 Hey everyone, I wanted to take a minute to put together a video to answer some of the questions that I've been seeing. A lot of you have left questions either in my DMs or on comments on videos. And I've been wanting to put together a Q&A video. This is actually my second time recording this because I didn't like how the first one came out. If for whatever reason I don't get to a question that you're wondering about, feel free to comment below. You know, we'll do this again if it's something you guys are interested in. Some of the things I'm going to talk about in this Q&A I can dive into more detail on in a dedicated video. Right off the bat, let me cover one of the things that I get the most. This is probably the most common question that I see and it's, do you have perfect pitch? No, I don't have perfect pitch. Now, I'm not the best person to explain this concept and I could be completely wrong. But my understanding of what perfect pitch is, is basically this. Unless you're colorblind, people with normal sight are able to identify colors just by looking at them. You're never gonna mistake yellow for blue and you're never gonna mistake green from red. When your eyes function normally, you're able to just see a color and just tell you what it is. When you look at the sky, you're like, oh, that's blue. The key here is that we don't need another color to compare it to in order to identify the color. There's, there's just, there's just no way that you could see yellow and think it's anything else. No, it's just, it's just yellow. Well, people who have perfect pitch. This is actually way more incredible than maybe some of you might even be thinking. But people who have perfect pitch can do the same thing with notes. So in other words, to them, a C and an F sound distinctly different. There's no way that they could mistake a C for an F because one sounds a very specific way and the other sounds totally different to them. They're able to just identify what that pitch is, possibly by some sort of way that the frequency is interacting with their, with their ears. I don't know how it works, but I just know that people who have perfect pitch, like, can't possibly mistake one note for another note. Whereas most of us, when we hear a note out of context, I mean, there's really no reference point for us to be able to tell you what that note is. So if I just play, now I just played it, so I know what it is, but unless you have perfect pitch, how can you tell what that note is? If I go, like, you can tell they're going up, but what notes are they? Most of us can't just hear that and immediately just know. People with perfect pitch can and that's crazy. I like to think of it in a way where most of us are sort of hearing music colorblind. We can tell when things are different, but we can't always distinctly identify what something is without a contextual reference point. And then people who have perfect pitch, they're kind of like, they're hearing music in full color because they can, they can just identify all the different components. It's really incredible and it's something, it's an ability I wish I had, I'm not really sure if I wish I had it. It might actually be kind of a curse because like if you play a C and it's slightly out of tune, a person with perfect pitch, it just bothers them because they can't hear anything. They're like, no, that's not a C, that's just slightly flat. And for me and most people with what we might call relative pitch, we don't care. I mean, you can tune this whole piano down to like A438 and I don't care as long as everything is in tune with itself. That's all that matters. How long have you been playing the piano? So I started playing piano when I was eight. I got grandma as my first teacher. It doesn't get much better than that. When you get to get off the bus once a week at grandma's house and look for snacks. When I was first starting out, I did everything by ear and I didn't want to learn how to read music because anybody that knows how to read music, if you remember what it was like to learn, it's exactly like learning another language. It is learning another language. You have to learn the writing, the alphabet system of another language and be able to read it fluently. And man, eight-year-old me did not want to do that at all. So I just would waste as much time as possible by just running around grandma's kitchen looking for snacks. So yeah, I started there and then I went through a number of teachers over the course of my, I guess, elementary school years. Then finally started taking jazz piano lessons when I was like 13, I think. And I did that all the way up until I graduated high school. And then when I graduated high school, I went to the conservatory music at Purchase College, which is just outside of New York City. And there they have a phenomenal jazz studies program. And that's, I spent four years in that program. And they have some of the most incredible faculty and, you know, professors and teachers on faculty there. I was just so fortunate to be able to study with some incredible, incredible musicians. And the other cool thing about being in an environment like that is that from like a fellow student standpoint, I mean, that was the first time that I was sort of in an environment where almost everybody was better than me. And that's a great position to be in as a developing musician because they just push you. The people around you just push you to be better. And really in a way, that's what this whole project has been like for me. Because now that I have an audience that I need to constantly be creating new content for, it's really pushing me to develop new skills and get better at certain skills. In particular, like transcribing and composition and some of the technique stuff with doing some of the dubs gets a little, can get a little dicey. So it's really helping me develop as a musician still. And, you know, I haven't been in college for a few years, but developing as a musician is a lifelong process. Something that a lot of people have mentioned and are surprised by is the rate of content output. I totally understand that because I have been making a lot of content. It's maybe not as crazy as a lot of people might be thinking. In particular, because I've spent so long building my skills as a musician. So I've kind of gotten to a point ear training wise and compositionally where some of this stuff doesn't take me all that long. So I'm able to kind of get through it fairly quickly. And then it's just, they're so much fun to make. These videos are just a blast to make. So, you know, when I get done with one, I'm like, I'll just make another one. I'm trying to fine tune my content output and production sort of schedule. Because for a couple of reasons. Number one, obviously I don't want to get burned out. And I haven't experienced any feelings like that yet. But I can certainly see how one day maybe I would feel like that. And the other thing too is trying to figure out what you guys like, you know. I want to create a nice mix of things that are just stupid and funny. And that I just laugh at myself. And I also want to be able to create, you know, actual music. Even if the subject matter might be humorous. Because I love making stupid, just dumb, short form content. That is just, I don't know, I just have such a blast making them. But you know, but I also want to create things that sound good. That are compositionally satisfying for me. So it's all, you know, it's all work in progress and stuff that I'll just, I'll learn over time. And then of course, the other aspect of these videos that requires some time is the editing. And that's another question that I get a lot. Is what software do you use? How do you make these? I do everything inside of Premiere. Which for me, I have a pretty extensive background in Premiere and After Effects and Photoshop and all that stuff. So my hometown, before I moved to Colorado, is I'm from upstate New York in a very small area right on the Vermont border. It's like an hour north of Albany. But before I moved, I was living in the small city of Glens Falls. There I ran a small digital agency. And what we did there is we helped local businesses in our area learn how to use social media better. And then we helped them actually like create the content for that. So a lot of that stuff, pretty much all of it was film and just creating fun content for businesses in the area to share with their audiences on social media. And even prior to starting that company, I had done a lot of film stuff in the past. In fact, there's some videos on this channel way, way, way down. Some of you've actually found them already. Videos from a long time ago that I either did, you know, just as like a project or for a client. So I do have quite a lot of experience with Premiere and the Adobe suite in general. So that's been a huge help for making these videos because the editing process is actually not super involved. The biggest thing with the editing process is just the audio. And especially when I'm doing like harmonies and things like that because then I'm just layering tracks and tracks. I mean, amazing grace of video that I put out recently. That's like 18 audio tracks. That process has been one of the more involved aspects of production, but it's been super fun for me because I love writing and creating harmonies, especially with the, I think the human voice harmonizing with itself is one of the most beautiful sounds and I'm really excited to do more of that and write new stuff and kind of get a little more involved in that process because it's so much fun and I really love the output. Here's another big one that I get a lot. How do I learn to play better or to play like you? That's weird because there's so many pianists that I'm like, I have the same question for. Aside from the obvious answer, which is just practice and tons and tons. I mean, there were times in college when I spent like four to five hours a day in the practice room. And that was not the whole time in college. And in fact, that was actually some of my least efficient practice time because I hadn't really learned how to practice well. But the overall point is just that it just takes time, time and dedication. But look, the thing I always say is that if you want to learn how to play the piano or if you want to learn how to play the piano better, I think that the most important thing you can do is do what makes you want to play the piano. Because look, if you start getting into some curriculum that you're not pumped about or you start studying classical music when you don't like classical music, just because you think that's what you need to do because that's how people learn the piano, like you're going to lose interest. You're going to get to a point and you're just going to be like, ah, I don't really want to do this anymore. And that's not good. I mean, why are we doing this to begin with? Because it's fun. You know, like we want to play this instrument because we enjoy it. So if you make yourself do things that you don't enjoy and that causes you to lose interest in doing it, don't do it. Play what you want to play. Because at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is that you continue to play and you continue to grow and learn. Now, that being said, if you are very serious about it and you want to make progress quickly and go about it, quote, unquote, the right way, whatever that means, I think it means a ton of different things. But if you really are serious about it, there are a lot of things that you probably should do. I studied classical music all the way through high school and I did it because of the technique that it can help you with. It can literally just help you with physically playing the instrument. Because that's a huge component, obviously. But check this out. YouTube is the second largest search engine for a reason, right? So literally just go and whatever level you're at, if you're just beginning, type in just beginner piano lessons, type in advanced piano lessons, type in music theory lessons, type in jazz lessons, whatever you want to learn. There are a ton of amazing creators who are making awesome lessons and just super vast online resources that you can consult to help you get to where you want to be. If you literally just type in any of those things I just mentioned, you're going to go down a rabbit hole and you'll be well on your way. But at the end of all of it, it's two things. Practice and do what makes you want to play. And keep going. Keep going. Keep learning. Okay, here's one of the biggest ones. And this is one that I'm going to kind of give like an overview answer to, but it's really going to take almost maybe like a series of other videos or just like a four hour long explanation video, which I don't, you know, I'd make it if it's something you guys want to see. How do you make these videos? How does this work? How do you do this? Now, obviously the autocomplete Florida man, the Trump tweets, that's just, you know, I take words that are already written and I figure out a rhythmic cadence and I turn them into song. Those are definitely simpler. And most of the time when people are asking this question, it's in reference to the piano dubs. Where I actually figure out what the notes of spoken word are. Just in concept, it's actually not super complicated. The complication comes with just developing the technique and the ear training to be able to hear this stuff. And then the experience of how to then work it into a composition. It basically works like this. I find a video where I'm like, all right, this is funny or this is a really good candidate for transcribing the notes of speech. And then I do exactly that. I take the video and I go literally syllable by syllable. Every sound that comes out of a person's mouth, I have to figure out what note or what pitch that corresponds to. And then I create a sequence of notes which would ultimately be what is essentially a melody. That's what I start with. So I figure out, okay, what is this person actually saying? How does that correspond musically? Once I have that figured out, then that's when I feel like the real composition happens because then I figure out how to apply those notes to a series of chords. Now, one thing that I always try to do with my videos is I want my harmonic concepts to actually make sense. I want to make something that ultimately is going to wind up sounding like something you might expect to hear in the real world because I could just take each note, put a chord to it, and call it a day. But I find it much more interesting when I can get things to flow and actually go from point A to point B in a way that makes sense to your ear. The closer that I can get the final product to sound like a real song, the better. So to do that, this is probably the most important technique that I use to make these videos. And I might make a video just cheerfully just demonstrating this because I think it's really interesting. Any note can fit into some version of a chord in any key. Okay, so what I mean by that is if the note is a C, like I can make that C fit into a chord of some quality in any key. It doesn't matter. So theoretically, it doesn't even matter what the notes are of the melody that the person's saying because I can find a way to work that into almost any chord progression. For example, a C is the root of a C chord, but it's also the major third of an A flat chord or it's the flat 13th of an E dominant chord. So right there, there's three drastically different sounds that we can apply that one C to. So it almost, it just doesn't matter what the melody notes are. So whatever the notes are that correspond to the spoken word, I almost don't even care because I'll just find a way to incorporate those into chords that make sense in a larger harmonic picture. So I'm definitely going to make a video just sort of like demonstrating that concept because I feel like it's kind of interesting. But in an effort to not make an obscenely long video, I'm going to cut it there. And if there's anything that I didn't cover or any questions you have about anything that I said in this video, please let me know in the comments below. And I definitely want to try to get to as many of those as I can eventually. And if you guys want, we'll do this again. If you're new here and you haven't subscribed and you would like to, please do so. I'd really appreciate it. And thank you to everybody for checking it out. And I will see you in the next video.