Plug-in Development and Live Performance with Soap Audio's Tom Carpenter - Music Production Podcast #411

podcast
Written By Brian Funk

Tom Carpenter is a musician, producer, and plug-in developer. He is currently on tour with his 3-piece indie electronic band, Moon Tower. Tom is a co-founder of Soap Audio, who recently released Soap Voice Cleaner, a plug-in designed to easily clean up spoke word audio. I spoke with Tom about his tour, Moon Tower, and Soap Voice Cleaner. Tom shared his thoughts on creativity and collaboration in both a band setting and as a programmer. We also explored how Tom has found multiple avenues to build a career in the music industry.

This episode is sponsored by Baby Audio and their new plug-in Tekno!
Save 15% with the code: MPP15 - https://babyaud.io/tekno 

Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube

Links:

Thank you for listening. 

*Edit - in the show I mistakenly mentioned Sony's involvement in Audacity. I was confusing Audacity with Acid, which was at one time owned by Sony. 

Please review the Music Production Podcast on your favorite podcast provider!

Episode Transcript:

Brian Funk (00:02.121)

Okay, Tom, welcome to the Music Production Podcast. Good to have you.

Tom Carpenter (00:03.567)

All right.

Tom Carpenter (00:08.473)

Thanks for having me, Brian. Excited to be doing this today.

Brian Funk (00:11.642)

Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you too. It's been nice to get to know you for a few minutes before we started and hearing about some of the work you're doing.

Tom Carpenter (00:18.733)

Likewise, yeah, I'm a fan of the podcast, so I'm very honored to be asked to come on.

Brian Funk (00:25.466)

Yeah, cool. I think I'd like to tell people exactly what you're doing right now, because I think that's pretty fun right now. You're not at home.

Tom Carpenter (00:32.727)

Yeah. No, I'm not at home. I was telling you before we hit the record button here, I'm slightly embarrassed having watched the other Brian Funk podcast to not have my cool synthesizer set up behind me like yourself. I am in a hotel right now. I am on tour at the moment with my band.

Brian Funk (00:56.58)

very exciting and it's I think it's kind of a cool indication of like some of what you're doing because of course you've got the Soap Audio company with the voice cleaner plug-in that's doing really well playing in a band producing music on your own you're doing a lot of different things at once to make this all work I think that's how the dream works these days is we find lots of different avenues to pursue the music and the art and the love of it

Tom Carpenter (01:25.421)

Yeah, certainly. And yeah, I can talk for a while about my, you the joy I grab from every little different angle of that. But specifically being on the road here, it's always a joy. We haven't, the band hasn't been on the road for about a year and a half now, and we're in about week three of this current tour. So starting to miss home a little bit, but we're about a week and a half out. So it'll be great. can go back home and hug all my microphones and...

get back to a decent listening environment. playing on stage every night is its own joy.

Brian Funk (02:02.896)

Yeah, and you guys are, you said an indie electronic three piece.

Tom Carpenter (02:07.541)

Indie electronic three piece. I said right before, yeah, don't want to sound too self congratulatory because this is not where we've achieved. But our North Star, as it were, of what we want to sound like is if the killers were to ever work with Daft Punk. So we've got the love for the classic drum machines and all the Ed Banger stuff. If we would talk about like, Sebastian and Mr. Wazzo, Daft Punk, DJ Mehdi, Justice.

Oofy, all that kind of like 12-bit aliasing, way too side chains, limited as heck sounds mixed with some of those like alt-rock guitars and also all three of us in the band are very big fans of pop music and well-written songs. We talk about, know, till the cows come home, you can have really experimental...

groundbreaking sounds and mixtures that haven't been done. But to us, what really pushes it across the edge into fantastic is when you've got that great song that you're producing.

Brian Funk (03:19.29)

Yeah, a song is usually the king. I it doesn't matter how you dress it. A good song is a good song.

Tom Carpenter (03:22.287)

The longest king. Yeah. Which is, I say is a knob-turner. So I'm not necessarily a lyricist, but that is, you know, king.

Brian Funk (03:37.084)

So I want to ask you a little bit about how you guys work the band because I told you I play in a three piece garage rock band. I play the guitar and sing, bass player and he sings and drummer and he even sings sometimes too. And we have very defined roles, right? Now, anytime I've jammed with people electronically, I've got...

Tom Carpenter (03:51.183)

Certainly. Yes.

Brian Funk (03:58.936)

Ableton live open and I can be everything right I can be the drummer I can be the lead synth I could be whatever I want and a lot of the You know beginning phases is total chaos because that's what everyone's doing everyone's used to doing everything so now we're working together Do you guys have defined roles that you play or is it a song by song? How do you manage? What are you guys doing because one person these days can easily take over?

Tom Carpenter (04:21.135)

Certainly.

Yeah, I mean, I will say one thing that we're proud of is that on this current rig that we're set up on, we are using Ableton, but Ableton is only used as a brain for which we send out program changes and MIDI out to our external gear. So we aren't using Ableton for tracks or anything like that. What we have going is I am doing the bass and the rhythm. And then we've got Devin, who's doing more of the harmony.

and some of the melody type stuff and we've got Jacob who is doing the lead vocal and some of the lead guitar work. we've got as far as gear on stage we've got a Moog Sub 37, an X DJ, a single X DJ, the ones that are pretty much CDJs, and two MIDI controllers, an Axe FX 3 guitar processor, and the brain of our rig which is

built around a MOTU Ultralight MK3. And to really nerd out on what's going on, we are using a open source software called Beat Link Trigger that is hijacking some of the ethernet connections that would normally be used intra pioneer here to be able to share BPM and hot cue information and loop and all that stuff.

between two Pioneer devices. These awesome people that are developing this tool called Beat Link Trigger have opened up the kind of walled garden that is Pioneer so that you can start using that. I mean, there's a lot of information there in various different ways. So now we've got Hot Cues on the XDJ being able to send us to Ableton Locators. We've got Ableton Link, which is...

Tom Carpenter (06:20.873)

slave basically to the master tempo fader on the XDJ. So we're able to loop or speed songs up or slow sections down or anything like that. Keep things very jammy and very modular. And then we've got Ableton interfacing with the Axe FX to send program changes for our guitars and whatnot. I'm also playing bass.

on stage along with the Moog Sub-37. We've got Ableton Drum Rack set up for the SPD. We've got the MPKs for the different sounds that are either sampled or you you gotta keep the sense low overhead for live performance. Yeah, the setup is, it's a lot of fun. We've spent a long time dialing it in.

And like you were saying, the organization of it is really so that we can do those things that we have struggled to do in the past when it's kind of been a guy doing tracks with an APC-40 and then a guy playing guitar on top of that. And that's the jamming. Like maybe tonight we want to play the song faster. Maybe we want to loop this chorus five times. Maybe we want to do the end of the set, do that loop at Nazium, something like that.

Brian Funk (07:43.26)

So you got some flexibility then. You can actually just kind of communicate it with the other members,

Tom Carpenter (07:50.763)

Yeah, yeah, it's much more, it's a lot of people turning a lot of different knobs on stage and, and it's a lot of fun.

Brian Funk (07:57.212)

huh. Yeah, that sounds cool. It sounds pretty technical with especially like hijacking the pioneer stuff and being able to convert that in.

Tom Carpenter (08:09.443)

Yeah, it definitely took some trial and error to get that going. Again, the Beat Link Trigger team is awesome. If you've seen any videos, they're starting to go viral right now of like Deadmau5 using a CDJ to play Skyrim on like his Xbox. It's that same. It's silly. But you can use that. You can hijack the information.

Brian Funk (08:30.734)

Okay.

Tom Carpenter (08:39.119)

Pioneer Link information. And hijack sounds like a dirty word. It's really just taking that information and using it in a different purpose.

Brian Funk (08:48.742)

Hmm. So that, but it's converting it into, guess, like a language everything else can understand.

Tom Carpenter (08:55.149)

Yeah. Yeah, totally. Kind of intro program.

Brian Funk (09:00.612)

I have to imagine this did not happen like that the first time you guys got together. Even when I play by myself with my MIDI controllers in Ableton, Live, and whatever, it's like this living organism that is always changing.

Tom Carpenter (09:07.223)

No.

Tom Carpenter (09:20.015)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (09:20.31)

So hearing something like that might be a little intimidating maybe for somebody that's thinking about getting into it, but it's one of the things I always say is like, just start as simple as possible. I'm kind of curious where you guys began with it.

Tom Carpenter (09:31.671)

Certainly

Tom Carpenter (09:36.077)

Yeah, well, we always wanted, so we've been a band for about 10 years now. And the name of the band is Moon Tower. And we started off, it's like that Linklater movie, Dazed and Confused. We were college kids, they say at the end of the movie, party at the Moon Tower. And we wanted to throw these Moon Tower parties. were at USC, were dumb college kids. And we...

Brian Funk (09:49.168)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (09:53.83)

Okay, cool.

Tom Carpenter (10:02.607)

weren't worried about releasing music or trying to promote music or anything like that. We just moreover wanted to put on an awesome electronic show, sync up lights with it, and do things, you know, interestingly. And I was an Ableton nerd and also a lighting nerd and something like that. But when we started, it was as simple as I had in APC 40. We knew that we wanted to get some guitars going. So we kind of just got a four on the floor.

a microphone, a couple guitars and started jamming together before we knew it. We started building out songs and put that show together. Moreover, to say, what's the best show we can do? What's the best jam that we can really get out of this moment? Not as much focused on what's going to be the best thing to drive Spotify or the best way to represent this album that's finished.

It was more about the love of the live performance at the get-go.

Brian Funk (11:04.72)

That's cool. And that speaks to what you can do with electronic based music these days. Cause it, I think, you know, for the most part, it's been like, we've recorded the song, we've produced the song, and now we have to figure out how to get it into the live situation. But you guys are jamming, writing the song more like a real band does, like a normal like rock kind of thing.

Tom Carpenter (11:23.439)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (11:29.923)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (11:31.6)

you play it out for a while then maybe you might go back to record it.

Tom Carpenter (11:35.321)

Certainly, and I mean the music came out and then we played again in the way. So there is that, you do want to get on a train at a certain point in time. But yeah, I think the ethos of it has always been live-centric. I'm excited about what we're doing right now on this tour. We're playing our album that has yet to come out. It's locked and playing that in full every night.

Brian Funk (11:40.539)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (12:04.683)

So doing a little bit more like we did in college where it was, you don't necessarily know the music if you're coming to the show, if you happen to be a fan, you may not hear exactly the stuff you've heard in the past, but it lets us all kind of live in the moment a little bit more. And it's been really rewarding. We couldn't be prouder of this new album.

Brian Funk (12:27.804)

So it's getting the real treatment in front of a crowd. Yeah, that sounds like a great time. I'm just so happy these days we can do that, that kind of stuff and really play these instruments like instruments. Like we can actually make this kind of music without it having to be.

Tom Carpenter (12:31.319)

Yeah, a little bit early too. So, it's fun.

Tom Carpenter (12:43.855)

very much.

Brian Funk (12:52.108)

so rigid and kind of maybe, you know, like just pressing play and we're going.

Tom Carpenter (12:57.421)

Yeah, certainly. And I mean, that's the way, even when we're not on stage in the studio, that I think we prefer to think about music creation. Be it, have a song that was written on acoustic guitar and now we want to produce it out, or we have kind of a loop or a jam or something like that going more in the box and we want to write to that. I the idea is that we want to be more of gardeners rather than...

Let's stay rigid here. It's a... And then afterward, we do end up, you know, doing the subtraction process to try and whittle down what was sometimes a long thing or sometimes bloated into, like I was saying, the most well-written song inside of that. And I have to shout out Devon Walsh and Jacob Berger, my two other band members who are invaluable members of the creation process. It's all three of us in all of

Brian Funk (13:28.54)

Hmm.

Tom Carpenter (13:55.865)

the Moon Tower stuff.

Brian Funk (13:57.82)

Well, playing together 10 years, I mean, I could tell you from experience how hard it is to keep a band together for a bazillion reasons. So to be able to do that definitely speaks to the bond.

Tom Carpenter (14:09.433)

You know, believe it or not, we've been playing together and we've been living together. were roommates for about 10 years now. So we're closer to an old married couple than we are a band. I guess an old married throuple. Yeah.

Brian Funk (14:14.361)

yeah.

Brian Funk (14:19.066)

Yeah, right. Well, I guess that's nice when it's time to rehearse and practice and work things out. Like, what are you doing? You're just watching TV? All right, come on.

Tom Carpenter (14:28.45)

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, we don't have a living room. have a studio. yeah, totally.

Brian Funk (14:35.612)

Hmm. That's very cool. Yeah. You use the same term, gardener. That's how I would think about it. The way I had my electronic setup going was I'm like playing these ideas and songs and it's not so much like I have to really write them. I can just play them and nurture them and kind of, you know, trim the little outgrowths here and there and let things blossom naturally.

Tom Carpenter (15:01.569)

Yeah. And I mean, now with modern DAWs and whatnot, we have such an ability to achieve perfection. And I do love music. I mean, I listen to a lot of industrial stuff that's very jagged edges and it can be almost abrasive in how perfect it is. And that's great. But also so much of the music that I return to year after year and I think a lot of people return to is loved because it was

capturing of a moment and it was kind of garden that wasn't it wasn't perfected to the point of inhumanity

Brian Funk (15:39.94)

Yeah, I agree. think that's interesting stuff and you can bring you back to listen again. how'd you hear how that went that way? that's funny.

Tom Carpenter (15:44.793)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (15:49.549)

Yeah, certainly. What's your favorite type of music to listen to,

Brian Funk (15:54.666)

man, that's tough. It depends on the mood, I guess.

Tom Carpenter (15:58.603)

I know, when someone asks that question you forget every band you've ever listened to. Yeah.

Brian Funk (16:02.62)

Yeah, right. I guess I'm probably most grounded in like the stuff I grew up in, like rock, know, alternative rock and 60s rock and things like that, 90s, 60s. um, but as I've gotten older, I've gotten a lot more into like technology and

Tom Carpenter (16:15.022)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (16:25.347)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (16:25.36)

you know, synthesizers, drum machines and stuff. Stuff that I thought as a teenager was like so uncool. But I think in the nineties it was kind of uncool in a lot of ways. Maybe like you like nine inch nails or something, but everything else that used a synth was kind of corny by then. I guess the eighties sort of did that to it. But it wasn't long before I started to realize like a lot of the music I like has that stuff in it. Even though I

Tom Carpenter (16:32.015)

Certainly.

Tom Carpenter (16:37.006)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (16:48.025)

Sure. Yeah.

Brian Funk (16:55.384)

I I don't like drum machines or I think I don't like synthesizers. I'm like, that's a synthesizer right there that I thought was like a guitar or something. You know, that kind of the way you are as a kid, you put these like lines in the sand for no reason other than just to have an identity.

Tom Carpenter (17:09.207)

certainly. Yeah, of course. Yeah, you gotta be rock and roll with it. I think I've the same ilk for a long, long time.

Brian Funk (17:15.738)

Yeah, right.

Hmm. Yeah, that's, that leads me to now where I, I kind of never know where I'm going to go the next time I make something. And that's, it's a lot of fun that way, but therein also lies the issue too, because when I was younger, just playing very specific kind of music, that's so many decisions were already ruled out. It was like, I'm going to play my electric guitar. It's going to be loud and it's going to be quiet and loud and

Tom Carpenter (17:30.126)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (17:41.996)

Sure.

Brian Funk (17:48.08)

That was it, but now when it's like, I can make like a spacey ambient thing, or I can make like acoustic singer songwriter, you know, sometimes that's paralyzing.

Tom Carpenter (17:53.86)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (17:58.083)

Totally. It is daunting sometimes. I mean, it's daunting on both sides having two stricks of a walled garden in which to create. it can be, I think I agree with you, even more paralyzing when you have the entirety of every sound ever recorded and you've got every mode of synthesis to create anything in your brain to find out, am I going to do here?

Brian Funk (18:24.124)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (18:29.412)

Right. One of my favorite, probably my favorite band is the Beatles. And I think about them and how much they experimented and all these things they tried, but they were sort of exposed to it little by little, I think, you know, looking back, they even talk about chords, like, somebody knows this chords. We took the bus over across town and learn it. but we now we get everything at once. You know, if you

Tom Carpenter (18:30.446)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (18:33.945)

Certainly.

Tom Carpenter (18:39.245)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (18:48.899)

Yeah, they do.

Tom Carpenter (18:52.793)

I've heard that one. Yeah.

Brian Funk (18:58.736)

Download any DAW, you've got everything. So it's like, where do I start?

Tom Carpenter (19:03.459)

Well, you've also with the Beatles, the history of the Beatles is the history of music technology in lot of ways. They didn't have a lot of the, a lot of the tools that we rely upon. mean, pre DSP, when we're just talking about signal processing in general, it was invented for the Beatles, you know, for a specific use case. I think the story on the, on the ADT, the automatic double tracker was

Brian Funk (19:11.066)

Mm. Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (19:32.727)

John Lennon didn't want to record a double of his own voice, so they had to invent a style of tape modulation to be able to emulate that and be it new types of saturation or double tracking or ways of recreating sounds. It's so fun to go through the Beatles discography and I find it so inspiring every time because it's the history of the tools.

Brian Funk (20:02.556)

Yeah, and a lot of those new tools when they came out they were like, let's give them to the Beatles like Bob Mogue is showing up with synthesizers and Fenders got some new stuff. They just send it to the Beatles and let's see what they do and Yeah, they've we got it all at once

Tom Carpenter (20:09.411)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (20:20.119)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (20:24.975)

We got it all at once. It's daunting. yeah, it's a lot trying to deal with of that.

Brian Funk (20:33.532)

Not complaining though, I love it. It's such a great time. I do feel thankful though that I, when I grew up, like I was a teenager in the nineties and I had a four track cassette recorder. That was like a big deal when I got that thing. And all I had was a mic and a guitar though, you know? So it was so limiting, but still felt like the whole universe opened up because now I can layer tracks. Wow.

Tom Carpenter (20:42.457)

Mm-hmm.

Tom Carpenter (20:51.5)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (20:59.683)

Certainly. mean, and then you advance all the way through to modern technology and we've got the best recreation that we can possibly achieve right now of these digitized sounds. And then I go back, like on this most recent record, all of the individual stems, kind of bar none, I...

put through what you're saying, like a Tascam 246 6-track recorder from 1984, just so can get like a little bit of that saturation or that sound. Yeah, degradation, just a little bit of something in that imperfection.

Brian Funk (21:34.14)

channel gain and all like yeah

Brian Funk (21:43.526)

Did you run them onto the tape or just through the electronics? Yeah, cool.

Tom Carpenter (21:46.317)

Onto the tape. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, onto the tape and played it back and whatnot and got to get a little bit wobbly with the... That specific model has a really nice sounding pitch up and down. Yeah, it's fun. It's a very sound, like, in sound right now. I feel like that. Taskam saturation's very in vogue. So I bought it...

Brian Funk (22:00.406)

Mm. Yeah.

Brian Funk (22:08.507)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (22:14.199)

off Craig's lists and restored it and what not just to see what all the fuss was about and sure as heck it sounds pretty great. Those transformers and everything are really awesome.

Brian Funk (22:27.996)

Yeah, I'm a big fan of that kind of stuff. I have a Tascam 388, which is an eight track, which I absolutely love, but also is temperamental. I mean, some days it's just making so much noise and I have no idea why. And then the next day...

Tom Carpenter (22:46.721)

I will say one of the reasons why I had to do individual stems on a lot of the stuff, I mean I would send buses, but two of the six tracks on my 246 pretty much gave out and I got in there with a multimeter and tried to solder it back to life. I'm not sure exactly, I will get back, I will get to the bottom of it once I get back from tour here, but...

Brian Funk (23:12.763)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (23:13.261)

Yeah, I'm using like channel 1 as L and channel 4 as R. And it's just a, it's a six track machine, but it might as well be a stereo warmer. Yeah.

Brian Funk (23:22.842)

Yeah, I hear you. I've done the same thing with mine. Like, I don't know what's wrong with track one, but let's just skip it. Yep. But yeah, sometimes it is just nice to have the plugins because they don't do that. And if they do, it's a feature, you know?

Tom Carpenter (23:28.515)

Yep, move on. Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (23:40.225)

It is. It is. mean, lot of my favorite, a lot of my go-to plugins these days are the ones like SketchCassette, where you've got some of that emulation of those, yeah, dropouts and that, yeah, algorithmic imperfection.

Brian Funk (23:49.53)

Yes, it's a really cool one. Yeah.

Brian Funk (24:02.106)

That's a really cool one also just visually too. I just love the look, just penciled kind of thing. Yeah, they've got a bunch of them I like a lot. One of them makes you sound like an MP3 kind of, which I can't believe I've, it might be lossy, something like that. I'm not sure, it's aberrant though. It has like,

Tom Carpenter (24:05.367)

Yeah, love their, a bare-end DSP does really good work.

Tom Carpenter (24:19.181)

Lost him.

Or has lost he good hurts.

Brian Funk (24:28.848)

you can kind of like draw on it.

Tom Carpenter (24:32.18)

Okay.

Brian Funk (24:34.36)

It makes it sound like I can't believe I want this sound ever because when like in the early 2000s when you were getting these like harsh digital sounds you're like, ugh, like what is this? But now it's just kind of fun to throw in there once in a while.

Tom Carpenter (24:51.001)

certainly. Yeah, no, we've come all the way, haven't we? I got an Instagram ad saying, like, recreate that classic sound of, like, bad A to D conversion from Pro Tools 2. It's like, all right, we're now, yeah, getting digital recreations of digital. It's funny. Maybe it's, I Googled it, maybe it's Digital-less? Nonetheless. Yeah.

Brian Funk (24:54.14)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (25:11.493)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (25:17.453)

there might be. I have like two or three of them. I really like their stuff.

Tom Carpenter (25:20.335)

We're all good.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of all the aberrant stuff. Also, D16 Plugging Group is one of my favorite ones these days.

Brian Funk (25:30.16)

Hmm, yeah, they those nice drum machines. Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (25:33.591)

Yeah, their rate reduction, think it's... shoot, what's it called? The rate reduction from D16, Decimort 2, has some of the best saturation and just really pleasant aliasing to me.

Brian Funk (25:46.491)

Mm.

Brian Funk (25:56.24)

DigiTales, that's the aberrant one I'm talking about. DigiTales. Mm-hmm. Yeah. If you want to sound like garbagey digital from the early 2000s, that's your best bet.

Tom Carpenter (25:59.019)

Okay, right on. Here we go.

Tom Carpenter (26:06.317)

Thank

Tom Carpenter (26:09.645)

Yeah, it was cracking me up. Yeah, it's like if you don't, yeah, if you want a bad representation of your dynamic range and at the same time, I mean, that was one of the things I came to learn when I was a kid. As much as I really loved that, you know, the Daft Punk music and the French touch and the stuff that went around with that, you learn those were born out of necessity from the hardware tools at the time.

Brian Funk (26:18.725)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (26:37.167)

You've got the SB 1200 and people would sample the, uh, they would, they would speed up the record player play, play stuff unnecessarily fast and, uh, slow it back down inside of the box to expand that 10 second sampling time on floppy disk. And then you'd have aliasing built into the sound. that like both the, the sound of the aliasing and the 12 bit dynamic range of the SB 1200 is kind of the sound of French house. And then.

You just put the kick too loud, you get an Alesis 3630, which probably costs, you know, 42 bucks. I've got a few.

Brian Funk (27:12.444)

I one. I've had it since I bought it off eBay in like 2000. It was like already getting thrown out.

Tom Carpenter (27:18.857)

I think I read on, it's no longer called the same website, is it called Gearheads now? Yeah, Gearheads is calling it the, one of the more affordable door stops you can get is the 3688.

Brian Funk (27:25.524)

Yeah, yeah

Brian Funk (27:33.116)

It's not great. But it's got something. It definitely does.

Tom Carpenter (27:36.385)

It's not great.

When you want to do that pumped out, you listen to mixes sometimes on... I'm just harking on French house for some reason today. But you listen to some of those mixes and they aren't great mixes in the technical sense. They don't have great frequency range. They don't have a great representation. They're pretty thin. But they have that thing.

Those guys found the thing and I think a lot of the time what I think my fellow music makers and myself are looking for is that thing of the moment. And it takes so much discovering and digging to find that thing. A slam 3630 with a kick drum going too loud so it pumps can be a thing. Or like the strokes thing where you do the is this it? Let me put up two microphones and get the sound of the room and...

have it sound terrible but it sounds like the time that can be the thing or you can go the Quincy Jones route and you get the most beautiful recording, the best, most perfect mix and that could be the thing but yeah finding an identity inside of the mix inside your music production style is something I'm always looking for and I'm looking for tools that can help me do that

Brian Funk (29:03.364)

Yeah, having a vibe, a feel, atmosphere is I think more important than anything. Because you can clean something up that doesn't have it and it just sounds distant or sterile or something.

Tom Carpenter (29:06.713)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (29:17.582)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (29:24.398)

I think sometimes I think a lot of times when you just throw ideas at the wall and going with it, maybe it's because you're not thinking too hard. You're not trying to get everything perfect. You're just reacting to the last thing you did. It sometimes comes together almost easier where if you try to purposely do this stuff, it can be, it can be too calculated. And then it doesn't have the energy or the.

Tom Carpenter (29:45.038)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (29:52.236)

Whatever that magic touch is

Tom Carpenter (29:52.527)

It's like the gardening thing where you see what grows and then you find the beauty inside of it. you are trying to, think Eno has one of his cards for Oblique Strategies is shoot the arrow, the target around it. And I love that when it comes to kind of music production in general.

Brian Funk (29:58.978)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Brian Funk (30:18.588)

That's a good one. Yeah. Well, I think a big thing we spend too much time doing is aiming the arrow and then never shooting it.

Tom Carpenter (30:26.445)

Yeah, certainly. We're getting frustrated when you shoot the arrow at a target and it hits somewhere else and not appreciating it. At least the problem I run into, not painting with a broad brush here, is not appreciating it for what it is. If I heard that thing in my head trying to separate that thing that I was hearing from what's actually there. Yeah.

Brian Funk (30:38.192)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (30:48.152)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I read a really great book on this called, why greatness cannot be planned. The myth of the objective. And it comes from like an AI background. So they're talking about their AI programmers. And I think it's even already like a bit old, like 2016 or something like that. But they talk about how when you are purposely trying to get someplace that's.

Tom Carpenter (30:56.516)

Cool.

Tom Carpenter (31:04.505)

Sure.

Brian Funk (31:16.278)

often prevents you from getting someplace new and interesting. So when you're just shooting the arrow and painting the target around it, you've reached a spot you wouldn't have come to before. And now you will see new steps after that, that you wouldn't have seen if you were just trying to get to, you know, whatever point B was. Where there's a place you've already been and you already know what's going to happen. But when you get to that novel place.

Tom Carpenter (31:20.481)

certainly. Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (31:37.485)

Yeah, totally.

Brian Funk (31:44.794)

Now you're able to see it the next novel place a step away from that. And you kind of keep following these little stepping stones.

Tom Carpenter (31:52.85)

Yeah, totally. I love that. I think I've heard it said, I mean, we're both just repeating ways we've heard it said. Someone, I forget where, it was on a podcast, it might have been the Lex Threadman, talking, someone was speaking to chasing excitement without expectation. And at any given moment, choosing the route whenever you're given a choice in life or in creation.

Brian Funk (31:56.091)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (32:20.929)

choose whatever option offers even marginally more excitement to you. And if you are to do that without expectation and do that nobly, I think he was saying, then you can experience becoming, as Vonnegut says, experience becoming. Yeah.

Brian Funk (32:37.116)

Very similar.

Hmm. Yeah, it's a very similar concept to that book, actually. And it's helped me a lot with making music because now it's just like, let's and I don't mean like, let's see what happens. Like I don't have any direction. It's more like let's work with what happened. Maybe is a better way to put it like, we're here now. OK, now what can we do with that instead of, man, I don't want to be here. I wanted to be there.

Tom Carpenter (32:48.803)

Certainly.

Tom Carpenter (33:02.446)

Yeah.

Certainly.

Brian Funk (33:10.126)

And then it's frustrating.

Tom Carpenter (33:10.189)

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It certainly can be. But there's so much beauty in it when you allow there to be.

Brian Funk (33:18.075)

Yeah.

Yup, yeah, and between that and just trying to see what I'm doing is more like a body of work or like breadcrumbs I'm leaving along the way instead of like, this must be my masterpiece now. don't think I've ever made anything good with that mindset. Now I will make a masterpiece.

Tom Carpenter (33:30.669)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (33:34.04)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (33:39.179)

No, it's... Yeah, it's really difficult. When you decide before it's your masterpiece that it will be your masterpiece, it almost becomes a self-fulfilling, what do you say, opposite of prophecy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Funk (33:46.917)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (33:51.642)

Yep. Definitely.

Brian Funk (33:57.39)

So I'm curious now, if you choose, you know, this is we're talking like music creating, producing, but you're also in the DSP world of programming and creating tools now. I guess I'm wondering if there's, are there parallels? Are they different things? Because maybe this is a little more, I guess when I think of programming, think very.

Tom Carpenter (34:10.265)

third round.

Tom Carpenter (34:20.375)

I actually...

Brian Funk (34:23.702)

logic based and numbers and

Tom Carpenter (34:27.733)

It is.

I came to the want to get down to the bottom of DSP and learn programming from a love of music creation. I was always fascinated. I think it goes back to my dad took me to my first concert. It was Rush.

And Geddy Lee had all of those, you know, he's got the moogs on stage and whatnot. And he's turning knobs and you watch the studio footage of them and whatnot. And I was always fascinated by what the knob does. Why, when you turn that knob, it, if you turn that, it now sounds darker or it sounds this and that and the other. And now at this point...

I know that's the cutoff on a low pass filter and that's the resonance underneath it and we use those to be able to shape with subtractive synthesis what's going on on the Moog. But I really probably about six years ago started asking the question of well why does that do that when it comes to audio plugins and come to DAW digital audio

workstation work when we've when we've digitized what is a signal. What is that? What is that? That was that was a real thing that was pressure coming out of the air and frequency and amplitude. And what what happens then? Why why does that knob inside of the computer make it come back out of my speakers different?

Tom Carpenter (36:15.469)

when it's translated back into something that my ears are hearing. So it came from, I think, an innate curiosity. And that led me down the path of trying to figure out, well, the best way to learn is probably to do, in my opinion. So I started getting into really elementary juice development. And juice is a framework.

that is amazing and they've got a really amazing set of tutorials online and there's a lot of great classes and people and I started checking out textbooks from our local library on what is kind of digital signal processing for audio applications. And the more I got into it, the more I found this is, is, I'm.

deriving as much joy from creating the knob that is to be turned as I am from turning the knob. So it came from a very similar place of creation and it still offers me the same joy of creation. It is more binary in that I would say if I have a piece of modular gear and I am

plugging in wires in different places, I might end up with a beautiful mess. when you're writing inside of a programming language like C++ or Python, you're less, I guess, you can't really go down the messy route. It needs to be quite organized for you to be able to achieve anything. But the joy that I felt when I was able to use a plug-in that I wrote inside of my DAW,

was very similar to when I had spent four hours patching cables to get that particular kick drum out of my Pulsar 23. I love that kick drum to death, now I have a... That kick drum is mine, no one else has that. That exists in the moment. In same way, I know exactly why the numbers that were translated from the Fourier transform, Fourier transform...

Tom Carpenter (38:34.767)

then manipulated by me in the digital signal processing domain, and then were put back out to be waveforms again that are audible. That's mine, there's an accomplishment there. So that was kind of, hopefully that makes sense, that's a little bit of my villain origin story, that's how I got into plugin development.

Brian Funk (38:58.3)

Yeah, I can relate to that. Not so much in that actual programming in that way, but I've been creating like Ableton Live packs using instrument racks and drum racks, audio effect racks and the thought of like, how am going to make these macro knobs interact? What do I want to have control over? How much control over each one of those parameters do I want?

Tom Carpenter (39:09.572)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (39:23.107)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (39:23.396)

and how does that influence how I play the instrument? I find that really exciting and it's especially fun.

Tom Carpenter (39:31.533)

I think it's very, very similar. It's just in a different medium. I think that coding can be thought of as inherently prohibitively difficult to wrap your head around. With modern tools and with the amount of information there is out there and the wherewithal to kind of want to get into it, I think even if you want to start

Brian Funk (39:44.56)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (39:59.867)

at Ableton macros and go down to Max for live and then go into the Maybe I'm gonna write a low-pass filter or something like that. Try to get my wrap my head around What's going on there? I think it's just a little bit deeper down that rabbit hole and I think it's it's all in the act of Creating It's fun, it's very rewarding I encourage I encourage anyone to that would be curious

to give it a go.

Brian Funk (40:31.802)

Yeah, I could see that. And especially when you're going to apply it to your own music, too. That's got to be a lot of fun.

Tom Carpenter (40:38.605)

Yeah. So, I mean, I have tools that are, and this was how I started, I have plugins that are internal use only. They aren't out there. And I don't say that as being like, I have something that you can't have. I say that moreover as saying, it's very rewarding to me to say, I need to get this out of the sound. I need to juice the sound.

Well, I dialed in my own plugin that I use inside of Ableton that does what I need. And if it doesn't work exactly like I need, maybe I'll go down to the code and change that a little bit and re-export the plugin for my use. It's similar to patch cables or anything like that in my head.

Brian Funk (41:33.178)

Hmm, almost like I could get a different EQ, a different console emulation, or I can go in there and I know I want this kind of character to the sound.

Tom Carpenter (41:38.669)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (41:46.457)

Computer music, although we do have so many tools inside of the DAWs, all of them ship with this massive suite of what seems like everything, in my head, computer music is very nascent genre. There's a lot of room in there for exploring and creating new things and being messy in the same way that

Like I was saying just to bring it back if they created an ADT so that John Lennon could have a new sound on his vocal well someone had to think of an ADT and then get out some some tape machine and make it wobble and this and that and then they put it inside of Abbey Rhodes and they used it to create some hit records, so I think there are a lot of tools that are yet to be made and

There are developers that are doing really amazing things all the time. But I am inspired every time I go in there and I try and think of kind of like the gardening. What are we going to do today? What's this tool that I'm going to try and create today?

Brian Funk (43:01.414)

Do a lot of those designs come from just a need while you're working on music or is it more, let me just make this and then see what I can make with it.

Tom Carpenter (43:12.591)

We have a plug-in that the Soap Audio guys and I made. We were trying to get down to the bottom of Michael Coleman, who is one third of Soap Audio, and he is an amazing mixer, producer, just audio engineer, musician all around. He was working with a lot of artists and he realized that when he recorded, when they recorded demo drums on their

voice memo on their iPhone. They would retract the drums and the artist would still prefer the voice memo drums. So we got down to what exactly is voice memos doing to the sounds and why is that pleasing? And we built a tool that is not...

It could be done if you route up a bunch of different... It's kind of expanding the quiet frequencies, or the quiet dynamics, and compressing the high ones, and changing the ratio dynamics, or changing, yeah, the ratio of the dynamics computer in real time based on the input of the sound. That tool wasn't out there, so we built it and...

We love it. it was for that one in particular, it was based off of just this everyday, why do I keep on dealing with people that prefer voice memos? What are voice memos doing? Can we do what voice memos is doing with a more musical intent?

Brian Funk (44:54.524)

So you're kind of referring to how I don't have to set the volume on my mic in my phone when I do a voice memo. It just sort of, it knows that because it's hearing what's coming in. And if I'm whispering in it, it knows it needs to bring it up. And if I'm recording the band, it knows.

Tom Carpenter (45:05.177)

Yeah

Tom Carpenter (45:12.409)

Voice memos, at least what we found, are doing some strange processing that's unusual when you, yeah, when you A-B it against the same source that was mic'd a different way. The playback of a voice memo has kind of an interesting dynamics thing going on. Yeah.

Brian Funk (45:32.892)

I've used them sometimes.

The last thing I did with my band, I used it almost like a room mic. So the drums were already tracked. I just ran them through, played them out of the monitors and just held my phone mic right here where I'm sitting and just let it record it. And then just kind of mix that in a little bit. And it definitely gave it a little bit of energy and a little more space. You know, the room, the song kind of changed a little bit.

Tom Carpenter (45:44.047)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (45:51.246)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (45:59.662)

A little something.

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (46:06.989)

Yeah. And it's a lot of fun. It's great. Yeah, this particular tool that we will release eventually. Yeah, and we've also built in parameters inside of the GUI to be able to kind of push what it's doing or what we assume that it's doing or what we found via our analysis to the extreme. So you can do these really crazy things to the sound.

Brian Funk (46:08.026)

It was cool.

Tom Carpenter (46:36.801)

It's great. It's a lot of fun.

Brian Funk (46:39.088)

Hmm, that is cool. that, but that came from a problem to solve because why does everyone like this voice memo? It should not work. Everything says no, let's do it the right way. But there's something more right about this way.

Tom Carpenter (46:45.133)

Yeah, yeah.

Tom Carpenter (46:54.711)

Yeah. Yeah. And the product that we're currently selling on Musub came also from trying to solve a problem, which was... This is the voice cleaner. Yes. From Soap Audio.

Brian Funk (47:08.22)

This is the voice cleaner.

It has a super cool interface, the way. The red and yellow and real simple, but interesting to interact with.

Tom Carpenter (47:14.979)

Thank you.

Yeah, that one actually came from Michael Coleman again. So I do as far as the company, it's Michael Coleman, Kevin Fielding and me. Kevin, or Michael is a really great audio engineer, Grammy nominated, all that stuff. And Kevin is a very high level programmer. He worked on some of the rabbit AI stuff and

currently is programming in the mobile space for skims. And I do more of the plug-in DSP backend stuff. So the voice cleaner came when Michael was complaining about basketball podcasts. He said all of them have the same issue. They have the same frequency buildup. They have the same, I think,

Rostam from vampire weekends had a great tweet that I think about all the time. It said just like remove the low-mids out of your life They all had this this terrible low-mid problem this terrible siblings problem this unevenness and it's in their dynamics and It was consistent we could tell across different Podcasts that were recorded in different rooms in different ways and then we tried to

kind of explain that we got in contact and we try to explain this to some of the podcast producers and terms like equalization, compression, dynamic range, multi-bands, sibilants, all these issues were daunting and scary words for them. So we set out to make a plugin.

Tom Carpenter (49:12.003)

that is a little bit of a non-musical application, well, a lot of bit of a non-musical application for anyone recording the human speaking voice to get a pleasant speaking voice that is non-taxing on the ear and to fix the problems if you only have maybe the budget USB mic from Best Buy or the recording into your iPhone without trying to get that crazy dynamics thing that I was talking about.

And it has been really well received by the people that use Audacity and getting the plugin via the MuseHub platform. And it's been a lot of fun getting to work with people and see the plugin have a bit of an adoption on a wide scale by podcasters and audiobook recorders.

narrators, content creators in general. People that may have never used a plugin before or never thought about digital signal processing or building a vocal chain or something like that.

Brian Funk (50:24.476)

And this works by they can choose like a profile or a preset for like their specific microphone. That's cool. Makes it easier than like some of the other like in terminology.

Tom Carpenter (50:30.861)

Yeah. Yeah, we, yeah, a long time getting just about all the microphones that, yeah, you could possibly really want or use, inside of that environment. And I've done a lot of, a lot of just mixing work for friends working in film and TV and on podcasts and that type of stuff. I find myself reaching for it more often than not.

Yeah.

Brian Funk (51:03.673)

Well, I mean, you've solved some of the issues you've encountered, right? So it's almost like your own preset in any plugin, basically, right? Or chain.

Tom Carpenter (51:10.039)

Yeah. Yeah.

Certainly, yeah.

Brian Funk (51:19.564)

When you're making one like this, have to imagine, because it sounds like it's, you're saying people are doing basketball podcasts, for instance, they're not audio engineers, music producers, which is probably why they're in the situation they are now, where you guys are saying, hey, something wrong with this. How do you decide how much control to give with it? Because you must have to...

Tom Carpenter (51:31.183)

Certainly.

Brian Funk (51:45.402)

decide some limitations, right? Because if they turn the knob too far, they're going to kill it.

Tom Carpenter (51:47.811)

Yeah. certainly. We, the, the plugin took about two years to develop and we, worked with a lot of people, mainly, parents of ours and stuff like that, where we really wanted to see, okay, push this to the limit. Can you make it sound bad? And, I know Brian, you have the plugin in front of you, but for anyone listening, it's got three knobs on it.

One says Squish, one says Suds, and one says DMUD. It's got a help mode where it will explain what all of those do. they, yeah, they're made very specifically to, they're linked very similarly in macros when you might build an Ableton Effect Rack where you can have one knob controlling nine different things. And whereas maybe on a FabFilter plugin, you might

have every single one of those program changes available to you, the end user, in the GUI. We wanted to go the exact opposite direction, where we said, best case scenario, you choose a preset, the knobs are going to be set where they are, where we've decided they should be set, and across a very broad range of human speaking voices that we demoed when creating the DSP for this plugin, we hope that you don't have to touch another knob.

And if you do, with the knobs skewed and everything, we are decently confident that your voice is not going to sound, it's not going to take much to make it sound quite great.

Brian Funk (53:30.94)

You want to take some of that control away because that's, mean, if you're an audio engineer, yes, I want to have all these. want to be able to do a bell curve and a, you know, low pass and whatever raise the resonance. But if I'm trying to make my podcast and I don't really know much more than how to cut out pauses or something like that, this is what I can go to.

Tom Carpenter (53:35.417)

Certainly.

Tom Carpenter (53:53.794)

Yeah.

It's a lot like, I think in in for a visual analogy, like an Instagram filter where I don't have access to the shutter and all that. And I don't necessarily want to. I'm personally colorblind. I would rather not have access to all that stuff. But if I click the filter, I might be able to have something sound more professional and then I can get

Brian Funk (54:10.234)

Right.

Tom Carpenter (54:23.373)

You know, that side of the work, the decent sounds, if that's taken care of, then I can focus on what I really want to focus on. the basketball podcast, it's talking about the subject matter of the podcast. Let's focus on making the podcast as enjoyable as possible and get to doing what you love.

Brian Funk (54:44.24)

Have you found anybody using this in more creative ways, like misusing it from the original intention?

Tom Carpenter (54:51.715)

You know, that is an interesting question and I have yet to see someone really try and break the plugin or like circuit bend it or something like that to be able to get an unusual results out.

Brian Funk (55:04.066)

or even people just running their drums through it or anything along those lines.

Tom Carpenter (55:07.755)

Yeah. No, if they are using the voice cleaner to do that, would very much appreciate it if they would let me know because I'd love to see that. Yeah.

Brian Funk (55:14.971)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (55:18.332)

Because in thinking back, we were talking about some of the old gear and the limitations that are built in with it. Yeah, now we have all these devices where we have every parameter we can control, which is, again, I'm not complaining. Don't take them away. But sometimes it's nice to have something that's going to sort of do its thing. You know what I'm saying? It's going to color it in its own way because it's

Tom Carpenter (55:22.04)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (55:44.068)

It's been built so that, yeah, this knob, it's doing like three things at once. So things are going to react.

Tom Carpenter (55:49.679)

It's a Pultec versus like a Pro-Q4. I love the Pro-Q4, but I instantiate the Pultec emulations. I would love to have a Pultec, but I instantiate the Pultec emulations, specifically the UAD one, way more often. It isn't doing exactly what is written on the GUI. And I'm a pretty firm believer in...

when creating a tool that's supposed to be a efficiency hack and to be able to get out of your own way in the creation sphere that it's more important to have an enjoyable piece of gear than a technical piece of gear. But there's different applications where I certainly need that Pro-Q4 and I need to set, you know, a 20 band or like a crazy dynamic EQ that's doing all sorts of this, that and the other and stereo width and

Yeah, there's use cases for both.

Brian Funk (56:53.712)

That's a great point because when I'm first creating a song and I'm getting in the vibe of it and the feel, I don't need to be pulling out some EQ where I'm looking at the frequency spectrum and boosting and cutting so that I get a little extra rumble. I want something where I can just turn the low end up and, all right, now it's rumbling like I need it. Now I can move forward. Later on, I'm mixing. I'm trying to fine tune things. Then, OK, now we'll get in there, but.

Tom Carpenter (57:14.488)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (57:22.095)

There are different sides of your brain, at least to me. And there are people that create as they mix, or mix as they create. yeah, as far as keeping your tool creator-centric, I prefer those that... I think I mentioned the Pulsar. I love Soma Labs. Their instruments are so cool. I adore their...

Brian Funk (57:24.186)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (57:49.997)

The Pulsar 23 has a connection that just says WTF and wow and stuff like that where it isn't made to be understood. It's made to be entropic and whether or not it's like a sample and hold algorithm that's pinging off of an LFO, it is something. It is algorithmically random or I guess it's analog so it's not algorithmically but you get what I'm saying.

The entropy in it is great and I love having that simplicity of this one thing I don't need to understand, I can just appreciate for what it's doing. Yeah.

Brian Funk (58:27.612)

I do that sometimes for myself with my own Ableton Live Racks. Rather than call something like low pass filter with reverb plus whatever, I might just call it like distance or melt. This is the melt knob. It has a few things going on and it gets me out of the...

Tom Carpenter (58:42.776)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (58:53.68)

That technical mindset, like you kind of mentioned earlier, like when you're watching Geddy Lee and you hear the sound gets muffled. But now you know it's a low pass filter at like 1k and you got the numbers in it. You almost like science yourself out of the fantasy world that the music is creating.

Tom Carpenter (59:00.462)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (59:04.377)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (59:14.329)

Sure, yeah, certainly. There's a... And I have gone down, I have only found that my appreciation for music has grown deeper the more that I learn about the really technical stuff, like the transforms at the...

bass level of digital music, but being as umbrella and being as beginner minded as possible is also probably the most fun place to be creating music.

Brian Funk (59:46.267)

Yeah. Yeah, I know a lot of people fear learning stuff for that reason. Like, no, I'm going to... And I guess that can happen sometimes where sometimes I hear a song like that's one, six, four, five progression and get like snooty about it. But as soon as I forget that it's one, six, four, five, I'm like, what a cool chord progression. You know?

Tom Carpenter (01:00:02.126)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:00:08.879)

Sounds great. Well, I mean, it brings me back to like, was a bachelor of music and the part writing was much more like completing a Sudoku puzzle. There's objective correctness inside of this. You don't do the parallel fifths if you want to, you know, resolve a plagal cadence, it's going to be this to that. And there are rules to it. And with programming and with doing

DSP engineering, it is kind of, you've got rules to it, but the end product can still be beautiful. If the composer followed all of the rules, the end user experience, the end listener that's consuming the symphony still kind of derives emotion from it.

Brian Funk (01:00:56.444)

Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, sometimes that stuff can bog you down and pull you out of that. I mean, loved... Yeah, I've always loved...

Tom Carpenter (01:01:04.451)

Yeah, totally. It's balance.

Brian Funk (01:01:11.964)

the way I would talk about music before I knew what I was saying. I'd like, that sounds like a star behind some clouds. And you got all these weird ways of describing things because you don't have the actual vocabulary. But in those descriptions, a lot of times, it pulls you into this world of what you're making.

Tom Carpenter (01:01:32.123)

Yeah, I had a mistake, I think, on that front with accidentally pulling my dad out of it for a little bit. So my dad is a big music consumer and music fan. turned me on to a lot of the stuff that I love. And he was explaining to me that a mix from I Don't Remember Who didn't sound great to him. And

I was explaining to him, the system on which you're listening to the mix doesn't sound very good. And then we got out my Slate VSX headphones and we were like...

They've got the different room emulations. You can listen to it in like a digital version of a Tesla or like NRG studios or anything like that and switch around. And my dad had this in real time. He was, he was kind of realizing that, is it, is it the fault of the speaker manufacturer or the person that placed the speakers in a different room or the mix engineer and all of these different things?

And not that I regret it, because it's not like he doesn't enjoy music anymore, but I did realize in real time, was like, okay, we're taking too much of the magic out of this. We just, you know, the bass can just be too loud. Let's let it be, let's let that be what it is.

Brian Funk (01:02:53.136)

Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, sometimes, yeah, you could be like at a show and really focused on, I don't like the way that particular drum sounds or something. And then that's all you hear. And now you're not having fun at the show or you just whatever this is what it is and.

Tom Carpenter (01:03:04.659)

yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:03:08.91)

Yep.

Tom Carpenter (01:03:14.573)

I had that issue at a music festival where I think I walked away from my friend so I could get a better stereo image. Like, what am I doing here? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, totally. It's a...

Brian Funk (01:03:21.66)

I got the better stereo image, but I'm alone and I'm not sharing the experience anymore.

It's happened performing where I've been playing before and like something about the sound just eats at me and then I'll finish and be like, that was terrible. And maybe even listen back to it or other people, so good. sounded great. you're like, well, I guess.

Tom Carpenter (01:03:44.822)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:03:51.129)

That was one of the things with the sub vocal cleaner, more than anything, the issues with the basketball podcasts that Michael was listening to. then we found the same issue across a lot of different podcasts. These kind of like, amateur is the wrong word, but these kind of smaller podcasts that were very DIY.

they were taxing to listen to. There was a reason why you as a consumer, even if you couldn't vocalize it, even if you didn't have like the, you know, the specific words to be able to say that, you know.

this is why it's taxing, you would turn them off because they had these issues. So we kind of wanted to fix that because at the end of the day, we wanted that, you know, we the information that was behind all of that, those frequency problems. Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:04:42.46)

Right. Yeah, that was a similar effect to like some of the music mastering that was happening. The loudness wars were like, oh wow, it's so intense. It's great. But like after a few minutes, you're like, oh my God, it's this, I'm never getting a break. need, like I'm getting a headache and I'm getting tired. Just listening to this because there's no push and pull, no breathing room.

Tom Carpenter (01:04:51.405)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:05:03.758)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:05:07.575)

It's bold listening to all the new remasters and whatnot where they've gone back and tried to really, you know, get the original intended dynamic range. Suddenly that snare is not being buried, something like that.

Brian Funk (01:05:14.844)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:05:19.845)

Right.

Brian Funk (01:05:26.588)

It's a little funny when you go on the streaming services now and you've got some choices of like what year version of the album, like am going to listen to Nirvana Nevermind from 2013 or the new 2021, 30 year or am going to, where's the original? Can I just have that? I have friends that have been

Tom Carpenter (01:05:34.243)

Yeah, sure.

Tom Carpenter (01:05:43.437)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:05:48.803)

The biggest...

Brian Funk (01:05:50.512)

going back to their CDs for that reason, because they're like, I just want it to sound the way it sounded, not this new edition that are...

Tom Carpenter (01:05:54.231)

I don't want it. Yeah. You're speaking about the Beatles mixes. Some of those are funny. I don't know which years they were, but there are some mixes I think I had on CD where it's like Ringo and George in the right ear and John and Paul in the left ear, where I'm not sure what the how that one crossed the finish line. Right.

Brian Funk (01:06:12.848)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:06:19.684)

Yeah, they did a lot of weird stuff like that.

Tom Carpenter (01:06:22.903)

Yeah, I'm really big fan and huge... I'm very interested in spatialization and what's going to happen with head tracking and what they're currently doing with Atmos, where music can be panned more in a 3D environment and...

Stereo, like I was saying, digital music is decently nascent. Stereo, as a means by which we listen to music, is also, I mean, very much nascent compared to how long we as a people have been listening to music. The vast majority of that time, if you wanted to hear more of the bassist, there was no recording. You had to turn your head. You could hear more of where the bass was coming from. And I'm curious whether or not when you mix...

what's currently implemented with gyroscopes and head tracking and all this, whether or not we'll move back to a place of being able to define your own listening experience via head tracking, or whether or not that will be an option, like you were saying, inside of the streaming services. I want to put on dark side, and I want to put on the Atmos version, but I want it to be.

in a room where I can move even if I do have on my AirPod Max or whatever they are.

Brian Funk (01:07:47.396)

Mm.

Yeah, these AirPods I have now, they're, guess, like, maybe they're the pro or something. They're maybe a generation behind or so. But they have that where, if I put my phone in like my left pocket, at first, it sounds like the music is on my side. And then it's sort of like understands after a couple of seconds that, that's just where you're keeping your phone now. Okay. And then it centers again. and that can be a little weird.

Tom Carpenter (01:08:03.832)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:08:07.502)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:08:15.396)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:08:18.728)

don't like it in that case. And it can be funny also if I have the computer connected to the AirPods and I turn away, you know, I'm watching YouTube or whatever. YouTube is still over there. Like speakers are. It's got this, it's a weird feeling.

Tom Carpenter (01:08:32.27)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:08:39.664)

But it does allow some of the Atmos stuff to come, which I don't even really understand how they're able to do that with only two speakers in your head. But some of the mixes I've heard are great, really cool.

One I really enjoyed was the B-52's Love Shack. had the guys that mixed that on the podcast and that was really cool because something I never noticed about that song, the entire way through, there's just people like partying. It's like, hey, all right, like people just, it's crowd noise kind of, and you really feel like you're in it. But there've been other mixes where it's like, where's that guitar? Like the lead guitar is buried now and.

Tom Carpenter (01:08:58.563)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:09:08.471)

Yeah, sure.

Tom Carpenter (01:09:22.83)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:09:23.068)

There's something weird going on here with this mix that I'm having a hard time.

Tom Carpenter (01:09:30.191)

What I'd be curious about, and I'm really asking for the world here, is whether or not, in a hypothetical future, you could have, you could give the end listener volition in choosing how they would like... You know, if you want the... Well, if you want the crowd sound in the B-52 to be louder, maybe it wouldn't look like a mixing console, like an audio guy might understand it, but is there a world in which you could...

Brian Funk (01:09:45.18)

or they want to stand.

Brian Funk (01:09:51.942)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:09:59.661)

do something on your listening experience to be able to choose to have more John, less Ringo, more Paul, you know? Is there something that you could do spatially? I've seen, I know that they've done that kind of as experiments inside of physical spaces that have physical at most rigs. But as far as delivering music in that format, whether or not there's anything there.

Brian Funk (01:10:09.104)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:10:30.19)

Yeah, kind like what you're saying about getting the better stereo image at the show moving over. Or can I stand closer to Paul so I can hear his bass better?

Tom Carpenter (01:10:34.68)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:10:40.451)

How much choice do we want to the listener? Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:10:45.594)

Yeah. so much of the actual piece of music is in the mix, those artistic decisions you're making with the mix. So if you're turning that over, you're changing a lot.

Tom Carpenter (01:10:56.847)

Good one.

Tom Carpenter (01:11:00.361)

yeah, there's a, yeah, I feel like I'm, and I mix our music. So I'd also probably be, you know, not offended, I'd be cautious to hand that amount of choice over. Maybe it would be something like what we were doing with the voice cleaner where you can change it enough, but not try and break it. Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:11:09.67)

Hey.

Yeah, especially.

Brian Funk (01:11:24.688)

Right. Well, especially if you have a song that has 72 tracks in it, you know, but

Tom Carpenter (01:11:29.599)

yeah, no. There would have to be some type of standardization and how that's delivered. It's a whole range of issues in what I'm proposing, but I think the type of problem is there.

Brian Funk (01:11:37.348)

Yeah. Well, have you seen the isotope as a visual mixer? Yeah, I think it's through their Neutron app plugin where it's kind of a...

Tom Carpenter (01:11:44.621)

no I haven't.

Brian Funk (01:11:52.628)

they all communicate with each other. But it's, it's, there's a vertical line that goes up and down and the, that would be your volume. And then it's, it's like a graph, I guess, where you got up and down, left and right. Yeah. And you can just move those things around. And if you place it higher, it's louder. And if you place it more to the right, it's more to the right, more to the left.

Tom Carpenter (01:11:56.226)

I one.

Tom Carpenter (01:12:02.69)

Okay.

Tom Carpenter (01:12:07.757)

I pulled up an image of it. Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:12:19.023)

Cool, yeah. I am.

Brian Funk (01:12:21.404)

I've played with it a little bit. was interesting. It was a neat way to mix that, you know...

Tom Carpenter (01:12:28.867)

Would you put each of those on your individual stems at the end of the chain? And then that would be gain and panning type?

Brian Funk (01:12:36.77)

Yeah, so if I remember correctly, if you have a bunch of these neutrons on the tracks, then they all feed to some central location, and then you have the visual mixer where you can push things around a bit.

Tom Carpenter (01:12:45.172)

Got it.

Tom Carpenter (01:12:53.497)

The only iZotope I really want to use all that often, I know they've got amazing tools, but the RX suite is really, great. For either the D-HUM or they've got specialized guitar denoise, the spectral denoise, they're intensive, but they're great.

Brian Funk (01:13:03.014)

Hmm. Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:13:16.122)

Yeah, yeah, they make really interesting stuff and I've used plenty of it. I'm always using Ozone and stuff like that. But that kind of visual interface I could see maybe for a consumer, like you can have like your phone, right? And you can just like kind of move things.

Tom Carpenter (01:13:25.358)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:13:34.295)

Yeah, for this, this way.

Tom Carpenter (01:13:40.459)

Or like when we've all entered the Matrix in 12 years, when we're wearing our Apple Vision Pro headsets, being able to... Something like that. Yeah. It's a thought. It's a thought. And then would you be able to turn your head 360? But like you were saying with the YouTube coming out of your right ear when you turn your head.

Brian Funk (01:13:49.158)

Yeah, right.

Tom Carpenter (01:14:07.585)

It definitely needs to be a choice and we need to have the ability to choose to listen to stereo.

Brian Funk (01:14:14.396)

Yeah, I don't know how I feel. think it's like, part of me thinks it's cool. It's like, wow, it's cool. can do that. But when I'm like, this happens to me, like every time I, if I'm going out to do like a little yard work or something or go for a run, I put my phone in my pocket and then everything goes in my pocket, you know? And then it comes back. Cause I think it understands that.

Tom Carpenter (01:14:28.814)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:14:40.581)

They must just know like, that's probably a case where you don't want that. But it is a funny feeling, which is weird because it's more natural, but.

Tom Carpenter (01:14:45.465)

Mm-hmm.

Tom Carpenter (01:14:52.619)

It is. It is. But I guess we've naturalized here by...

Brian Funk (01:14:55.012)

I guess we're just used to it. We've been trained to have headphones on and just hear it out of the headphones.

Tom Carpenter (01:15:01.441)

I had a friend have me come over and look at their they'd recently gotten a like a hi-fi setup and they were not an audio person in the slightest and they got a decent system and they placed it so that the two speakers were back to back one was facing this way and one was facing exactly the other way there was no stereo image it was just exact opposites and I realized that that phantom middle channel and

know, spatialization is just something that most people, even even audiophiles, I mean maybe not so much audiophiles, but a lot of people just don't think about it, like at all. They really think about the left and the right in the middle of it all.

Brian Funk (01:15:44.89)

No, no, I've found myself explaining what listening in mono is to people versus stereo. And you just don't think about that, I guess, until you get into this world.

Tom Carpenter (01:15:51.182)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:15:59.181)

Yeah, and I know it's the same way with all the mediums that I'm not, you know, a professional in. I know there things happening, be it novels or TV shows or movies or anything at all, where there's so much nuance inside of it that I just get the joy of being a consumer and just get the awesome emotional feeling of consuming that without heavy knowledge of what's going on here.

Brian Funk (01:16:03.387)

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:16:28.144)

Well, I think that's kind of...

the goal of a lot of it too. I don't think you want someone listening to the song and then be like, what a cool mixing move that was, you know, the job of that, the mixer is almost to get out of the way that you're not thinking about it. And, or like the camera in a movie, if you're constantly like, whoa, cool camera angle. I love how they're spinning the camera now. You're, you're not thinking about the story and you're caught up in the,

Tom Carpenter (01:16:39.843)

Yeah, probably.

Tom Carpenter (01:16:45.315)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:16:55.278)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:16:59.779)

Yeah. In the technical... Right, right. Well, that's great analogy. That's funny. Yeah. It is.

Brian Funk (01:17:00.19)

You know, you're excited about the paper the book's on and not the story of the book.

Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:17:12.534)

And I think that's a little bit like what I was saying before with being at a show and I don't like the way that sounds or the new master is kind of annoying. The 2014 edition.

Tom Carpenter (01:17:20.877)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:17:24.751)

Well, yeah, deprive yourself of the joy of consumption. Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:17:31.536)

Yeah. Yeah. So much of the job is to get out of the way. your friend, you know, with, with soap is probably like, I was enjoying the show, but I'm too distracted by the sound. Like I, want to listen to it more, but it's annoying. It hurts or it. Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:17:45.847)

Yeah. I mean, that was it. It was, and it was, was made out of a labor of love. And I'm glad that the tool is being used by people and I'm glad that it's finding its home because we really are very proud of it. And we stand behind it a hundred percent. Yeah, it was made to fix, fix a problem so that it could, it could be it being the end product could be more enjoyable.

Brian Funk (01:18:12.708)

It's great people are taking to it and it kind of brings me to ask you a little bit about MuseHub because it's one thing to make something but it has to also reach people and you guys are using MuseHub to reach an audience and I'm not all that familiar with it but as I've been looking through it, it seems like a pretty cool way to find some new tools for whether you're making music or even more than that I think.

Tom Carpenter (01:18:19.597)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:18:28.356)

Yes.

Tom Carpenter (01:18:36.673)

It's great. So Audacity, think all, a lot of music creators are very familiar with Audacity. Audacity has been around for a very long time. And at present Audacity has been freeware and crowd maintained for as long as I know.

Brian Funk (01:18:56.304)

It was Sony originally, if I'm not mistaken. Am I wrong about that? I could be wrong. I never really used it, too much, but it was always the software at the school I work with. Audacity is what everybody used. It doesn't matter. It's not anymore, at least.

Tom Carpenter (01:18:59.235)

Was it? I believe you.

Tom Carpenter (01:19:14.489)

Sure.

Tom Carpenter (01:19:20.847)

It was developed by... Shoot. Now you got me looking at the Wikipedia page. This is not important. Yeah. It started in 99 at Carnegie Mellon. Yeah, I believe it was freeware the whole time. Doesn't really matter. It's been a part of Muse Group for about three years now.

Brian Funk (01:19:30.14)

You

Tom Carpenter (01:19:49.619)

And Muse Group launched Muse Hub, where there's also MuseScore and some pretty popular creation tools. Specifically, Audacity is the most popular or the most used DAW in the world. And it's far and away the most popular amongst non-musicians using DAWs to record

non-musical ideas. So a lot of what the MuseHub software is doing is getting the tools to these people that you and I and a lot of the listeners of the podcast are probably aware of everything, you know, between the multi-track recorder and the newest release of Serum 2. But like these people may have never owned a plugin before and

may not be familiar with anything inside of the world of DSP. So I think Muse Hub is making audio production and DSP tools accessible to an audience that don't necessarily find themselves looking for those otherwise. And I am not affiliated with Muse Hub, so I could be getting that story entirely wrong, but that's what I understand it to be and...

I really have only the best things to say about that team. And it's had a lot of users since it launched MuseHub as a platform a bit ago.

Brian Funk (01:21:29.508)

I mean, it's great you're able to put your work up there and it reaches people. And I say it's like right on the front page. It's for podcasting essentials. It's after audacity. It's no voice cleaner.

Tom Carpenter (01:21:33.049)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:21:40.963)

Yeah. And I know that MUSE Hub is encouraging other aspiring developers to get onto the platform and try their shot at kind of creating tools, be it for musical uses or non-musical uses. yeah, there's a lot of joy to be found in DSP if you find your name being called that way and a lot of great resources for education.

inside of that sphere.

Brian Funk (01:22:12.86)

I think it's really cool how you've taken a lot of these interests of yours from playing music with other people, performing, touring, and also just programming and creating your own tools. It's, I think, the kind of modern direction a lot of people that are interested in music making and being involved with music as a career kind of need to think about because

Everything changes so fast. It's hard to put any of your eggs in just one basket. So to have some maneuverability and you know, all of that is, is smart. And it's probably fun for you too, cause you get to scratch a lot of itches.

Tom Carpenter (01:22:48.782)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:22:58.659)

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I wouldn't say that like pursuing a career in music is like always, you know.

going to be the most financially stable thing that you can do in life. And I wouldn't say that like going deeper into DSP was something that I did to kind of achieve, you know, whatever, a more diverse, either financial or whatever, trying to stabilize myself. But it has given me an appreciation for all sides of music, be it the knob turning, the very granular, you know.

This was recorded by a mic and then went through an A to D conversion. Okay, what is A to D? Now that I appreciate that, I appreciate everything that's happening on my screen more and I appreciate the music more. And it's also allowed me to like really appreciate the creators that have come before me that have like paved the way and made amazing music and amazing music creation tools.

Brian Funk (01:24:04.89)

Yeah, that's cool. That tends to happen when you start exploring something, start making it yourself and start seeing what really goes into it and all of the little things that came before that allow you to get to where you're going.

Tom Carpenter (01:24:13.645)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:24:20.899)

Yeah, certainly. It's a joy. And there's a lot of innovation left.

Brian Funk (01:24:30.234)

Yeah, I think so. It's always, I mean, we're getting spoiled, I think, really. mean, it seems like every week, there's a new this, there's a new that, this new thing came out and everything's like, my God, that's so cool. It used to be so much more spread out.

Tom Carpenter (01:24:31.439)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:24:41.347)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:24:47.789)

Yeah, there's a bedroom developers and there's, yeah, I would say is a, you know, maybe I'm biased on this, but I learned to code before chat GPT and the, the LLMs could really just spit out code. And I would caution anyone if they want to get into plugin developments to learn it the hard way, because even as I've tried to get more into and try and learn higher level and lower level stuff.

It's funny how there's nothing that can replace doing it the right way. The GPTs and LLMs and all that stuff have led me more astray than in the right direction. Yeah.

Brian Funk (01:25:31.1)

Yeah, they're certainly interesting tools. I've found them maybe like in creating like visuals even sometimes I find it very hard to get what I want but sometimes it gives me the idea to make what I want and that's kind of cool but yeah you can't do that if you don't have some of that foundational stuff as well. There's still a lot of value to knowing that stuff.

Tom Carpenter (01:25:48.366)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:25:55.843)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:26:00.121)

Certainly, no, and I don't mean to say don't, don't, yeah, I'm not holier than thou. I'll use it. I'll hop in there, but it can confuse if you don't really know what you're looking at.

Brian Funk (01:26:12.484)

Right. believe that. Anything on the horizon or you want to share before we wrap this one up?

Tom Carpenter (01:26:14.372)

Yeah.

Tom Carpenter (01:26:23.503)

Certainly. yeah. Well, first off, Brian, thank you for having me. This is a lot of fun to do. Yeah, imagine by the time this... Yeah. Well, I was about to say, I imagine by the time this comes out, my band will have likely finished the tour. We've got about a week and a half left, a little bit more than that. We're ending next Thursday, which is the 16th. So...

Brian Funk (01:26:29.988)

Yeah, thanks for being here. This is great. Taking time out of your tour.

Brian Funk (01:26:52.624)

You might be out before then.

Tom Carpenter (01:26:54.383)

Okay, right on. Well, I've got a band called Moon Tower and we love our new show, we love our new album. We're selling vinyls of the album that isn't out yet and that's a lot of fun. Soap Audio is continuing to create some amazing tools that I'm going to be cautious to talk too much about because...

I know how development goes and sometimes a feature set ends up working really well in beta and then in the release we can't deliver. So I will just say for non-musical applications and some cool unusual musical applications, Soap Audio is some great tools coming down the pipeline that I couldn't be happier about.

Other than that, check out Audacity and check out MuseHub and the great people at MuseGroup.

Brian Funk (01:27:51.708)

Cool. Yeah, definitely checked it out. I'll put links in the show notes for people so you can just click on them. But yeah, Tom, thanks so much. This has been great. Thanks for coming by. Yeah, you too. Thank you to everybody listening. Enjoy.

Brian Funk
Next

Your Best Music is Dying! 10 Habits of Prolific Music Producers