the Rooster by Alice and Jane's, if you know that song. And that was like, I couldn't believe it. I was like, this is amazing. It's so fun. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (11:27.168)

Nice. Yeah, yeah, I remember that one. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (11:36.947)

Yeah. I remember trying to record my, uh, like middle school band in there. So I'm like, all right, I've got four tracks and I've got a drummer, two guitars, vocalist. I think we didn't have a bass player at that point. I was like, all right, I've got one mic for my drums. Where does it go? Yep. Yeah.

Brian Funk (11:50.43)

Yeah, right, just hauled it out. Yeah, but you learn so much like that. It never occurred to me until I had one of those that it matters where you put the microphone. It taught me all about, you started to realize where you got cooler sounds, if you stuck it in certain spots.

Lanier Sammons (12:03.521)

Sure.

Lanier Sammons (12:08.585)

Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yup. And, uh, yeah, I started experimenting with some outboard gear when, uh, when I had that too. And I had like a little multi-effects unit that totally taught me, you know, like to understand reverb and delays and things like that. Uh, and I also vividly remember, um, my dad came home one day with, uh, with this little box and was like, Hey, I went to the music store. I asked him, you know, like, what, what should you have? And he was like, he told me, uh,

This is a compressor and this is the sound of contemporary music. Um, and I, like, I, I plugged some stuff into it and twiddled some knobs. And it's like, I can't hear that this is doing anything. It was, you know, like 14 year old me did not have the ears to, uh, to understand what, uh, what compression sounded like yet, but, uh, yeah, a great introduction to it and a good reminder when, you know, students show up in the classroom and it's day one of compression, they're like, I can't hear this. I'm like, yeah, right.

Brian Funk (12:41.75)

Hehehehe

Brian Funk (12:48.574)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (12:55.438)

All right.

Brian Funk (13:06.302)

Yeah. I have, what is it? The Alesis 3660, I think it is. No, I'm sorry. It's not, is it Alesis? It's the 3660. I forget. I can't see the name on it, but it's like a dual channel compressor. And I got that later. By then I had ADAT machines that were...

Lanier Sammons (13:06.673)

I remember. We'll get there.

Lanier Sammons (13:34.217)

Nice. Mm-hmm. Hehehe. Mm-hmm.

Brian Funk (13:34.866)

already kind of old by then, by the time I got them. And I understood I was supposed to use the compressor on everything for some reason. I had no idea what I was doing. I probably ruined so many recordings with it. But I didn't understand even what the idea was with the process. What was even for? It just makes it sound better, was what I was told.

Lanier Sammons (13:42.781)

Yeah, right.

Lanier Sammons (13:47.245)

Hehehehe.

Lanier Sammons (13:55.189)

Yeah, right. Yeah.

Yep, yep.

Brian Funk (14:04.182)

It's a great point though to remember what it was like at those early stages. I had a club at my school, music production club, at the high school I teach at. And I get students come in all the time and like, you really have to ask them, like, do you, do you familiar with like bars and beats, quarter notes? And some of them, they know it. Some of them know it better than me. And some of them, some of them have no idea. So it's like.

Lanier Sammons (14:10.463)

Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (14:14.281)

Oh well. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (14:25.077)

Yeah. Right, right.

Brian Funk (14:33.966)

Okay. And I'm reminded of my grandmother actually when she first got a computer and I'm trying to show her how to like go to AOL or something to get email. And I'm telling her, okay, so you just move over here and click on that. And the idea of move over here and click on that with a mouse, but what do you mean click on it? Like just terminology, simple things that you take for granted that there's so much of that in learning music.

Lanier Sammons (14:35.798)

Yeah.

Hmm.

Lanier Sammons (14:43.469)

Hehehe

Lanier Sammons (14:53.015)

Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (14:58.985)

Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (15:03.997)

Yeah, that's one of the things I think, you know, always trying to grow as a teacher, hopefully in various ways. And I think at this stage, I've been, I've been at CSUMB for about 10 years and, you know, a lot of the same classes over that time. And I think that's the, the biggest thing I'm trying to keep on my radar is, uh, on awareness of where my own familiarity, um, might get in the way of teaching it. You know, like you, you can't just, uh, you can't throw out.

Brian Funk (15:28.877)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (15:31.797)

Those terms without making sure you explain them and, you know, hopefully we've got it built into the class in a good way, but, uh, like you were saying too, sometimes students drop into the classroom and they've, they've been doing this and watching YouTube videos and, you know, listening to podcasts like yours and they, they know a lot of what's going on, but, uh, yeah, it's a, it's a wide range on that entry point. Yeah.

Brian Funk (15:53.034)

Yeah, especially DAWs, because you kind of have to know computers at least a little bit. File structures and stuff like that. It's funny how music gets you involved in all these other side missions. Everything from web design to marketing and computer specs.

Lanier Sammons (15:55.529)

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Sure. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (16:06.104)

Right? Absolutely.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, I mean I... Yep, I picked up a soldering iron for the first time in music grad school. Hehehehe.

Brian Funk (16:18.446)

Nice. Yeah, I've mostly unsuccessfully tried to fix a lot of guitar cables that way.

Lanier Sammons (16:25.385)

Yeah. I made some contact mics that I still have around and use for various things. And they're still working, like 15 years out. So I think I did okay. But I now know enough to know that they were ugly solder jobs.

Brian Funk (16:31.168)

Nice

Brian Funk (16:43.664)

My one successful soldering job is somewhere over here. It's a little bit out of reach, but it's a telephone that's turned into a microphone. So with an XLR kind of soldered in, which is really simple. It's two soldering points. So you just two wires. The way mine works is you actually speak into the earphone part of the phone.

Lanier Sammons (16:51.805)

Oh cool, yeah, nice.

Lanier Sammons (17:06.741)

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Nice.

Brian Funk (17:10.306)

It's got such a cool sound.

Lanier Sammons (17:12.557)

Yeah. I'd be curious to hear it. I'm curious how colorful, you know, like I've got the landline sound in my head still a little bit, but I imagine curious how much of that is the actual receiver and how much of it was transmission, you know.

Brian Funk (17:27.474)

Yeah, right. I guess some of it must be transmission, but a lot of it does come out of that. That trans... whatever it is in there. It's a worthy little afternoon project.

Lanier Sammons (17:36.309)

Yeah, yeah, nice.

Lanier Sammons (17:43.005)

Yeah, yeah. I imagine there are a lot of those phones kicking around in thrift shops and Goodwills. Yeah. Cool.

Brian Funk (17:47.806)

Yeah, that's exactly where I went. I just went to the thrift shop and grabbed the one they had. And it's, you know, because, and I don't know if this would strike people younger than us that never had a landline phone to talk to someone through, but there's an intimacy to it. It's got that feeling like, you know, you're on the phone for a couple hours, like spilling your guts to somebody you trust.

Lanier Sammons (18:12.693)

Right? Yeah. There's old ones that had the like plastic shoulder rest so you could, uh, could really get into it. Mm hmm. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. I hadn't thought about that there. Yeah. Like, yeah, there's something different about the cell phone, even still being right there in your ear, right? It's a, yeah, it's a different feel. Yeah. What do you use?

Brian Funk (18:19.03)

Yeah. It's like, yeah. Yeah. That's the lost art form, right? Like holding the phone between your shoulders like that. You can't do that anymore. Yeah.

Brian Funk (18:37.791)

Yeah.

Even some of those sounds, dial tones and busy signals.

Lanier Sammons (18:42.309)

Oh, sure. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. The dial-up modem sound that was all over 90s music for a while. What do you wind up using the phone mic on?

Brian Funk (18:53.234)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (18:59.534)

I don't know if I've actually used it on a recording for anything, any songs yet.

Yeah, I don't think I have, but I know I want to do it at some point when, you know, some kind of like intimate part of a song where you want it to sound like, you know, that feeling. I mean, I can remember having friends, you play your guitar over the phone, I made this song, what do you think? And next time I want to capture that, you know. You can get pretty far and pretty close with some EQing and, you know, compression and stuff with the DAW,

Lanier Sammons (19:26.521)

Yep.

Lanier Sammons (19:35.649)

Sure. Yeah. Called telephone EQ for a reason, right? Right.

Brian Funk (19:40.946)

Yeah, but I'm glad I made it anyway. And if nothing else, I think for me, I'll take a little pride in like, I made that microphone. You know, make me like the song better. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (19:51.485)

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the gear you've had your hands on. Yeah, yeah. It's a different, it's a different relationship. Yeah.

Brian Funk (19:59.271)

I think that translates on some level. Even if it's just for when I listen back and I think to myself, like, yeah, there's something special about that.

Lanier Sammons (20:05.389)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Brian Funk (20:11.328)

You said it's much smaller there. You call it CSUMB. Get used to that.

Lanier Sammons (20:16.361)

Yeah, yeah, Cal State University, Monterey Bay. Yeah, it's a little shorter that way. Ha ha.

Brian Funk (20:21.066)

Yeah, I wonder if that presents like some cool advantages to the students too, because I mean, I went to high school in a place where I think there was a hundred kids in my class that graduated. Um, and now I teach at a school where there's two different high schools. And I think altogether it winds up being close to 1500 kids that graduate. So you can go through that school and never meet people in your grade. Whereas at my school.

Lanier Sammons (20:32.361)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, me too.

Lanier Sammons (20:41.109)

Yeah, yeah.

Lanier Sammons (20:46.129)

Right? Yeah, you're gonna know everybody.

Brian Funk (20:48.718)

If you moved in third grade, you were the new kid until we graduated. But everybody really kind of knew who you were for better or for worse. Maybe it's harder to get away with things, but there was also, I guess, more of an understanding of who the students are and what they're going through.

Lanier Sammons (20:54.335)

right?

Yeah. Right.

Lanier Sammons (21:11.425)

Definitely. Yeah, I think a lot of that holds true at CSUMB too. So the school is kind of mid-sized. I think we're around 7,000, 7,500 undergrads, but the music program, usually we run about 50 majors at any given time. And most of those folks, another thing that's a little unusual about us, most of those folks are doing tech.

in one way or another. So, you know, not just the requirement for the major, but they're taking classes beyond that and see themselves as, you know, producers, engineers, or, you know, artists that are gonna do that stuff for themselves as well. And I think the size there, a couple of directions. One, just kinda on the logistical side, you know, we've got this giant, well-equipped studio sitting there, and you're mostly just competing with your classmates for time there.

And not all of them are going to be at the stage in the program where they're able to book their own time, but we get them there pretty quick. So that means you can be in there doing your own sessions. Usually if you really want to, you can get a couple hours a week, four hours a week, longer at the right times. And I think that hands-on time is a really important factor for folks. Just no substitute for learning it, then going in and doing it, and pushing your own limitations.

Brian Funk (22:32.023)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (22:33.953)

So some of it's just the logistical side, but then I think that social side you mentioned is super important too. Folks are in class with the same people, generally pretty small class sizes for the tech stuff. So they get to know each other and some of that means cool collaborations come out of it. We've had a bunch of neat bands that formed from folks that were in classes together and just you know.

Brian Funk (22:56.238)

Hmm.

Lanier Sammons (23:00.513)

hey, I'm gonna book two hours to put my song down. Will you come engineer for me while I'm out there tracking my vocals? And that kind of stuff happens all the time too. And then the other side of that is just, as faculty it means I get to know the students pretty well too, usually by the time they've graduated, I've had them for three, four semesters, sometimes more. And there's no substitute for that. I think more.

Brian Funk (23:26.431)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (23:29.037)

The better you know the student, the more you can give them helpful and useful instruction and advice.

Brian Funk (23:34.35)

Right. Yeah. I had a couple in my music production club that kind of went through the years, you know, it's coming to the club and it's just really cool to see them grow and develop. And then you also start to get a sense of what they're trying to do so you can help them in that way. Yeah, it's so important. Peter and I were talking about this, too, when we spoke just about that connection, you know, even

Lanier Sammons (23:39.593)

Mm-hmm. Cool. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (23:52.053)

Yeah. Nice.

Brian Funk (24:03.454)

Even in the online program that I'm teaching with Berkeley, there's still a lot of opportunity for connection, people to form relationships. It's so important to have people that you can talk to about this stuff and share ideas and pull you out of the lows that inevitably come along.

Lanier Sammons (24:20.577)

Right? Absolutely.

Lanier Sammons (24:27.582)

Yep. Yeah. And you all were talking about students kind of staying in touch and checking back in too. And yeah, man, that is satisfying when people get back in touch and they're like, you know, hey, you want to check out this cool music that I just made or, you know, even better when they're like, hey, I've got a wonderful job in the field and I just want to tell you about it. And that's, yeah.

Brian Funk (24:47.446)

Yeah, right. Yeah, once in a while I get that from maybe a high school student or somebody from Berkeley. It is, that's kind of when you feel like, oh, maybe I'm doing this well. At least while they were here. I must have done something worthwhile. Because it's a hard job to know if you're doing at all. You just kind of hope you try your best and hope that it helps people out.

Lanier Sammons (24:53.822)

Nice. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (25:00.881)

Mm-hmm, absolutely. Yep.

Lanier Sammons (25:11.533)

Absolutely.

Lanier Sammons (25:15.997)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a great point. It can feel like a sort of a black box. You know, you get your, your evals and that tells you something, but right. Like the, the real payoff should be many years down the road. And if, if students don't come back and tell you, then, uh, you know, I guess you can always do a little, little social media stalking, but, uh, you know, it's better if they just, uh, come and give you the update.

Brian Funk (25:30.454)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (25:39.262)

Right? Yeah, I do that in my classes at the high school. I always give them at the end of the year, like a piece of paper, and it's blank and just anything you want to say, you know? And I tell them, I'm like, look, you know, I've been observed how many times this year? A couple, you know? And yeah, I got that right up and all. But you guys really know what's going on in here. You know, what do you think? Let me know, because I'm trying to.

Lanier Sammons (25:51.061)

Nice.

Lanier Sammons (25:56.801)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (26:02.337)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (26:07.166)

improve upon this thing I'm doing here. I really do value those opinions a lot because they went through it. They saw the good end and all the bad days too.

Lanier Sammons (26:09.597)

Right? Yeah.

Oh absolutely, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Lanier Sammons (26:19.101)

Yep. Yeah. I know people have a lot of justified criticisms about student evals. You know, there's all kind of research on biases and things like that. At the same time, you know, there's always nuggets in there, right? You know, like, I think, you know, problems when you just turn them into quantifiable data and, you know, don't take into account all those biases and things like that. But yeah, I get a ton out of reading.

Brian Funk (26:34.667)

Yeah, yeah.

Lanier Sammons (26:47.305)

they write in the actual qualitative stuff.

Brian Funk (26:50.734)

Right, yeah, and I'm sure that's the same for like professional evaluations too, if they like you. Like, that goes a long way and it's nice to get that perspective too, anyway.

Lanier Sammons (26:54.709)

Sure. Yep, yep.

Lanier Sammons (27:01.041)

Right.

Lanier Sammons (27:04.669)

Yeah. I'm curious about the combo of the high school English teaching and the Berkeley teaching and where do they overlap? I'm sure there's a lot of spots there, but those seem like two very different classroom environments.

Brian Funk (27:23.91)

Well, if you're in the Berkeley class, you signed up and paid money to be there. So you're, you're kind of excited, I think on some level, uh, usually in my English class, you have to be there. You don't have a choice. You have to pass four years of English graduate high school. So there may be a tougher sell, you know, and, and also, um, it's, it's not, some of them like don't want to read, don't want, don't want to.

Lanier Sammons (27:31.445)

Hehehe. Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (27:38.826)

Yeah. Right, right.

Lanier Sammons (27:47.213)

Sure, that makes sense.

Lanier Sammons (27:53.713)

Mm-hmm. Sure. Yeah.

Brian Funk (27:54.286)

They think they don't like it and it's probably because school has beaten it out of them their whole life you know, I always say to them like You have it. I don't like to read just because I like to decode words. I Like to read things I like to read about it's just like movies who likes movies they all raise their hand I could show you bad move. I could show you bad tick-tock accounts and you'd say you hate tick-tock And I think school does that honestly, too

Lanier Sammons (27:58.689)

Sure, sure, yeah.

Lanier Sammons (28:06.721)

Hehehehe

Lanier Sammons (28:10.663)

Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (28:19.775)

Sure.

Yeah.

Brian Funk (28:23.406)

to a lot of students through the actual reading they have to do. You know, and when you're that young, like you're not into the classics for the most part. You know, that's like an academic exercise for, even for me, I don't read Shakespeare for fun. I appreciate it. It's great work, but it's work for me to, you know, it's not the same. So that's the main difference, I would say, you know, that it's...

Lanier Sammons (28:27.169)

Yeah. Yep.

Lanier Sammons (28:44.449)

Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (28:50.893)

Mm-hmm. That makes sense. The self-motivation. Yeah.

Brian Funk (28:54.342)

Yeah, yeah, I mean, and it's not a knock against my high school students in any way. I mean, I totally get it. I was the same way. I didn't even like English in high school at all, really. But there are so many overlaps that sometimes I almost don't know what I'm teaching in a way, especially when you get into like the more philosophical or more foundational stuff about work, hard work, work ethic, creativity.

Lanier Sammons (28:58.753)

Oh sure, yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (29:13.517)

Hehehe

Lanier Sammons (29:17.358)

Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (29:20.821)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (29:24.526)

then it almost doesn't matter what you're talking about. And there are a lot of principles and ideas that I share with them that a few hours later I'm talking about to Berkeley kids or students. So it's cool that there is that. And I didn't see that right away when I first started all this stuff teaching and then doing music. I didn't see all those connections, but the more I think I understand

Lanier Sammons (29:37.61)

Yeah, that's cool.

Brian Funk (29:54.646)

both the more I see the connection.

Lanier Sammons (29:57.357)

Sure. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. This is, is back a, uh, back a couple points, but, um, I just finished reading this Nick Hornby book called, I think it's called Dickens and Prince that might be the other way around, which is literally a comparison between Charles Dickens and Prince. Um, which I gotta be honest, my, my takeaway from it is that it is a little bit of a stretch, but it was a fun excuse for him to write about both people. Um,

Brian Funk (30:13.574)

Oh wow.

Brian Funk (30:22.323)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (30:23.061)

But what you were saying reminded me of there was a second, a section in there where he's talking about a judge in some criminal trial, you know, assigning this kid who was convicted of, I think like some kind of violent offense, if I remember correctly, to read Dickens. Right. That was like his, his punishment was supposed to be sort of morally elevating at the same time. And, uh, and Hornby had some good stuff about, you know, sort of how little sense that makes in so many ways. And that, you know, like.

Brian Funk (30:40.935)

Uh huh.

Brian Funk (30:52.066)

Hehehe

Lanier Sammons (30:52.853)

You know, you know, he talks about coming to love Dickens in high school or maybe it was college, but, uh, also that, you know, like Dickens was low brow in his time, you know, like he would be shocked that, uh, that he's being held up as this, uh, paragon of, of classic literature. Um, and, uh, yeah, I think that stuff is, is fascinating and yeah, it's a good reminder for music too. That's another, um, like mid-career thing I find myself working on is, uh,

Brian Funk (31:01.866)

Yeah, yeah, right.

Brian Funk (31:11.085)

Right.

Lanier Sammons (31:21.341)

It's, it's so easy to go to musical examples that I assume people will know, but you know, a couple, a couple of generations removed here. These are, it's not super familiar and yeah, so maybe there's, there's a slight classics problem to overcome in, in music too.

Brian Funk (31:33.454)

Hmm.

Brian Funk (31:41.218)

Right, right. Yeah, well, that's pretty funny about the reading. You know like the classic detention scene with the kid writing on the board, whatever? I make it a point, I never make writing a punishment. I don't want that association. Or reading, because it's already got a bad rap with a lot of kids. So I don't like to do that. But that is pretty funny.

Lanier Sammons (31:50.616)

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Lanier Sammons (31:55.177)

Yeah, that makes sense. Right? Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (32:04.694)

Mm-hmm.

Brian Funk (32:10.806)

works out.

Lanier Sammons (32:10.949)

My, uh, my wife has a great story of the opposite, which is her dad, uh, growing up would tell her that she had a bedtime, uh, had to be asleep except if she was reading, so she would like, you know, uh, voraciously read cause she thought she was getting away with something, uh, staying up past her bedtime. And I'm sure that was, that was her dad's plan all along. Yeah.

Brian Funk (32:21.658)

Hmm.

Brian Funk (32:28.746)

Yeah. Right. Ha ha. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah, I can. I did the same a little bit, but I wasn't reading the books for school. Like to me, it was like a different it was a lot like music, too. It was like a different world. I would listen to music. But for me in school, when I was a kid, like all this music we were doing was like, I'm not into that at all. Playing in.

Lanier Sammons (32:41.613)

Sure. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (32:47.83)

Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (32:55.349)

Mm-hmm.

Brian Funk (32:56.694)

I didn't play in the band. I wasn't interested in learning the stuff we were doing in our little music classes. Because we weren't playing music. We were just learning about it. And I don't know.

Lanier Sammons (33:03.842)

Yep.

Lanier Sammons (33:08.401)

Yeah. Right. Yeah. And when you have no choice over rep, that's tricky. That's back to that same issue.

Brian Funk (33:15.691)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (33:19.958)

Well, it's funny what you say though about like finding those common reference points because I go through that all the time where there's things like I just think they're going to know and they don't and every year I'm surprised. And every year I think there's fewer common things for us all, just as a culture even. You know, we used to have our few channels and our MTV and you kind of knew what was going on.

Lanier Sammons (33:29.141)

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (33:37.901)

Sure. Yeah.

Brian Funk (33:45.51)

everyone had the same reference points, but now everyone chooses their own adventure and you could be watching obscure like, you know, 1960s spy movies all the time and you know, who knows what someone else is watching.

Lanier Sammons (33:50.486)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (33:59.974)

Right? Absolutely. Yeah. I started making it a point like a couple of years into teaching of jumping on streaming platform and just going straight over to like chart playlists and once every few months just going down and making sure I was listening to like the top 20 things. And that was super, super eye opening. And I think especially for teaching engineering and production.

Brian Funk (34:19.019)

Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (34:26.121)

important, right? Like it gave me a much better lens into some of the sounds that, uh, that I think the students were aspiring to. And, uh, and I mean just, you know, got me aware of a bunch of artists that despite their massive success and popularity, somehow were not on my radar.

Brian Funk (34:28.214)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (34:44.606)

Yeah, right. Yeah, it's true. It is a good thing to just keep an eye on. And especially, I think when you're looking at the production aspect of like, you know, hit music. To me, that's where it's interesting. A lot of the actual music isn't so much my cup of tea most of the time, but the, the work that goes into get it to sound like that is, you know, it's like some

Lanier Sammons (34:51.029)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (34:55.856)

Mm-hmm.

Brian Funk (35:14.958)

skills behind that and people want to know how to do that kind of stuff despite my tendency to want to make everything sound like it came out of a garage.

Lanier Sammons (35:16.964)

Absolutely. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (35:25.585)

Yeah, I think it's, yes, it's super interesting that the so much of the what I think of as like production virtuosity seems to happen on really, really popular music, you know, it's kind of surprising. And maybe it's more a contemporary thing, but like the amount of experimentation that happens with like with mixes on tracks that are, you know, from giant artists and wind up on the on the top of the charts. It's yeah, I appreciate it.

Brian Funk (35:36.088)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (35:54.081)

It's nice to feel like that stuff is appreciated too, you know, that folks are into here and cool engineering.

Brian Funk (35:57.6)

Mm-hmm.

Brian Funk (36:02.09)

Right, right. It's part of what makes a lot of the artists, you know, have that edge and sound so slick and fresh because of the way it's presented.

Lanier Sammons (36:09.205)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Brian Funk (36:13.17)

Having that attitude too will help you enjoy many more kinds of music even if the actual music itself isn't for you. You can appreciate some other aspect of it.

Lanier Sammons (36:23.383)

Yeah.

Yep. That's an exercise I do with the students periodically, you know, sort of like in a music appreciation vein. But, you know, I, I tell them, you know, you certainly don't have to like all the music you hear, right? You know, everyone's entitled to personal taste for sure. Um, but I think as a musician, it's a good exercise to try to find something to appreciate about every piece of music you hear, because, you know, I mean, what piece of music was made without somebody at some stage pouring...

heart and soul and sweat and tears into it. And so there's gotta be something there that's, you know, cool and inspirational and interesting. Or at least where you can just say, you know, hey, it's not my cup of tea, but I can really tell what they were, what they were putting into it.

Brian Funk (37:13.746)

Right. And different people come to music for different reasons. Some people want to hear just a fun beat. Some people want to hear something that sounds fresh and new. And some people want to hear musicians playing really well. Some people want to hear great songs. Some people want to mood to study to or something. It's to know how to access a lot of that stuff is important if you want to be a versatile producer, engineer.

Lanier Sammons (37:28.245)

Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah.

Brian Funk (37:41.715)

any of those jobs really.

Lanier Sammons (37:41.877)

Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.

Brian Funk (37:46.25)

What are the classes you're teaching?

Lanier Sammons (37:48.585)

Yeah. Well, right now, nothing, because I'm on sabbatical. So yeah, a bunch of time for creative projects, which is exciting. But normally there's, well, actually we're at a little bit of a transition point. We are, we're just about to launch next year, kind of the return of a dedicated tech concentration within the major. So we've always had a bunch of flexibility and a bunch of tech classes, but I got to build it out a little more formally and add a couple of things. So we.

Brian Funk (37:51.094)

You're on sabbatical, right? Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (38:18.421)

We have a couple of sort of intro tech classes, you know, the things that get people started and getting you introduced to the DAW and some basics of acoustics and signal flow. And then where I usually get people, we do a dedicated recording tracking class and a dedicated mixing and editing class. And then at the top of that structure, we do a class just called advanced audio production. That's kind of

putting it all together. So for that one, usually an outside artist or a few outside artists comes in and the students see a small project sort of start to finish with that artist. So that's been a bunch of it. And then the stuff we're getting to bring online newly will be a post-production audio course. We've got a really great film department in particular at CSUMB that we've been collaborating with for a long time. So.

building that side out a little more, but also some relevance for TV and games, of course. A live sound course coming on board, which has always kinda been a part of the other ones, but given it its own space. And then a MIDI synthesis and DSP course to kinda pull all of that stuff into its own place as well. So yeah, those will all be mine when I go back. And then usually I get to do the

Every student at CSUMB, regardless of program, does a capstone project. So senior thesis style, you know, usually a research paper, but in our case, usually also a creative project of some sort. And I usually get to get to work on those as well, which is, which is always super satisfying.

Brian Funk (39:57.614)

Hmm.

nice, so you kind of help them see their project come into fruition. That's cool.

Lanier Sammons (40:04.753)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those are, uh, yeah, you know, self-directed self selected. Um, and I just kind of get to step into that advisor role and, uh, you know, help them get what they want to do over the finish line. Yeah. That's always fun.

Brian Funk (40:18.146)

Mm.

Brian Funk (40:21.238)

Yeah, you know what I love about all that too, and that's so built into this kind of program is that everything is real world stuff. So like so much in normal school is just academic work for school. Even in my English class, there's a lot of stuff they have to do to get ready for the state exam. So they can write these two essays that they will never have to write again in their life after they take the test.

Lanier Sammons (40:29.901)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (40:49.229)

the

Brian Funk (40:51.074)

that no one ever writes. And this is why so many kids probably say they don't like to write or they don't like to read. But it's music courses and programs like this that you get to choose what you're doing and you get to really follow your own passions is so important because that's actually reality, I think, so much more than...

Lanier Sammons (40:58.349)

Sure.

Lanier Sammons (41:05.993)

Yeah, absolutely.

Lanier Sammons (41:14.685)

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think so. And I think I, I hope we give people a good balance too, between working on their own music, you know, or, you know, working with their colleagues on original stuff. And, uh, I think that's also, it's super valuable at the end of the process, but also at the beginning because, you know, you screw up tracking guitar for your own, uh, song then all right, you just redo it, right? You know, there's, there's no outside artist breathing over your shoulder, but, um, on the flip side, I think once they get

Brian Funk (41:38.562)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (41:44.061)

some foundational skills, then having that external artist experience is really valuable too. Even if they don't want to go be an engineer and engineer somebody else's records, I think seeing it from the other perspective is good too. And everybody comes out of the program definitely having been on both sides of the glass and hopefully developing some empathy as a result.

Brian Funk (42:11.81)

Yeah, right. Yeah, that's important. Yeah, just an understanding of what the other people are doing. You know, that's, it's amazing what doing the other job will do for that. I mean, just like when I was a waiter, what that did for when I go to restaurants, right? Changes your perspective completely. But that again, that's still real world. You're working on somebody's project. You're doing their thing.

Lanier Sammons (42:13.883)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (42:18.864)

Right.

Lanier Sammons (42:22.698)

Yeah.

Yeah, sure. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Lanier Sammons (42:36.765)

Yeah, right. Absolutely. Yeah, and with any luck, it turns into release. And it doesn't always, but it often does, which I think is super exciting too, right? Leaving the degree with some credits on something out in the world.

Brian Funk (42:48.894)

Yeah, yeah, that's great. That sounds like a lot of fun.

Lanier Sammons (42:53.998)

Yeah. It's, it reminds me when I, um, I saw Peter, uh, Peter Bell, who you mentioned before not too long ago, and, uh, I was, was talking with him about whether it made sense to like bring in a ringer artist who is going to be going to be what you don't want somebody to be in the studio, right? Like whether, you know, coach somebody in advance to come in and like, all right. You know, I want you to complain. I want you to be difficult. Um,

Brian Funk (43:17.047)

difficult.

Lanier Sammons (43:19.581)

just to give the students that experience. And I've never done that before, but I started wondering, you don't wanna make it a pain, but maybe a pain when there's a safety net there and you got an artist who I can just ask to turn it off, might be good too. Yeah.

Brian Funk (43:31.552)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (43:36.714)

Yeah. What did you determine that something you might do or what did he say? Did he have any?

Lanier Sammons (43:43.333)

Yeah, yeah, I think he was definitely, you know, sympathetic to the idea that, I mean, you're not going to make it through a career without encountering plenty of difficult people to work with, right? And yeah, and maybe there's some value to making sure people have that experience when they're in the safer confines of the classroom. But it's tough, you know, I mean, yeah, I don't think any teacher enjoys putting their students in.

Brian Funk (44:08.493)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (44:13.569)

tough situations, right? You know, like, I guess there's, tough love is a thing, but it's not my particular pedagogical approach. Yeah.

Brian Funk (44:20.99)

Right? Yeah, maybe that's for someone else that's into that a little more. It, it's not a bad thing to be exposed to, like you said, in that safe environment. Um, because it can open your eyes a little bit to like simple things that, um, come off the wrong way. Uh, you know, even like playing live, right? Um,

Lanier Sammons (44:29.837)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (44:35.649)

Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (44:41.942)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (44:46.486)

Mm-mm.

Brian Funk (44:48.162)

asking the audience, how's the sound out there? Is everything okay? Is in a way like, I don't trust the mixing engineer. I don't trust the front of house person. And I didn't know that until I kind of was on the other end of it. And luckily for me, I wasn't really too serious about it. I was just kind of doing it. But then part of me was kind of like, hey.

Lanier Sammons (44:52.456)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (44:58.565)

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Mmm, mhm.

Lanier Sammons (45:13.997)

Hehehehe

Brian Funk (45:17.146)

You know, that's not their job. What are you gonna listen to someone write? That guy doesn't like it. They like it, but...

Lanier Sammons (45:17.429)

Yep. Heh heh heh. Yep. Heh heh heh. Uh huh. Yep, yeah, the guy in the third row said, uh, the bass is too loud. Heh heh heh. Yep. Ah, yeah, that's funny. Heh heh heh. Yep, that's when, as the, uh, as the live sound engineer, you just, you know, do something with your hand behind the desk.

Brian Funk (45:30.09)

Yeah, but the other one thinks the vocals need to come up. Turn up the bass and turn it down.

Lanier Sammons (45:45.449)

And then, and then they give you a thumbs up back. Oh yeah, that's much better.

Brian Funk (45:48.102)

Yeah, yeah, perfect. Right. That was some guitar player, or maybe it was a bass player I saw a video of on Instagram or something that had a knob on the bass that did nothing. And it was just his knob for pleasing, you know, the engineer or whatever. Can you do this? He was like, oh yeah, sure. Yeah, sounds good.

Lanier Sammons (46:00.138)

Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (46:05.709)

Mm-hmm. Heh heh.

Lanier Sammons (46:13.873)

Yeah, those are good reminders.

Brian Funk (46:17.573)

I don't know if that makes it into the lessons though. Yeah, just pretend to do what they ask you to do.

Lanier Sammons (46:22.182)

You know, I talk about it occasionally with the students, because I also find pretty frequently with the students, right, we're doing a session with an artist, somebody's out there and they'll say, oh, hey, can I get more of whatever? And before I have actually gotten over to change anything, they'll be like, okay, yeah, that's great. And so then, you know, we talk about that, right? You know, I'm not trying to trick them, but like, you know, if they just told me they're happy, I'm not gonna.

Brian Funk (46:40.108)

Yeah.

Right.

Lanier Sammons (46:48.097)

tell them I didn't do anything either. You know, it's a, yeah.

Brian Funk (46:50.346)

Yeah. There is a sort of placebo effect, right? And it might be just part of making the artist comfortable, too, in that they feel like they have a little control over it. And if they ask you something, that you will respond to them and help them. I guess that's probably something you get into, right? Just making the artist feel comfortable and.

Lanier Sammons (46:55.767)

Oh, totally. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (47:00.658)

Mm-hmm, sure.

Lanier Sammons (47:08.649)

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yep.

Lanier Sammons (47:17.729)

Absolutely. Yeah. I think the, um, you know, the, the talkback mic is one thing that almost nobody, no matter how experienced they are, you know, in their home studio setup has any experience with coming in as students. Um, and so that idea that, you know, like, unless you are telling them what's going on, um, they're just kind of flying blind out there, you know, like, um, one of our control rooms doesn't even have a, uh, a window into the live room. We've got a camera.

Brian Funk (47:41.515)

Right.

Lanier Sammons (47:47.177)

So we can see out there if we need to, but the artist is just totally dependent on what we tell them. And so, you know, thinking about...

how to communicate effectively in that context. And just thinking about frequency of communication. An artist is so much less likely to get frustrated with you if you jump on and are like, hey, give me a minute, I'm gonna adjust levels on this and I'll be right back with you. Then if they're just sitting there and it's silent and they don't know what they're waiting for. Yeah, it's something we talk about a lot in the sessions. It's something I'm, and maybe that's the right way to do it. It's something I'm curious about. Sort of.

Brian Funk (48:17.772)

Hmm.

Lanier Sammons (48:27.697)

how to, I could teach it even more outside of directly in the sessions too. Um, but it, you know, comes up very organically and also in some manufactured ways once we have, have artists there.

Brian Funk (48:32.856)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (48:39.838)

Right. Yeah, because that is a weird feeling when you do a take and then you're like...

Lanier Sammons (48:43.603)

Mm-hmm.

Brian Funk (48:46.802)

You know, you're like looking around, your hands are up, like, and you don't know, you don't know if like they're thinking you're terrible. You don't know if they're having the discussion, like we need to get somebody else to do this because this is just not working out.

Lanier Sammons (48:47.619)

Yep. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (48:54.207)

Right, right.

Lanier Sammons (48:59.138)

Yeah, I mean, it's such a pressurized and tense environment to be recording out there at all. And yeah, you gotta, you gotta be their friend, you know, even if you're, you gotta deliver some bad news or ask them to do it again. It's yeah.

Brian Funk (49:08.77)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (49:14.082)

Right. Well, I think you have a very kind of warm, friendly disposition about yourself that must come across. When we were at the retreat, the songwriting retreat, we had the night of performances, and you were running the sound with you were doing mixing from the iPad and stuff, kind of moving around. And you really had that kind of like, hey, it's going to be cool. Like, just give me a little level. Yeah, just like that.

Lanier Sammons (49:19.989)

No, thanks.

Lanier Sammons (49:25.021)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (49:31.934)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lanier Sammons (49:41.782)

Hehehe

Brian Funk (49:43.978)

And it sounds nice, like you would say things like that. Just that kind of made you feel okay. And I know for me, like getting in on the sound check, for instance, going on after Mira, voice is incredible, right? So yeah, you put any kind of mic in front of her and she's gonna sound great. And...

Lanier Sammons (49:45.769)

Yeah, oh totally, yeah.

Lanier Sammons (49:59.337)

Mm-hmm. Yep. Marigoto, yep. Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (50:07.249)

Yep. Yeah. I think I told her she sounded great on like five different mics over that. I was like, that mic sounds really good on you. Next day, different mic. That mic sounds really good. And at some point I just got to tell her it's her. Yeah.

Brian Funk (50:16.043)

Yeah, it's not the mic, doesn't matter. But yeah, that's kind of an uncomfortable, intimidating moment for a lot of people. It is for me when you're trying to figure out if anything sounds okay. It's nice to have that. I think that etiquette is an important thing. Maybe people like yourself kind of have it naturally. But...

Lanier Sammons (50:24.63)

Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (50:31.006)

Oh yeah.

Lanier Sammons (50:40.737)

Oh, thanks. Yeah. I hope so. I think, I mean, I will say, you know, all of you were super easy and generous and legitimately, you know, sounding good right out of the box. But yeah, that was, it was a little bit of a tricky one too, just because, you know, I hadn't really touched that board before. You know, Matt, Matt Jones, who put it all together, I got to go over and kind of see how it was set up a little bit before. And he walked me through his understanding of it. But yeah, first time running sound on it.

Brian Funk (50:58.006)

Right.

Lanier Sammons (51:10.013)

Yeah, I think you're right though. The, you know, if, if your live sound engineer is stressed as an artist, how are you not going to be stressed? Right. Like it's just, you know, you're going to worry and you're going to, you know, get responses or, uh, you know, hear things that you're going to have a natural, uh, pushback against and, um, yeah. So I appreciate it. I hope I'm, I hope I'm good at pulling that off consistently and, uh, definitely, uh, an intention.

Brian Funk (51:18.064)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (51:39.322)

Yeah. Yeah, it was great. And really, like the sound part of the show was so far in the background of anyone's mind because it was running so smoothly.

Lanier Sammons (51:48.749)

Nice. Yeah. That was, yeah, the other, uh, the other piece of the puzzle too, is, you know, you all as performers up there for, for sure. But then also I've got, you know, a bunch of outstanding engineers sitting in the audience listening to it all too. That's a, that's not always the case at a typical live show.

Brian Funk (52:04.627)

Right, right. People that might be able to, hey, you know, the 800 Hz is a little out of whack tonight. Yeah, I could imagine. I think everybody had that a little bit, you know, when you're around a group of people that, like that, was a pretty experienced bunch of people. And everything was covered, huh?

Lanier Sammons (52:12.449)

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Heh, heh, heh.

Lanier Sammons (52:26.389)

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Brian Funk (52:29.818)

You guys did great work by the way. Your group was with Murigato and Cindy Alexander, Peter Bell. You guys produced two songs in the week which was pretty fantastic and even

Lanier Sammons (52:31.761)

Thanks. Yep.

Lanier Sammons (52:40.169)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, it occurs to me I got to send, one of them we're still finalizing arrangement and mix stuff and the other one, well, we might even retract some stuff again, but I got to share some mixes back out to the group since we were kind of writing and recording right up through Friday there. But yeah, man, what a amazing group of folks to get a chance to spend an intense week making music with. It's a real pleasure, yeah.

Brian Funk (53:00.353)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (53:09.098)

Yeah, nice collection of talents too. Um, diverse talents and different perspectives and styles too. Um, yeah.

Lanier Sammons (53:12.861)

Yeah, absolutely. Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (53:18.781)

Yeah, it was a real crash course in that kind of songwriting too. I think I said something like this towards the beginning when I was introducing myself, but a ton of the work I do normally is collaborative, you know, with a filmmaker or museum staff or, you know, as an engineer for an artist. But usually when I'm composing, it's pretty solitary. You know, it's me and the computer or an instrument or both. And

Brian Funk (53:42.539)

Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (53:47.913)

So yeah, the idea of just sitting in a circle with four folks and having some songs come out of that was, was not something I've done before. And it was, uh, yeah, cool to, to find a way into that. And I mean, to work with three folks who were so generous about giving me spaces into that too, and, you know, drawing out where there was room for contribution and, um, yeah, super grateful to the three of them and to, uh, to Matt, uh, for putting it all together too.

Brian Funk (54:13.802)

Yeah, awesome time. I did get a little insight into your group a little bit. I felt really lucky because I had a few moments with the other two groups as well, where I was yanked into the other group by Renato to do background vocals, and he had the headphones on my head and lyrics sheets in front of me, he's like, sing, and I'm like, I don't even know this, I've never heard it before.

Lanier Sammons (54:23.741)

Mm-hmm. Right.

Lanier Sammons (54:31.735)

Mm-hmm. Some vocals, right? Yeah, yeah, I thought I remembered that.

Hehehehe

Yeah. Ha ha!

Brian Funk (54:42.814)

He's like, this doesn't matter, just sing. And it was because of that, it was just so fun and welcoming and I mean, their song was incredible. And the pressure of having to sing for people I've never sung before, and now they're gonna listen to me like in the headphones and really close, and I'm gonna be singing in a room where it's quiet, all that melted away because of course it's.

Lanier Sammons (54:44.397)

Hehehe

Lanier Sammons (54:51.309)

Oh yeah, yeah.

Lanier Sammons (54:59.784)

Yeah, yeah.

Right, right.

Yeah.

Nice.

Brian Funk (55:09.602)

going to be a little rough around the edges. I don't even know what the song sounds like. But that was so fun. And then I think it might have been the last day. Peter and Cindy were in there. And then you dropped in the room too. And we were just kind of mostly fly on the wall. But it was fun to offer a few thoughts and just see how you guys worked a little bit. And it was a totally different feel. And

Lanier Sammons (55:11.021)

Sure.

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (55:19.317)

Yeah, he did a little writing with Cindy and Peter. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (55:28.492)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (55:31.917)

Absolutely.

Mm-hmm.

Brian Funk (55:39.262)

Really cool. Really, like, it's a scary thing on a lot of levels. Just intimidating, especially, and just, you know, you're writing, you're vulnerable and all of that. But it didn't feel that way at all, which was so amazing. I think that definitely has a lot to do with Matt, who put it together and went through a lot of lengths to get us comfortable and...

Lanier Sammons (55:45.035)

Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (55:48.969)

Yep, absolutely.

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (55:57.479)

Yep.

Yeah. Yep.

Brian Funk (56:05.194)

without doing anything too cheesy like at some meeting where you're getting to know activity trust falls or anything. He really hit that nicely with the right balance of activities and conversations to just warm us up.

Lanier Sammons (56:08.405)

Yeah, just very, uh... Yep. Hehehehe!

Lanier Sammons (56:16.673)

Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (56:21.909)

Absolutely. Yeah. And yeah, just a super comfortable spot to be too. And, you know, well set up. Like I also appreciated that it never really felt like people were competing for studio time, you know, there's, there was enough, enough to go around and it felt like everyone could kind of work very fluidly and yeah, I did. So after the first day I came home and I was like, man, I don't know that these people need me for anything. It was like, these are incredibly talented, experienced folks. And, uh.

Brian Funk (56:32.779)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (56:52.201)

Uh, and I, I really appreciated, you know, like I was saying, the more the week went on, they, um, they're also just so good at like making space for it. And then, you know, we got to time to record stuff and it's like, oh yeah, I'm, uh, I'm an engineer. That is, that is also a reason I'm here.

Brian Funk (57:05.738)

Yeah, that's your... Yeah, yeah, it's cool how it was set up so that there were different kind of specialties, I guess, with people, right? So when that time came, like, that's when you step up. And then, you know, we had that too. And yeah, everyone was very open to that, letting people be part of it, which was cool.

Lanier Sammons (57:17.405)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (57:33.953)

Totally, yeah. It was interesting hearing about your group sitting on three different laptops, all working on the same song too. It's like, oh, that is such a different experience than the way that my group's working. It's really, even within the confines of this thing, there's so many ways of going about it and getting the cool results, yeah.

Brian Funk (57:45.64)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (57:52.37)

Right. Yeah, our group started out, I think we went in the studio just for the space and we're playing guitars and talking. We spent a lot of time talking first, which was cool, getting to know each other a little. I didn't know anybody really. I knew Matt, but only on the internet and he was on the podcast once. So I'd never met him before in person. And I was working with Chloe as well, Chloe Echo.

Lanier Sammons (58:09.761)

Mm-hmm. Sure. Right, right.

Brian Funk (58:20.686)

is our artist's name. And we just kind of chatted, talked, and we, oh yeah, we found like commonalities in music we liked. And through the conversations, we started like, once in a while, a line would pop out and we started playing around some chords. But yeah, what we wound up doing at one point was going to the Met's Beach House right on the Pacific Ocean, which is where Peter and I stayed, which is.

Lanier Sammons (58:20.94)

Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (58:39.021)

Thanks.

Lanier Sammons (58:45.517)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, right down the street from me. Ha ha ha.

Brian Funk (58:51.071)

Wild. That's right down the street from you.

Lanier Sammons (58:53.385)

Yeah, yeah, I'm not nearly as close to the beach as Matt's place over there, but yeah, it's like a 20 minute walk or so. Yeah.

Brian Funk (59:00.482)

Oh, that's cool. Yeah, so we were just in there with our laptops. I was working on the drums, I think. And yeah, Matt was maybe playing with some of the vocals that were there, and Chloe maybe with some synths. I forget exactly what everyone was doing. I think it switched a bit. But it was fun to be sitting there and kind of looking around, knowing this thing is growing. We're all doing our separate thing and it would eventually have to be recombined. But it was a...

Lanier Sammons (59:22.622)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (59:29.81)

And that was kind of the thing about the whole week was that there's just so many creative people around working, doing stuff. So you took your break, you got something to eat, and then next thing you know, you're seeing something going over here at the piano, or you go upstairs and there's another thing happening. Derek was outside and, you know, doing all his mixing. That's powerful, you know, even when I'm...

Lanier Sammons (59:34.889)

Yeah, right, right.

Lanier Sammons (59:42.989)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (59:48.507)

Right, right. Yep, mixing on the lawn is nice.

Brian Funk (59:56.746)

I'm home, I'm in my house, this is my basement if you can't tell, and this is where I do all my work. There are days like if my wife is busy working, then she doesn't do music, but whatever she's working on, she teaches as well, she's got a gaming store. That energy seeps into me and I get more productive too. I'm not going to sit on the couch and watch TV if she's busy.

Lanier Sammons (59:58.625)

Hmm?

Lanier Sammons (01:00:12.602)

Mm-hmm.

Oh sure. Yeah, absolutely.

Lanier Sammons (01:00:23.269)

Right, right. Yeah. Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. Yep. Oh, absolutely. And yeah, I totally feel that too. At the same time I, so the space I'm in here, my home studio, um, I wind up doing a lot of late night work. Um, I think for me too, there's a, there's something about just the, the quiet house, the quiet neighborhood.

Brian Funk (01:00:24.394)

I don't know if I feel guilty or what it is, but it motivates me. It's so good to put yourself around that.

Lanier Sammons (01:00:51.617)

Um, that, uh, that energy is, is conducive to sort of, uh, yeah, maybe like the other side of that is just like, you know, feeling totally alone so that all the, all the bad ideas can, uh, make their way out in safety and then, uh, yeah, yeah.

Brian Funk (01:01:03.358)

Yeah, yeah.

Brian Funk (01:01:08.806)

Yeah, I love those late night hours, but I just don't. I think I'm too conditioned getting up early for my high school.

Lanier Sammons (01:01:15.261)

I imagine the, yeah, yep, yeah. One perk of the college teaching gig is I'm rarely in the classroom before 10. Ha ha ha.

Brian Funk (01:01:21.207)

Yeah.

But it translates a lot for me into the mornings. So on the weekends, I'm usually up with a couple hours to spare before anything starts happening around here. So I can, yeah, I'm like you. I like to get those bad takes and bad ideas out in solitude.

Lanier Sammons (01:01:27.073)

Sure, absolutely. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:01:34.421)

Nice.

Lanier Sammons (01:01:42.396)

Mm-hmm. Yep, yep. Yeah, I'm going to try to hit that note I have never hit before. I'm going to do it with nobody else around.

Brian Funk (01:01:49.406)

Yeah. Those are the days that I wait until she goes to work. Shut all the windows. Yeah. It's, it's funny though, to be around a group of people where you kind of don't have that luxury too. And, and it's okay. And for it to be okay is great.

Lanier Sammons (01:01:55.458)

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Lanier Sammons (01:02:09.429)

Sure, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. That was remarkable to me, how quickly it felt, felt quickly to like, or it felt comfortable to, you know, throw out a line for a lyric. And, you know, I mean, I write lyrics for my own stuff on occasion, but it's not something I think about as my forte, really. And, you know, and definitely not something I've done a lot of collaboration on. And, you know, so in a room with a...

with a bunch of other folks that do that really expertly. Them having the graciousness to let me stick an idea in there was really nice. And yeah, and remarkable that just within a day, it felt like that space was there. Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:02:55.818)

Yeah, it's nice to have that. And you have to get into this state of just being really open to everything, accepting ideas and seeing what you can do with it. I love the stand-up comedy, not stand-up, but improv comedy kind of approach of yes and. So when you say...

Lanier Sammons (01:03:18.597)

Mm-hmm, absolutely.

Brian Funk (01:03:22.102)

we're doing improv and you're like, oh my god, there's an elephant chasing me on a bicycle. I have to be like, oh my god, and he's got a gang of tigers with him. It's always yes and something else. It's such a great way to write because it just lets ideas in and you can, we might, in the editing phase, take the tigers out or something, but to just kind of roll with things because it also gets you making decisions.

Lanier Sammons (01:03:26.294)

Hehehe

Lanier Sammons (01:03:34.965)

Yeah, that's a nice idea. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:03:42.657)

Thank you.

Lanier Sammons (01:03:49.161)

Right? Yeah, yeah. And yeah, you get the scaffolding to hang the stuff on, and maybe the stuff you're hanging on changes down the road, but super valuable to have the scaffold there. Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:03:56.888)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:04:00.906)

Yeah, just picking something and going with it is so important. I definitely waste too much time too often in those early stages trying to decide if something that would work perfectly fine is smart enough, good enough, intelligent enough. Is this a clever chord change? I just fall right out.

Lanier Sammons (01:04:06.242)

Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (01:04:16.897)

Yeah. Right.

Yep. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. That's the, um, the, the sort of composition background for me doing, um, doing composition, uh, in, in undergrad and for grad school. I think some of the, uh, the sort of like contemporary new music, you know, experimental classical approach, it kind of feels like you are starting from scratch every time you write anything, right? Like the

Like the musical language needs to be invented along with the piece. Um, and that produces amazing stuff. And there's some, some things I love about it, but, uh, coming out of that, I also had to find a way to give myself permission to just, uh, just write from the, I like how that sounds approach, you know, doesn't, doesn't matter if it's the same chord progression I've heard a dozen other times, if, uh, if I've got something to do with it, that's great too. And, you know,

Next time I'll go back and figure out how to do a piece entirely with XLR cables.

Brian Funk (01:05:24.206)

Yeah, I wanted to ask you a little bit about some of that stuff. I heard some of it on your SoundCloud, I think. So some of it, it sounds like you're completely rethinking concept of instruments even, just what they do and how they're performed on. You just said something I want to go back to real quick. You said with only XLR cables. Do you mind?

Lanier Sammons (01:05:29.441)

Oh yeah. I forget what's up there.

Lanier Sammons (01:05:42.773)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:05:49.013)

I haven't done that piece yet, but you know, someone will. I mean, there is, um, the thing that it brings to mind. There's a, um, a Steve Reich piece. Uh, Sonic Youth did it on that, um, like 20th century music album they did. Um, I think I've heard you mentioned Sonic Youth before, so maybe it's familiar from that. Um, I, my, I'm going to get my, my music composition PhD card taken away. I can't remember the name of the piece right now, but it is, um,

Brian Funk (01:06:08.234)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:06:17.401)

Microphone suspended over speakers and then you set them in motion. I think it's called pendulum music. Um, so they swing back and forth and they feedback of course, right? Cause they're pointing directly at, but the feedback changes as they swing and then they, you know, like the rhythms change and, uh, so maybe, maybe that's the closest I can come up with for somebody who's actually done the, uh, the XLR piece, but, uh, I don't know when I come up with it, I'll let you know.

Brian Funk (01:06:38.77)

Uh huh. That's cool.

I had a Sarah Bell Reid on the show. Um, if you're familiar with her, she's like, uh, she plays trumpet in like a classical sense too, but, um, also very experimental running it through modular synthesizers. So her, her big thing, like, it seems like that she's focused on lately is the modular sense and experimental sound design. And she was talking about no input mixing where you run the outputs of the mixer back into the input. There's no, there's no.

Lanier Sammons (01:06:45.373)

Mm-hmm. I don't think so.

Lanier Sammons (01:06:55.697)

Mmm, nice.

Lanier Sammons (01:07:01.037)

Cool. Yeah.

Mm-hmm, absolutely, yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:07:09.804)

Mm-hmm.

Brian Funk (01:07:11.594)

sound coming into it, but you start turning knobs and get weird feedbacks and all the stuff you're not supposed to do, basically, in a musical way.

Lanier Sammons (01:07:13.195)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:07:19.158)

Yep. Yeah. And amazing the range of sounds that come out of that approach. You know, it's, uh, you think it might be sort of like a, a one trick instrument, but, uh, man, I've heard a beautiful range of stuff that folks have gotten out of no input mixer pieces. Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:07:25.334)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:07:37.322)

Yeah, I haven't done that yet. Mostly because I'm too lazy to disconnect all my mics and everything.

Lanier Sammons (01:07:39.829)

Yeah. Sure, sure. Yeah. It does take a lot of cables.

Brian Funk (01:07:48.97)

Yeah, and I might wanna, well, my dog is kind of deaf, so she probably won't care, but those will be the frequency she can hear probably, but I'll have to wait till no one's home. I was making a sample pack of guitar feedback a little while back. I was recording my band's album and I wanted to get feedback parts to swell in and out. So I was like, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm just gonna run it.

Lanier Sammons (01:07:58.185)

Hehehehe Hehehe

Lanier Sammons (01:08:04.725)

Hmm. Oh nice, yeah.

Brian Funk (01:08:16.694)

the whole track and just play with it and see what I get. And I did that for all the songs. So you're talking like, I don't know, a good hour, two, probably more like two really, of just making incredibly obnoxious feedback noise. Thinking like, this will be good because then I won't have to ever do this again. You know, and I can have them without making all the noise. It was the one time ever.

Lanier Sammons (01:08:26.537)

Cool.

Lanier Sammons (01:08:32.333)

Hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe

Lanier Sammons (01:08:38.673)

Right. Yep, yep. Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:08:45.014)

my wife came down and was like, what are you doing? So I mean, she's had me, she's listened to me looping things for hours while I tweak like one little effect or something. And just all kinds of stupid sounds coming out of here. But that was the thing where she came and she's like, are you okay? Like what's going on with you?

Lanier Sammons (01:08:49.005)

Fair, very fair, yeah. Right, right. Yeah. Yep.

Lanier Sammons (01:09:05.547)

She thought you just collapsed with the guitar in hand and it was just a... It's good to know where those boundaries are too. That's it.

Brian Funk (01:09:08.442)

Right, like, why are you doing this? Yeah, it's like, it's for the album, it's just like... Why would anyone want to hear that? You're right, they wouldn't.

Lanier Sammons (01:09:24.105)

Well, maybe don't take her to the Steve Reich Pendulum Music Concert.

Brian Funk (01:09:28.618)

Yeah, well, I guess like, you know, in the, it's probably the early 2000s, some of my friends were going to music school and they inevitably have these concerts of experimental music. We were going into Brooklyn to see them. And there were some times where I, like it was just beyond my understanding where I was there and I'm kind of like, I like, why are we all standing here listening to this noise just going on and on and on.

Lanier Sammons (01:09:42.389)

Yeah. Right, right.

Lanier Sammons (01:09:55.689)

Yep.

Brian Funk (01:09:56.826)

And there's definitely, I guess, some of it's better than others. And sometimes I think it's just, I don't know, what's the word, but it's kind of indulgent or something.

Lanier Sammons (01:10:01.193)

Yeah, of course.

Lanier Sammons (01:10:08.381)

Yeah, I think there's some pieces that are, you know, like asking you to bring a, you know, a familiarity with the, with the tropes, with the background, right? Where they're building on something, but, um, there are definitely pieces too, where, yeah, I think there's just not a, not a way in for me sometimes. Um, yeah. Yeah. And I mean, maybe sometimes that's the, that's the point.

Brian Funk (01:10:32.631)

It tests you a little sometimes.

Brian Funk (01:10:37.92)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:10:38.069)

Um, I, um, I did my dissertation on audience interactive music in the concert hall. So pieces where, you know, somehow the audience is part of the performance. Um, and there's definitely a few of those that are sometimes a little like intentionally confrontational. Um, and, uh, yeah. And, and I think there's some, some value to that. Yeah. One of my favorite versions of it. Um, do you have fluxes the like 50, 60s avant-garde movement?

Brian Funk (01:10:53.086)

Yeah. Andy Kaufman comedy.

Brian Funk (01:11:04.578)

there.

Lanier Sammons (01:11:06.465)

They did a lot of stuff that probably fits most comfortably in performance art, but they talked about what they did as event scores. And a lot of it does involve sound and sometimes it's really explicitly musical. But there's a flexes piece that involves like setting up a platform in the middle of the performance space, putting somebody up there holding a hose and the performer does nothing.

until someone complains and then the hose gets turned on. I really like that, right? Like it's telling you something about, yeah. I think at the audience, I think that's the general, yeah. And I don't know how much, if ever it got performed, some of the Fluxus stuff is definitely conceptual in a way that it's a piece on the page, but maybe not in performance. But yeah, there's some.

Brian Funk (01:11:38.21)

Ha ha ha!

That's funny. Who does this? Where does the hose get pointed? Oh my God.

Brian Funk (01:11:51.undefined)

Wow.

Brian Funk (01:11:57.748)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:12:02.957)

some, you know, both some humor, but also like it says something about a like audience performer divide and power dynamics and stuff that I think, I think can be interesting too, you know, even if I don't want to be the one getting soaked. Yep. There's probably some of that in there too. Yeah. I didn't tend to want to push the audience too much in my own versions of that, but I did do a piece once that, um,

Brian Funk (01:12:11.672)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:12:16.386)

Right? Yeah, some sadistic tendencies behind some of that.

Brian Funk (01:12:23.883)

Heh.

Lanier Sammons (01:12:32.961)

had a sensor for when people walked into the venue. So it's kind of like a pre-concert experience. You know, you'd come in to get your seat and you'd step on the sensor on the way in. And it would trigger, almost all the time, it would trigger some applause. I had a bunch of different versions of applause and cheering. So almost everybody walked in and everyone cheered for them. I thought, you know, that's the little, I'm curious about the surprise element, curious about how people reacted to it. But I did build in like a...

Brian Funk (01:12:49.675)

Heh.

Brian Funk (01:12:53.547)

Yeah, that's cool.

Lanier Sammons (01:13:02.041)

5% chance or something that you would get booed. And it happened a couple times. And I have to admit, I did kind of enjoy the reactions. That was something satisfying.

Brian Funk (01:13:05.536)

Ahahaha

Brian Funk (01:13:12.15)

Go ahead. That's funny. Yeah, it's cool to push the boundaries of what performance is, what music is, what is tolerable. And I don't always wanna be the subject of that experiment. But it's fun to, I really love, and you do this in some of your music too. Like you bring in.

Lanier Sammons (01:13:29.293)

Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep.

Brian Funk (01:13:40.382)

Like in some of the stuff I saw on YouTube and on SoundCloud, that you like to bring in some natural ambiances into your music to set the scene a little bit. And it's interesting when that stuff becomes musical. And sometimes it's just the way you frame it, noise suddenly becomes something really interesting.

Lanier Sammons (01:13:49.153)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:13:57.93)

Yeah, absolutely.

Lanier Sammons (01:14:04.573)

Yeah, yeah, I think for me in particular too, started doing a lot more of that. When I was working with, uh, doing post production audio stuff for film projects. Um, and a lot of my collaborators, um, uh, often I'm doing score for them, but then I'm also doing sound design and mixing the whole thing, or in some cases, I'm just doing sound design and mixing it for them. Um, and it did.

a little more, made me think a little more about those types of sounds, the sort of foley and sound design aspect of things. And also I started, you know, I'm still working in Pro Tools when I'm doing the post-production audio. It's the same software, the same tools. And so it was, yeah, opened my ears a little more to building those sounds into stuff that's explicitly musical because, you know, what it can do for a film really jumps out. And then...

You know, why not leverage some of that? And, uh, and like you said, too, I think there's some coincidences that, um, that work or, or yeah, just ways in which the sound becomes contextualized is musical. Um, I was, uh, I just finished mixing a project by a guitarist named Giacomo Fiore. Um, and, uh, he had a residency at the Lou Harrison house, which is up in Joshua tree in the park, uh, and Lou Harrison, a famous 20th century composer. Um,

Brian Funk (01:15:02.819)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:15:14.891)

Right.

Lanier Sammons (01:15:32.345)

And so Giacomo did a bunch of improvised stuff in the park and in the house. And, you know, most of it recorded sort of at least the park stuff, you know, out in the natural environment, so you got all kinds of other sounds that come into play and the ways that that, you know, added to the guitar aspect. And he also did some running the guitar through some modular synth stuff too. So a little connection there. But,

Brian Funk (01:15:59.406)

Hmm.

Lanier Sammons (01:16:00.841)

Yeah, the, you know, the, the birds just start feeling like, you know, part of the orchestration, right? It's a, you know, you can tell what they are. They're not disguised or anything. We're not processing the birds. Well, in one case he did have a mic inside his resonator guitar that he did some field recording with and that, that's a little, little acoustic processing, but, um, yeah, I think there's possibilities are, are really cool. They, um, you know, complexity scene setting, like you said, that they can kind of add in and

Brian Funk (01:16:06.808)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:16:20.855)

Uh-huh.

Lanier Sammons (01:16:30.49)

in what I hope are kind of unobtrusive ways too.

Brian Funk (01:16:33.622)

Hmm. Yeah, I always like that. I like things to sound like they happened somewhere. And you can really play around with that with even just really subtle, like you'd almost don't even hear it. You just kind of put it in the background softly where maybe someone gets their headphones on, they'll be like, Oh, yeah, listen to that. The first time I ever really noticed it, I think was on

Lanier Sammons (01:16:48.714)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:16:57.106)

Mm-hmm.

Brian Funk (01:17:02.37)

Beatles Abbey Road record when I think it's Sun King comes on. There's crickets in the background. That little guitar, maybe it's bass or something. I was like, yeah, that's really cool. And I used to get the other place when I lived, my parents' place was also in the basement, so there's always all kinds of crickets and insects.

Lanier Sammons (01:17:14.024)

Alright.

Lanier Sammons (01:17:19.853)

Hehehe

Lanier Sammons (01:17:29.773)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, right.

Brian Funk (01:17:32.198)

unfinished basement and they would always make their way on my recordings. And I used to at first be like, I gotta wait for that cricket to stop. But then after a while, I was kind of like, he's in the band, you know, let him be part of it. Like, what the heck, you know? And those aspects of recordings for me, bring him, bring me back to those times. And I think when I hear music like that, it brings me into a world.

Lanier Sammons (01:17:44.477)

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:18:01.066)

It's something I'm always trying to think about with recording into the computer because it's sterile. It's, there's nothing there. There's negative infinity DBs of sound. It's just so unnatural. So sometimes you record something or play something and it just doesn't sound like it's anywhere. And letting that stuff in suddenly like now we're someplace, we're in a world of an environment to exist in.

Lanier Sammons (01:18:06.733)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. Heh heh heh.

Lanier Sammons (01:18:16.872)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:18:23.11)

Absolutely.

Lanier Sammons (01:18:31.081)

Yeah, that's another like early, you know, post production audio lesson was just sort of thinking about room tone, right? That, um, you know, you, uh, well, hopefully if you're working with something that was shot live and they've got, uh, got mics on set that they're using, they've recorded some room tone for you. But, um, like how much, how much of a difference that makes and how much we can really perceive it, even if we don't hear it, if the room tone, you know, is not there. Like if you did some.

some dialogue recording after the fact, some dubbing, or, you know, if there's an edit and you don't pencil in the room tone there to kind of fill that gap. And yeah, that definitely, you know, before I started thinking about and doing some post production audio stuff, I don't, I don't think I had an awareness of that the same way in the ways that, yeah, there's like very subtle sonic markers really put us in a place. And like you were saying, sound unnatural if they're not there. Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:19:01.816)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:19:26.83)

Right. Yeah, sometimes in movies that's enough to pull you out. If, you know, out of that like kind of hypnotic, lost in the world of the movie feeling, if the dialogue is overdubbed in a weird way where it's just too close-miked for this room or this world we're in, they're so far away, but it sounds like they're right in there.

Lanier Sammons (01:19:30.509)

Totally, yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:19:42.497)

Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (01:19:48.543)

Absolutely.

Yep, yep. Yeah, you can hear the reverbs suddenly change. They didn't quite match the location stuff. And yeah, yeah. Yep. Yeah, it's a tricky world. It's a, yeah.

Brian Funk (01:19:57.406)

Yeah. Oh yeah, I know. I mean, geez, I don't know if that's the kind of work that I would enjoy or would just make me crazy. Because I've, I've on a couple occasions, maybe like two or three had to fix things on the podcast or sometimes something weird happens. So I'm sort of like acting my part out again, you know, overdubbing it.

Lanier Sammons (01:20:09.889)

Hehehe. Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (01:20:19.121)

Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (01:20:23.962)

Oh yeah, tricky, yeah.

Brian Funk (01:20:26.542)

It's so hard to get it. I'm sitting in the same spot with the same mic and everything is the same. Maybe I turned the knob on the gain or something, but it's so hard to get that right. You got to get your energy level right, the kind of atmosphere of the room. I think that could be something that makes me crazy if that was my job.

Lanier Sammons (01:20:30.311)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:20:47.785)

Yeah, it's its own skill. I think it's definitely its own skill for voice actors and just actors in general. Yeah, yeah, it's a tough one. Yeah, a lot of the sound design stuff I've done most recently has been for animation. And that one sort of has the opposite problem where there's no inherent sound, right? There's just everything.

Brian Funk (01:20:56.856)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:21:07.214)

Cool.

Lanier Sammons (01:21:16.489)

has to be put there, you know, there's no model to base it off of. But that's also really fun when you, I think, when you get to just build it from nothing to what hopefully feels like a convincingly or appropriately realistic world, you know, it's animation. So you put it as far as it needs to be towards realism or past, I guess.

Brian Funk (01:21:17.887)

Yeah, yeah.

Brian Funk (01:21:27.339)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:21:38.826)

Right, yeah, I never thought about that. You don't even have, at least in a film, it was filmed in a park and there's probably some boom mics picking things up.

Lanier Sammons (01:21:47.101)

Yeah, yeah, even if you didn't use any of that, it's there as a reference. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. And especially in some more experimental animation. There's one I'll be working on this week. Lindsey Stone, who's a great artist, did a song, instrumental called November, that I did some arrangement on.

Brian Funk (01:21:50.718)

Yeah, at least give you a sense of what you're going for, but you got to really build that out. That's pretty cool.

Lanier Sammons (01:22:12.069)

Uh, and, and her album has been out for a while, but, uh, another frequent collaborator is just finishing up a music video for her that's all animated. Um, and I've got some sound design to do for just kind of like a frame story. And then the song starts and everything goes, but, um, he's got this really cool animated character. And at the start of the film, um, you see the body and there's what looks basically like an XLR jack for the neck. And then he picks up his head, which is in this kind of like glass fish bowl thing.

and snaps it on. And we just had a good five minute conversation yesterday about what does that actually sound like? Is it more metallic? Should it sound like a cable clicking in? Is it more like a thunk of, and how much is the glass the sound? And yeah, I think that stuff is a lot of fun too.

Brian Funk (01:22:48.868)

Yeah, right.

Brian Funk (01:22:54.824)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:23:00.502)

Yeah. So that sounds fun because you're building it, right? Whereas the other stuff sounds more like, I don't know, that's something I'm a bit happy to let AI figure out. But the other stuff is way more creative. Like, yeah, like do we get like a bowl and like get some kind of reverberation going through it or something? Yeah. That's pretty neat. You've got a track coming out.

Lanier Sammons (01:23:04.828)

Yeah. When you're fixing it.

Lanier Sammons (01:23:14.021)

Right, right.

Lanier Sammons (01:23:20.961)

Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (01:23:24.362)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:23:30.769)

Oh yeah, yeah.

Brian Funk (01:23:32.687)

And very, when you told me what it was, I was shocked when I heard what it actually was. Because it's so different. You could have easily just not even told me that it was a cover and I would have probably not realized it's that far. So you want to tell us a little bit about this?

Lanier Sammons (01:23:36.134)

Hehehe

Lanier Sammons (01:23:40.673)

Nice.

Lanier Sammons (01:23:47.309)

Hehehe

Lanier Sammons (01:23:53.326)

Sure. Yeah. Um, so yeah, it's a cover of, um, waiting for the bus, which is this ZZ Top song from, uh, yeah. Yeah, me too. That's actually kind of how it. Yeah. That's kind of how it came about. I was talking to some friends just about stuff that kind of like, you're always happy to listen to, you know, like regardless of the mood, the day, if, you know, you put that on, it'll work fine.

Brian Funk (01:24:00.65)

I love ZZ Top by the way. It's a three-piece rock band.

Brian Funk (01:24:13.535)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:24:18.441)

And I remember in your conversation with Peter, with Peter Bell, he was saying, talking about how he's always listened to Ray Charles, you know, like childhood through adulthood. And Ray Charles is one of those for me for sure. But ZZ Top is another one. I think especially that early stuff that, you know, like I've always got time for that. And so yeah, this one, I had that conversation with them, then put some on in the car on the way home. And it's got, you know, like a...

Brian Funk (01:24:25.367)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:24:36.488)

Heh.

Lanier Sammons (01:24:45.477)

super simple but super characteristic guitar riff. And I think the vocals are kind of interesting. And there's a story in there about this guy trying to get home after a long day of work and these cool details about Brown paper bag and my take home pay. He's been to the liquor store and just got paid. But I was like, all right, I think there's a version of this that's going to be different than the rip-in. You know?

Brian Funk (01:25:03.414)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:25:15.141)

awesome rock version that they did. And yeah, so I turned it into something pretty ambient. I think it's probably, I'm always bad at the genre descriptions for my own stuff. And you know, had to still put a big guitar solo in the middle because that wouldn't be fair to do an Easy Top song without that. But yeah, hopefully something that feels like it's kind of reimagined from the ground up. But you know.

Brian Funk (01:25:25.643)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:25:34.638)

Hehehehe

Lanier Sammons (01:25:44.265)

Same melody, same riff, same lyrics. Uh, yeah. One thing I do with my students sometimes is use covers to talk about the, um, the concept of the work, right? Like what is the song? What's the identity of it? Um, and I, I think it's still the same song.

Brian Funk (01:25:46.958)

Mm. Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:25:56.226)

Hmm.

Brian Funk (01:26:00.802)

Hmm. Oh, that's interesting. It's almost like the soul of the song. And maybe the three-piece ripping guitar band is like the clothes it's wearing. Okay.

Lanier Sammons (01:26:11.765)

Yeah, yeah. There's a book called The Poetics of Rock by Alban Zak, and he has this nice divide between song, arrangement, and track. And his definitions of them are kind of direct. Like, he talks about the song is basically what you put on the lead sheet, you know? So chords, melody, lyrics. And then arrangement comes on top of that, instrumental stuff. And then by the time you get to the track, it is the recording decisions, the mixing decisions, the stuff that has to follow the material.

Um, and, uh, yeah, so I, I think this is still, you know, yeah, still the same song, but other than that, I think it's, uh, hopefully feels like its own thing.

Brian Funk (01:26:53.578)

What's that called? Poetics of Rock? Poetics of Rock. Okay, cool. I gotta check that out. Sounds like a lot of fun. Yeah, there's some music sometimes I think about and it's almost like you need to have the people that made it in order for the song to come through. I think about that a lot with Nirvana. A lot of Nirvana songs. They're great songs. I mean, compositionally, melodically, but

Lanier Sammons (01:26:55.477)

Yep. Yeah. Yeah, it's a nice one. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:27:10.861)

Mm-hmm. Sure. Mm-hmm.

Brian Funk (01:27:22.738)

They're like impossible to cover.

Lanier Sammons (01:27:25.505)

I as soon as you said it I was trying to think of cool Nirvana covers and Yeah, it's not as many that come to mind as I might think I'm a big fan of covers in general And there's like that polyphonic spree lithium. I think it's pretty cool Yeah, that one's interesting I think it holds up But yeah, that's the only one there must be some others that some other folks that pull it off better I hear you mean

Brian Funk (01:27:39.838)

Uh huh, I don't know that one.

Brian Funk (01:27:51.35)

Yeah, the songs that are like the most quintessential Nirvana, like, I don't know that you can really get to without being Nirvana. There's certain artists like that are just so hard to pick. And then there are other artists whose songs, like, anyone can sing them and they just come out great. It's interesting like that. And I don't think one's better than the other, but it's...

Lanier Sammons (01:28:01.581)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:28:19.362)

That's why I'm interested in this book because that's an interesting concept. There's kind of this thing of the song and there's this layer that goes on top of it.

Lanier Sammons (01:28:21.131)

Oh yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:28:25.644)

Mm-hmm.

Lanier Sammons (01:28:32.349)

Yeah, and I think maybe that's a good point with some of the Nirvana stuff where...

You know, like if you think about some of those songs in lead sheet format, it would really feel like you were missing something, right? There's like vocal timbre and performance stuff that would be hard to notate out. And, um, you know, I mean, even, you know, the, some stuff about the drums, like, you know, even if you had the drums written out, I mean, you know, Zach would probably put that in the arrangement, uh, category, but like, you know, like it's, it's hard to imagine, uh,

Brian Funk (01:28:47.196)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:29:07.277)

It smells like teen spirit without that, that drum start, right? Like, you know, and yeah, is it the same song without it? It's a, yeah.

Brian Funk (01:29:10.642)

Yeah, right. And the sound and yeah. Well, I have the guitar tab books for Nevermind and in utero. So I learned guitar on those basically.

Lanier Sammons (01:29:22.146)

Oh yeah. Mm-hmm.

Sure. Yeah, yeah. I mean, same guitar worlds and, you know, mostly from the magazines, but yeah.

Brian Funk (01:29:29.375)

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's like Hal Leonard, guitar tab and sometimes it's just the explanation of what's happening for like feedback sounds and all this like noise in the middle of these interludes that they do. And it's you just can't write it down. You know, I think that's probably true for a lot of music nowadays, though, where sound design is such a heavy part of what's going on. You know, how do you transcribe like?

Lanier Sammons (01:29:34.756)

Hehehe

Lanier Sammons (01:29:44.265)

Right. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:29:59.27)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:30:01.982)

I don't know, like Amantobin, is that how you say it? Or just like, you know, some of this stuff, like Apex Twin, like how does that get written down?

Lanier Sammons (01:30:05.389)

Mm-hmm. I think so, yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:30:13.933)

Sure. You know, there is a really cool record by Alarm Will Sound, who's an experimental ensemble. They did a whole record of transcribed Apex Twin stuff that they then perform. I'm just pulling it up here. I think it's called Acoustica. Does that look right? Yeah, yeah.

Brian Funk (01:30:34.037)

Okay.

Lanier Sammons (01:30:41.285)

And it's amazing to hear because it's people performing all that stuff, right? There's crazy rhythms and things like that. I think it is a super, super difficult question to answer whether they are still the same pieces, you know? Right? Like they're, I mean, they're done that way on the album and they are like pretty faithful transcriptions. But yeah, you know, when like that's a woodblock instead of...

Brian Funk (01:30:57.506)

Hmm.

Lanier Sammons (01:31:07.817)

you know, whatever effects Swinn cooked up in Max or whatever he's using. Yeah. It's always interesting with the students to see where they're willing to draw the line. They, um, I'd say they more default to saying it's the same song though, on most covers. It's hard for me to get covers where, um, where, where they're too often willing to say, yeah, I don't know if that's the same song anymore.

Brian Funk (01:31:10.573)

Something twisted and ripped apart sound file. Yeah. Right.

Brian Funk (01:31:24.354)

Hmm.

Brian Funk (01:31:32.418)

Hmm, that's interesting. I wonder Because you can't really copyright sounds right like

Lanier Sammons (01:31:42.205)

Yeah, I don't think so. Yeah. I mean, I guess, I think there's some trademarks possible, but yeah. But yeah, not timbers really. Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:31:44.65)

I mean, melodies, parts, but yeah, like the sound of an instrument. So like a synthesizer patch or some weird sound you made by processing something over and over again. And sometimes that's the defining characteristic.

Lanier Sammons (01:31:54.273)

Yeah. Right.

Lanier Sammons (01:32:03.433)

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah, it's a tricky one. Yeah. Yep.

Brian Funk (01:32:11.57)

Yeah, it's cool. I got to check that out. So I think you said that possibly the 23rd of October the track will come out and we can adjust if that changes.

Lanier Sammons (01:32:13.517)

Hehehe

Lanier Sammons (01:32:20.745)

Yeah, that's the plan. Yeah, yeah, hopefully on any streaming service you're looking for, just under my name, linear-sammons. And a couple other things there. This whole putting stuff out under my own name thing is relatively new for me, but I'm hoping to do more of it, part of the sabbatical activities.

Brian Funk (01:32:38.306)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:32:42.41)

Yeah, so is that the plan for the sabbatical? How long are you off for? Okay.

Lanier Sammons (01:32:45.449)

Amongst other things, yeah. I've got the whole academic year. So, uh, yeah, not back into the classroom until the fall of, uh, 24. So it's a nice, nice chunk of time. Um, so yeah, I'm, I'm aspiring to, you know, an album's worth of stuff, whether or not that is, uh, all, you know, released as an album or just kind of, you know, trickled out as it's ready. Um, and then a few other things I've got, um,

installation project with an animation colleague who is doing really cool stuff based on natural landscape around here. And for that one I'm trying to do generative music. So some software in Max that will analyze the video and create music based on what's happening in the video. A couple mixing projects, that Joshua Tree thing by Giacomo Fiore that I just finished up and a colleague that has a really cool...

Brian Funk (01:33:30.973)

Oh, cool.

Lanier Sammons (01:33:41.921)

guitar and sax trio. Althia Sully Cole, we're working on that one right now. Yeah, some other scoring stuff. It's, yeah, I loaded myself up a little bit here. Hopefully, hopefully not too much.

Brian Funk (01:33:44.43)

Hmm.

Brian Funk (01:33:56.114)

Well, how are you going to discipline yourself? Um, I'm curious because. Okay. So it's kind of a good jumpstart to that.

Lanier Sammons (01:33:59.613)

Yeah, you know, the retreat was really good for that, I think. You know? Yeah, that was the first week of the semester. So it was, you know, right when all my colleagues were going back to class. And, uh, you know, I mean, obviously everybody there is kind of like, you know, eight, 10, 12 hours a day working on music and I was taking stuff home and working on it more after I went back. Um, so, uh, yeah, trying to, you know, just sort of, um,

Brian Funk (01:34:21.752)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:34:28.589)

get on a regular schedule. So I'm, I'm getting up. I've got, you know, whatever I'm working on. This is dedicated, uh, time for it in the morning, you know, lunch and exercise and then back to it. And, uh, you know, trying to just, I, it's the, uh, doesn't sound very rockstar, but the, uh, the, the nine to five version. Yeah. Right. Absolutely. Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:34:49.01)

Yeah. Well, I think that's really important. I go through this every year. Summer vacation comes around for school, right? And I could probably do like two albums, you know, this summer and I can work on all these things and I got all these ideas and for those first couple weeks, I just feel like I have endless time. And so I later, you know.

Lanier Sammons (01:35:00.105)

Yeah, right.

Lanier Sammons (01:35:10.847)

Yeah.

Yeah, well, and the rest is important, right? You gotta recharge too.

Brian Funk (01:35:16.778)

Well, that's something I tell myself, yeah. And next thing you know, like half the summer's gone by. And you're like, oh my god, I didn't do anything yet. So I find it really important to establish something. And usually for me, it's the mornings too. I think I like to think about, like, what do I need to get done today to feel like I was productive? And do that first.

Lanier Sammons (01:35:38.913)

Mm-hmm. Yep. I do. Yeah. I do the little, the weekly to-do list, right? Here's what I want to get to on what days. And I mean, inevitably stuff moves around, but it's still, uh, yeah, it's good to have the, uh, the tangible sense of progress and the plan. Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:35:47.255)

Mm-hmm.

Brian Funk (01:35:50.475)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:35:54.782)

Right? Yeah, because the worst I guess is to like sit around thinking, what should I do now? What should I work on? Cause I get stuck in that too often that I just need...

Lanier Sammons (01:36:01.628)

Yep, yep, yeah.

Yeah. And yeah, if there's, you know, if there's a dozen things on the list and I haven't organized them some way, there's... Decision paralysis is a real thing for sure. Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:36:14.622)

Yeah. I'd hate to know how many hours I've spent over, say, the last summer, kind of standing around looking out the window and like, maybe I could do that. Or, you know, I think I'd like to. Or maybe today's a good day for the beach. It's really nice out. So it would be so embarrassing, I'm sure, to hear that number of hours.

Lanier Sammons (01:36:22.157)

Hehehehe... Mmhmm... Hehehehe...

Lanier Sammons (01:36:31.131)

Right, right? Yep.

Lanier Sammons (01:36:37.769)

I mean that said from, uh, from the outside, my impression is that you get a lot done. So, you know, like the, the amount of music you're putting out the podcast and you're doing all of it with a, with a day job that's not super directly tied into it too. I think that's some impressive productivity. I got to say. Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:36:44.306)

haha out

Brian Funk (01:36:58.982)

Oh, thanks. I'm trying, but yeah, you always see the holes in your game. I know I could probably do more, but... It's... I'm not beating myself up about it, but there's the part of me that... So that's why I ask you, like, so what are you going to do? Because maybe I can steal a few secrets from you, and it sounds like there's no secret. It's just... get to it. Plan it out and get to it.

Lanier Sammons (01:37:05.441)

Sure, sure, sure.

Lanier Sammons (01:37:13.597)

Yeah. Yep. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I don't. Yeah. Yup. Yeah. I don't think I have any secret for it. And same as you always struggled with those summers when they roll around that, uh, yeah, I bite off more than I can chew in my planning. And, you know, if I get to half of it, I, uh, I feel like I've, I've actually done. Okay. But, uh, yeah, I think, yeah. I mean, routine is the best thing I've, I've tried to figure out for it. I mean, I guess that and, um,

people giving me deadlines. Anything I'm collaborating on, even if they're like, oh, you know, whenever. I'm like, when would you like to have it? Let's, uh, let's put a date on it. Yep.

Brian Funk (01:37:52.882)

Yeah, yeah, that does help.

Brian Funk (01:38:00.986)

Don't tell me whenever. I have a lot of whenever projects that are still sitting around for quite a while. Yeah, it's good to have that. Even like with our band, we always get together. Usually it's Thursdays. So if nothing else, you chip away for that amount of time every week. And it's pretty cool to see what happens over that time where it doesn't seem like a lot.

Lanier Sammons (01:38:08.473)

Yeah. Yep.

Lanier Sammons (01:38:13.557)

Mm-hmm.

Nice.

Lanier Sammons (01:38:22.941)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:38:31.114)

But it all adds up. Every little drop in the bucket counts.

Lanier Sammons (01:38:33.206)

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, a couple of hours a week over, over a year that adds up, right? That's yeah. Nice. Yeah. And I think I told you, uh, separately, but, uh, yeah, I really enjoyed that episode with the band talking through the record and, and just really enjoyed hearing the record too. That's a, yeah, that's so cool.

Brian Funk (01:38:40.426)

Yeah. Yeah, things get done.

Brian Funk (01:38:52.202)

Yeah, you did. Thanks. That was a fun episode to do. I think that's the only one I've ever done with other people in real life, actually, which is pretty funny. I really was thinking too while we were away it would have been awesome. You know, we were very busy and as much as it sounds like a lot to have a week, it's also not a lot at the same time. But it would have been really cool to sit down and do this like...

Lanier Sammons (01:39:01.697)

in the same room. Yeah, yeah. Heh heh heh. Heh heh.

Brian Funk (01:39:21.278)

face to face. Maybe it was two weeks, it would have been more feasible. But yeah, that was a lot of fun. And it was basically what we would have done anyway. We were going to sit around and listen to the record and sort of pat ourselves on the back and enjoy the fruits of our labor. But I think that's such an important part. I don't know if maybe in the past I would have felt that was like, I don't know, kind of like lame to...

Lanier Sammons (01:39:21.59)

Yeah.

Right, right. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:39:41.032)

Oh sure.

Brian Funk (01:39:51.242)

celebrate, but...

Lanier Sammons (01:39:53.392)

I mean, it's a huge accomplishment, right? It deserves it, yeah.

Brian Funk (01:39:56.27)

I think anytime anybody finishes anything, you really should make a big deal out of it. Because it is a big deal. Playing it cool, like, yeah, we did it. No, these moments are so few and far between. And it also just inspires you to get at it for the next one.

Lanier Sammons (01:40:02.683)

Yeah. Right.

Lanier Sammons (01:40:10.399)

Yep.

Lanier Sammons (01:40:17.201)

Absolutely. Yeah. There's so many interviews out there where I've, I feel like I've read or heard artists talk about how they never go back and listen to their own music. And, uh, you know, I'm not like putting on my stuff all the time, but I'll happily like, you know, when the nostalgic itch strikes me, go back and listen to something and, uh, yeah, I always, I always worry for the folks who, who don't want to hear what they made ever again. Like you got to go back and appreciate it. Right. Like, you know,

Brian Funk (01:40:26.232)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:40:42.166)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:40:44.573)

Even if you listen and you might do a dozen things differently now, you still, it's still an accomplishment and something to be, uh, to be enjoyed.

Brian Funk (01:40:52.45)

You know what? I kind of like that feeling actually. When I listen back and say, oh man, like those drums don't sound so good. I could do much better at that. It's kind of, yeah, I'd kind of feel like if I listened back to something old, I was like, that's way better than anything I've done. I'd feel a little bad. But yeah, I'm the same way. I listen to like things I'm working on in my car rides and go back and...

Lanier Sammons (01:40:54.389)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:40:58.653)

Yeah, that's true. Marks your growth, right? Heh heh. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:41:07.401)

That would be depressing. That's true.

Lanier Sammons (01:41:15.733)

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Brian Funk (01:41:20.878)

Just get some perspective on what I've done. I don't usually like to do it with other people, though, I guess. It's more of a solo thing.

Lanier Sammons (01:41:27.821)

Yeah, yeah, that's true. It's a solitary activity, yeah.

Brian Funk (01:41:32.066)

But I think that's part of the reason we make music is so we can hear it, right? So I think it's...

Lanier Sammons (01:41:38.537)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're not making stuff you want to hear, then uh... Yeah, unless somebody's compensating you really well... Why are you doing it? Hahahaha!

Brian Funk (01:41:46.131)

Yeah, I guess, right, right. Yeah. There's a lot of other things in life to do. Yeah. So cool. Um, I know, let me see here. We've got a few places we can send people. We can go to linearsalmons.com. I'll spell that L A N I E R S A M N O N S. And I'm going to put that in the show notes too. Um.

Lanier Sammons (01:41:51.486)

Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:42:03.506)

Absolutely. Yeah, thanks.

Lanier Sammons (01:42:12.32)

Thanks.

Brian Funk (01:42:13.43)

That's dot com. There's Soundcloud, which I'll connect to that. And I see from your Instagram, you're a fellow dog lover. So yeah, you too. That's cool. They look very cute. It looks like they have a lot of fun. Um, I'm like that too. I got my, my coffee mug with my, no, that's, that's not them, but it looks like one of ours, actually the one that's right behind me here.

Lanier Sammons (01:42:21.061)

Oh yeah, absolutely. Two tiny ones. Heh heh heh. Absolutely. Heh heh heh. Oh, nice. Is that yours?

Lanier Sammons (01:42:40.009)

Nice. Yeah. We do, we have a Potter friend that made two mugs with our dogs faces on them. Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:42:47.59)

Oh, really? Oh, that's super cool. Yeah. That's like always an easy gift for my wife. I just get like the dog on something and there you go. But cool. Yeah. So we'll encourage people to go there to check out your work. Um, and then to find your track on possibly October 23rd. If not, we'll, we'll switch it in the show notes so that people know when, but.

Lanier Sammons (01:42:54.955)

Nice.

Lanier Sammons (01:43:03.725)

Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Yeah.

Lanier Sammons (01:43:10.861)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, we'll get you an active or pre-save link there. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Nice. Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anytime. It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Brian Funk (01:43:16.01)

Yeah, yeah, we'll get something in there. And this is a lot of fun, man. It's great to catch up.

Brian Funk (01:43:25.514)

Yeah, hey, I'd love to hear about how things are going towards the end of the sabbatical maybe or after you're done and maybe so I'll hold you accountable. But I have something to show. Oh, maybe if you just have like a nice tan that would be okay too. Yeah. Cool man. So yeah, thanks for coming on and thank you the listener for tuning in. Have a great day.

podcastBrian Funkmusic production podcast, Lanier sammons