Michael Walker: Yeah. All right. I'm excited to be here today with my new friend, James Patrick. So James is the co-founder of Slam Academy. He's one of the world's first Ableton Certified Trainers, and he's helped shape the global standard for electronic music education, both as a pioneering sound artist and author.

James has taught and mentored thousands of clients from beginners to music industry legends, across institutions like IPR, Dubspot, and Slam Academy. He has two acclaimed books and decades of innovation in synthesis, sampling, and sound design, and I'm really excited to have him on the podcast today.

Talk a little bit about his journey with creating Slam Academy and also where things are at as an electronic artist, where things are headed. How can we catch the wave of this emerging technology that we are lucky enough to be a part of? So, James, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the podcast today.

James Patrick: Yeah, Michael, thanks to you for having me. It's a real honor, and I am grateful for an opportunity to share a little bit about my story and also maybe shed some insight into where things are going from my perspective up here. And yeah, it's really special to be here, so thank you. Awesome.

Let's rock.

Michael: So, to kick things off, would love to hear a little bit of background in terms of how you started Slam Academy and became one of the world's first Ableton Certified instructors.

James: Sure. So, everyone's life story is long, but I'll try and keep it brief. Basically, I grew up in Minnesota, and I happened to be right down the street from Prince where I grew up in the seventies. And so he, before Purple Rain came out, would walk his dog up and down my street, and I was like, who's this little short guy with this tiny little dog, as a little kid. And Purple Rain came out, and a lot of that music was over my head when I was seven or whatever.

But then the neighborhood kind of changed, and by the time I was a teenager I started running into his bandmates and producer friends and roadies and everything around. And this was before he built Paisley Park, which is his current, and was his studio for many years in that neighborhood in Minnesota.

Fast forward many years, about the time I was 18 or 19, I was already really starting to DJ a lot. I always was really into the more forward-thinking or experimental side of music, anything that made you wonder where did those sounds come from or how are those sounds made.

And this music puts me in a place that classical music or even traditional diatonic music doesn't put me in. It puts me in a new space. And so that was always kind of my muse. And so,
 I reached out to a couple of Prince's people that I still knew from my childhood, and one of them had a little private studio in South Minneapolis, and he brought me over and showed me how to use a sampler and a drum machine and a synthesizer. And this was in the mid-nineties, and I was just cooked for life. And it was artists too like,

I don't know if any of your listeners are familiar with artists like Aphex Twin or Boards of Canada or Autechre. These are really kind of nineties, really forward-thinking electronic music groups. If you're not familiar with those groups, check 'em out.

But I just was really inspired to do something different, and so through learning those machines, I just got compelled to rearrange and destroy sounds in new ways that hadn't been explored yet. And so it was just really that passion for doing that and taking people into a space they had never imagined was really what got me going.

And nowadays, I think that's really, really common, especially in the world of technology and the internet and AI and EDM and everything. Everyone's trying to take people into a place they'd never imagined. But especially in the nineties, everything on the radio was still classic rock or nineties hip-hop and rap. And at the time, neither of them were really turning me on that much.

So long story short, I got really into producing tunes and DJing, and I just kind of stood out as somebody who played music that was unexpected but still made people really happy, kind of finding the blend between art and entertainment. Some DJs just go straight entertainment, and it is commercially successful but maybe not super creative. And other people go really arty, and they get the other end of the paradigm for their results. And so I kind of was good at blending those worlds.

And then after doing that for a really long time, I ended up just becoming a DJ and producer as my career, and I just did that most of my life. And to lead it up to Slam Academy, after working for a variety of different studios or schools, just as staff and kind of just to be around the equipment and to make music with the professional gear that I couldn't afford,
 eventually I also was working in record shops. I became a partner in a record store, a small record store in Minneapolis, 'cause I just needed to be on the main nerve of the sound signal flow coming from Germany and Europe and everything through the record stores, 'cause that's how music was distributed a long time ago.

Eventually I decided to leave that industry and pursue education, like formal education, formal training myself. And so one of Prince's people—Prince's bass player, recording engineer, mix engineer, and live sound engineer—had all came together in the late nineties and started a music school in Minneapolis, a recording and production school. They didn't teach instrumentation; they taught studio technology: cutting tape and using a console and all that engineering junk. And so I didn't, I wasn't interested in recording bands, but I knew I wanted to get closer to sound, and so I went through the program and was valedictorian, and they hired me immediately.

And this was right around the year 2000, when Ableton as a software was just being introduced to the public. And I had a mentor who told me, you gotta get into this Ableton thing. They should be teaching Ableton at that school. By the way, the school was called the Institute of Production and Recording, which is the school that you mentioned earlier, Michael.

So fast forward just a little while. When Ableton 2 was out around 2002, I ordered 45 copies of it for our studios and got a call the next day from somebody in Germany. It was like, there must be an error on your order. Nobody has ever ordered 45 copies of the software. And so I was like, Hey, nice to meet you. Ever heard of Prince? You know, we're here trying to teach people how to make music, and we quickly developed a very special relationship, and they started flying out. Through that relationship, over the next five years, I helped develop the Ableton Certified Trainer program, which was basically—at the time, Pro Tools certification was really, really big. I don't know if it still is or not; I have no idea. But Pro Tools certification was like an end-user product. So Pro Tools was selling for, you know, three to $10,000, these certificates that people who use Pro Tools can put on their wall and hopefully get a job as an audio editor or a mix engineer or whatever.

But Ableton wanted to do a different approach. They're more of an artist-driven software, so they wanted to certify their instructors, and I was one of the early-onset instructors, and so I helped develop that program, and it was really cool. And so that's how I became basically the first Ableton Certified Trainer in the world along with like two other people. And that was a really big boon for my life and my career, 'cause here we are 25 years later, and I still work daily with Ableton in Germany. And I'm really proud to be a part of that organization. And they are, again, still an artist-driven company, and I consider myself more of an artist than anything else.

And so I gravitate towards people who feel that way. And most people who are gravitated towards me are also just trying to express the sound ideas that they have inside of themselves. And so Ableton has become the tool worldwide to do that. And so through that software and through incorporating things like modular synthesis and the Ableton Push, if anyone out there is familiar with that, these are hands-on, tactile, interactive devices that allow people to touch sound in new ways and open up a more expressive pathway between the ideas that people have in their mind and their actual output.

So that has been wonderful. To finish it off, about 15 years ago, an old friend of mine who has a PhD in music, unlike myself, said, yo, we should join forces and start a school. And I said, that's a crazy idea. Let's do it. And so we started Slam Academy, and so, yeah, now I've been the sole proprietor for a while there, and it's been wonderful.

And we are an advanced, forward-thinking electronic music school. We cater to all genres and all styles. We have singer-songwriters and everything, but our primary focus is we are an Ableton Certified Training Center, one of the only places in the world that can say that. And so we really push the good word of helping people channel their creative vision and joy into their life, and allow that to be significant, and to love their experience as humans through sound. So that's the long story. That's actually the short story, but it still was pretty long. Thanks for listening.

Michael: That's awesome. Thank you for sharing. I love hearing stories like this. It's very, very interesting to hear too. I actually didn't know that Prince had his roots in Minnesota, Minneapolis. How dare you not know that? I know. It's like sacrilegious.

James: If you ask a Minnesotan that, they would say every human in the world knows that very, very well. And if you ask anyone not from Minnesota, they're like, from where. But we're all real proud of that. He is definitely a real—

Michael: We're spreading the good word. Spreading the good word. So now, yeah, now everyone knows. Well, not everyone—everyone that's listening to this right now, you remember it. Don't forget. This is your duty. You're the lights that must spread the good word.
 Very cool. I mean, also I can just imagine that experience of being, growing up seeing this emerging thing happening with Prince and seeing the musical roots starting to form, and it must have made such an impression on you and what was possible. So it makes sense that, from this mass, this roots, has also given birth to a very cool musical synthesis.
 Also awesome to hear just how big of a part you are in the genesis of Ableton and their instructor programs. I know I've personally—Ableton was my main DAW. I've used Logic, I've used Pro Tools, but Ableton for me, I was always the tech guy with our band. I've played keyboard, background vocals, and I had Ableton set up with our backing tracks and with a lot of the production things that we did related to synthesis. Nice.

So I personally use Ableton, and we—Ableton Push 3, you know, up here on our keyboard. We have a Push 2 downstairs. Awesome. So love Ableton, and the way you just even described it is for this tool that's really meant to help people channel and express who they are through the music.

So I'd be curious to hear from your perspective, 'cause I'm sure you've worked with a lot of artists now, and you've probably seen some patterns between when people are first coming in, some of the biggest challenges or struggles they have, and the ones that have breakthroughs—like what kind of does that for them?

So I'd be curious to hear from your perspective: when an artist first comes into your academy, what are some of the biggest challenges or frustrations that they usually are struggling with at the beginning?

James: Absolutely. After teaching for over 25 years and also being an artist myself going through it, I can tell you that one of my favorite mantras that I still just keep gravitating towards when it comes to—this is something that resonates even with me as an artist today. I'm constantly making music for myself too.

Everyone that starts out on their creative journey, I always ask my students, new classrooms full of new students: who here considers themselves a perfectionist? And very rarely is there someone who doesn't raise their hand. And if there's somebody who doesn't, I'll be like, oh yeah, get in the trenches, make a mess. And they're just like, woo. And their walls are down.

They know what's gonna sound a little off, and they don't give a shit. And these are the people that can really flow. But then all the other people around them who are like, oh, I'm a perfectionist,

they hear what they're making, and they're like, hmm, it's a little off. But damn, I'm jealous of that ability to enter the flow state.

Michael: Hmm.

James: And I think perfectionism is the enemy of good. And of course, it's funny, we were talking about Prince, who really was an extreme perfectionist. But nonetheless, that caused him a lot of suffering. I mean, he made thousands of hours of music that the world never heard, or maybe someday will now, but that's sad. He was largely a misunderstood person, a human, a suffering human, because of, I think largely, that inability to just fucking make—or, pardon my language—just make a mess.

Life is messy, and art needs, in my opinion, to be messy. For instance, again, I have this modular synthesizer sitting in the background. If you're a perfectionist and you're going into this kind of environment, it's going to be almost impossible. You gotta just love touching sound and just make a mess. Start by dumping the paint all over yourself, and then smush it into position and enjoy that process of making a mess.

That's, I think, my best bit of advice for beginners: just get messy and don't be a perfectionist. Even enjoy that perfectionism part of yourself, but save it for the mixdown, you know what I mean? And when it comes to creating art in the beginning, just—

One of my mentors told me one time, he's like, you know how you make electronic music with a hardware instrument? You gotta find the play button. And my question was like, well, it's the triangle. But I'm not gonna hit that 'cause I don't know what's gonna come out, and how do I program it, and yada yada. And he's like, no, no, no. Hit it. And then all of a sudden just random presets start coming out, and you're like, oh, but I don't like that. And it's like, there you go. So you're an artist. Change it.

And so now you're making a mess, and it's gross and ugly, and I just think that's a beautiful part of—and it's a metaphor too for the human experience. You can live your life bolted down under perfect guardrails—go to bed at the same time every night, get up every morning, eat the same thing every day—and at the end of your life, what did you really experience? Go out there, and I don't want to say get in trouble, but push yourself and be—liberate yourself from the rules a little and just make a mess and be free from judgment.

'Cause there's no such thing as perfect art. There's only this moment you have to live right now and your opportunity to live it or not. So that's my advice. Not to get all meta on you, but that's how I live.

Michael: That's great. I think that's extremely important knowledge to hear, and often the counterbalance is much stronger of that perfectionist mindset that we talked about.

So what I'm hearing you say is that especially early on in the creative process, the enemy of getting in that flow state is judging yourself or trying to be too analytical or perfectionist about what's happening. So especially when you're channeling and being creative, you kind of allow yourself to be messy, allow yourself to not be perfect, and it's definitely not gonna sound perfect. It's probably gonna sound kind of bad when it's first coming out, but that's really what gives rise to the ability to create something that does resonate, that you are proud of. Absolutely.

There's an analogy—you've probably heard this one before, but I think it really demonstrates what you're talking about nicely—is this: you have a big chunk of ice, and so who you are, your music, is sort of like this chunk of ice, and then you chip away at it and you turn it into a sculpture. So it's been there all along. You start with the full thing, and then you narrow it down. You figure it out. And it sounds like that's similar to what you're describing with: allow yourself to just show up and start the process of chipping away, 'cause if you never do that, then you're never gonna get to that sculpture.

James: Right. To relate it to musicianship too, on even a practical studio level, I tell my students all the time, I'm like, sometimes you have to build the Pyramids of Giza and then start breaking them down until you get back down to a grain of sand. And then you find the grain of sand you were looking for.

So with making a track, for instance, with Ableton or Pro Tools or any software, I'll tell my students, I'm like, hey, if you're not sure what to do today, just hit record. Pile it up, pile it up, pile it up. Tomorrow when you open up your session and you hit play, if you're overwhelmed by how much stuff is coming at you, that is a better problem to have than feeling like it's just missing something and you don't know what to add. I always say fill the canvas with paint. I want to see every instrument in your voicing arrangement playing something the whole time. It's easier to get creative in the end with the eraser than it is with the paintbrush.

Michael: Mm.

James: You know, so just dump it all on there and then decide, okay, here's the bridge; let's erase the chord progression, or here's whatever. And it just becomes easier to subtract from a brain dump. But if you can't give yourself the freedom, judgment-free, to just do the gross brain dump because you're too worried about, oh, but my next step's gonna be wrong, you're never gonna get there.

I have students, no kidding, who have been working on the same track for four or five years, and they're just hyper perfectionists, and they're still trying to get to the last chorus, and they just don't know what to add, and they're looking at silence on the timeline. And I'm just like, can you please just stretch that stuff out for three and a half minutes and then just get out the bazooka and remove things? It's just—to me, at least this is how my brain works, and I find it to be very effective with my students—is just: phase one is the making-a-mess session, and grab your instrument and just play, play, play. And that's how real music happens.

So you can do the erasing session as phase two, and that's a lot more fun—the cutting room—when you have a lot of good material to work with, right?

Michael: Cool. That totally makes sense. Yeah. So kind of starting with the unfiltered—be creative, be messy, let it all out. And then from there you have the raw material, which you can grab the eraser and you can start to subtract. Yeah. And you can chip away the ice block. Cool.

James: There's a—real quick—there's a really great book by a guy, Dennis DeSantis. He's actually one of the technical editors or something at Ableton, and he wrote a book called 74 Creative Strategies, and it is one of the most profound books about writing songs that I've ever seen in my life. I strongly recommend it to anyone. 74 Creative Strategies by Dennis DeSantis. And one of the two-page chapters is called "Write Drunk, Edit Sober." And it's just a metaphor, but basically the idea is:

Get in there first when it's time to create and get loose—reckless abandon. Tape is cheap nowadays. Let it run. And then come back the next day, like on a fresh meal coming home from the gym and with a vision. Get out the microscope. And that's—I think that's—I love that workflow. I think that's lucid.

Michael: Yes. That's so good. What was the phrase again? So, write drunk, edit sober. Write drunk, edit sober. Nice.

James: Right—with a W. Write. Create while free—intoxication—and then edit with clarity.

Michael: Okay. So then the takeaway is everyone should get wasted. And obviously, obviously I hear what you're saying, James. It's just like: let go, be messy, put it out.

Write drunk, and then—and then come to it with a fresh, open mind, and then that's the point to edit it. Yeah. Awesome.

Curious to hear your perspective as someone who has been doing this for decades and really helped artists master the craft of channeling their musical creativity and expression and having those different phases. It feels like right now we're entering a new era of how—or maybe we could argue it's part of the same era—but I'd love to hear your perspective with generative AI and music.

As it relates to creating songs, now we have the ability to just type in, I want this kind of track, and then it will generate it. And oftentimes it's pretty amazing what it can generate in a few seconds. But it's also missing maybe some of the heart or soul.

I would love to hear your perspective on these tools with AI and how you approach using new tools, whether it's AI or any new tools. Do you think that there's a difference between generative AI versus the other revolutions we've had in the past with music production, or what's your take on it?

James: This is truly a humongous topic, and there's so many directions we could take this in the limited amount of time that we have, but I will just be selective about a few points that I'd like to make. First of all is that music is a tool to bring people together and to enhance the human experience. A song that is made by a machine for a machine may be great as a standalone object, but until it does those initial things—like enhance relationships or human, actual human being experience—to me personally, it's just another algorithm that's ineffective.

And I think there's this fear that the framework will start creating songs and putting them on Spotify, and then human beings' music won't get listened to anymore. And then people will be streaming music on Spotify that's made by robots that people don't even realize. And that is kind of doomsday-ish.

But frankly, if the music is good and people are dancing or cooking to it or cleaning or doing whatever they want to do with music on, and it's enhancing their experience, then I think there's something to it. But as a creative person with sound, I love the act of creation itself. For instance, someone showed me the other day this—every producer needs a good vocalist, right? And so why not just sing your own bad voice and then upload it, and it sends it back sounding like Marvin Gaye. And it's not just effects on your voice; it's an entirely new timbre, like a whole new person singing exactly the words you sang, but it sounds like a real person. And it's in, like, 20 seconds. That's obviously informed by quite a bit of heavy computing.

I'm like, wow, that's really powerful. But you know what? One of my favorite things to do in my whole life is to coach a vocalist and sit with them and get the best performance out of them and watch them feel it and sing it. And even if that AI-generated vocal is amazing, that whole—back to the purpose of all this—is the human experience and interaction. Even if I could do that with a free upload and download, and it's harder for me to have the person over and adjust the microphone and the trim and all that, I'm going to.

I'd rather, because I want the experience of doing it. And so from a producer standpoint, the AI tools are very powerful, but I just love creating too much to hand that over. I want AI to do my laundry and my dishes and clean my floor and do all the stuff in my life I don't want to do, so I have more time to do this stuff. I'm not going to personally choose or use up environmental resources so I can hand over my most sacred activity of my life, which is being around other human beings and being creative.

Now, from a listener's standpoint, I am, too, amazed by some of the music that these frameworks can generate. It's quite powerful and shocking, and I think in many ways better than the music I can make as far as entertainment purposes. But back to that whole art versus entertainment,

I think music generally—as a creative person—we're always feeling compelled on this gradient between: am I making the art that's inside of myself, or am I trying to produce entertainment for other people? And there's this push and pull all the time. Where we live on that spectrum can change from day to day. But for the computer to do it, it's kind of just purely a tool for entertainment. I don't—the, I mean, maybe the computer is feeling artistic or not, but that's not—I don't, you know, that's maybe a rhetorical question.

Human beings feel artistic when they are allowed to express their ideas. And I don't want to necessarily accelerate the depletion of that experience from the life of any human being any faster than I have to, as powerful as it's there. I'll leave it at that.

Michael: It's a very big topic, and it's obviously nuanced, and there's different—yeah, it's not necessarily black and white in every situation.

But what I'm hearing you say is that what you appreciate about tools is when they allow you as the human and as the artist to be able to do more of the parts that you enjoy, that bring you life to your life. And so if something is a tool that's allowing you to tap in more to that, and it's taking care of things like doing the dishes, or even just logistical stuff that you normally have to do that's not the fun part, then you're for it. And the part that you feel like is not something that you'd like to accelerate or even lean into is where it starts to replace some of those aspects of what actually brings you joy.

I think that makes a lot of sense. And one thing that this reminds me of is—I've heard that as this relates to things like playing chess, technically, I don't know, if you just had robots playing chess, they'd be way—at this point, they'd be way better than humans—competing against each other playing chess. But nobody's watching chess, like just robot chess players playing chess against each other, 'cause it would be kind of boring.

But a lot of people still watch humans. And so from that aspect, I think maybe there's an interesting point there with art as well, is that because technically even if robots can create a certain kind of art, if it's not coming from the human, maybe there's less of a connection there.

Also, I wonder what your prediction would be on—you know, we had Nolan Arbaugh on our podcast a few months ago. Nolan is the first human patient to have a Neuralink installed. And so this Neuralink is a neural interface that lets him control things with his thoughts.

He is paraplegic from the neck down. And so he was the first human patient ever to have this device installed. So he came on the podcast, and we created a song together telepathically using his Neuralink.

James: What. Okay. I gotta watch that one.

Michael: It's pretty cool. His name's Nolan Arbaugh, and he's just a great spokesperson in general for the company. But that company in general—the concept of brain interfaces—is just like—

James: Yeah, it's wild.

Michael: But I actually have a bet with a friend of mine in a business mastermind group I'm in—I'm a million dollars—that I think that by 2040 neural interfaces will be as popular as cell phones are today. And obviously that's wild and improbable, but I actually believe in that. I'm like a Ray Kurzweil fan—The Singularity Is Near. 2044, I think, is the date that his exponential curve was predicting by. But wow.

Anyways, before I digress more, I'm curious, as it relates to that—something like a neural interface—what I'm hearing you say is: you have experienced what you feel like is the most sacred part of making music, which is that creative channeling, or that process of expressing who you are, and technology that removes that gets in—it basically defeats the purpose of music in the first place.

But I do wonder if we had some kind of neural interface. Can you imagine just imagining a symphony and then it just shapes in front of you?

James: Yeah. I'll tell you what, I can't imagine the Neuralink thing. I just can't even wrap my tiny organic wet mind around it—my wetware. But one thing I can say just on the AI topic that's worth considering before we maybe move on—'cause this could go forever—is earlier when I was reflecting on AI tools with you, I was thinking in the context of tools that just generate the music for you, kind of.

But I think there's an intermediary there that is right on the cusp. I think a lot of softwares are already exploring it. You could get a VST plugin that's like Super Drummer AI or whatever, and you could just say, click the rock-and-roll button, and it'll make a rock beat. And that's not necessarily AI, but if you start prompting it with other things like in the style of John Bonham but more loop-based and less triplet drum fills, and it can start—you can start sculpting it using prompts.

Frankly, I think that has a lot more intrigue. Because, as somebody who—I produce a lot of music, and I play a handful of instruments, but I'm not necessarily excellent at any of them. I just wish I was a better jazz piano player. I just love jazz chords. I can do it okay, but I'm not great. And so I'd love to be able to be like, okay, jazz chords, Robert Glasper, but a little more—you know—and start prompting and having it generate stuff. And that exists. That is out there. And that kind of stuff I think is really compelling. And if it's going to empower more people to make music, I'd say great.

I don't subscribe to this old-school idea of: you gotta be able to play the instrument or it's fake. Especially when I grew up in the nineties, people would say, if it's not real music, it's bogus. Prince—back to Prince—was never with the fake shit. I respect that, especially if you're a wicked multi-instrumentalist; you're allowed to yell from that mountaintop. But for the rest of us, we want to be able to be creative and touch sound, and so I think that's cool.

But Neuralink—ask me in 2040 if I have one. And I hope you're wrong, but we'll see. Yeah. Awesome.

Michael: So what I'm hearing you say about the state of production is: if you can use these tools where it's almost like you're in more of the producer seat, and if you are able to communicate the vision of, like, yeah, I want a style of this drum and this style, and then you're able to iterate on it, that could be a cool way that people can use AI right now without completely automating the entire process of creation. Yep.

I'm actually really curious to hear your perspective on this, or if you have any insight. I feel like they're probably working on it, if not it's already there in some capacity, but it definitely feels like the experience I've had using AI music tools for the most part is like Suno and Udio.com, where it's like you're describing. It's like, I want to write a song about my dog named Bob who is flying a kite. And it's like, dog named Bob flying a kite. They'll create the song. I'm like, oh, that's cool, but it'll be fully produced. So I'm like, ah, that's interesting.

But I feel like where it's really gonna take off is when a platform like Ableton or any DAW natively integrates with a large language model that has music-generation capabilities that map it to MIDI and choose the instrument sounds and creates the MIDI track. So literally it just creates it for you, but then you as the producer, the DJ, can be like, all right, cool. I like this instrument, but I'm gonna mess around with this melody that it played.

James: Yep.

Michael: Here's a great starting point.

James: Yeah.

Michael: I was gonna ask: how far away are we from that? Or do you think—is that already happening, or what's the current state of that?

James: I'm not really at liberty to speak on behalf of those innovations, but I can tell you that technologically we have achieved that as a human race for sure. And where and when or how it is deployed to the end user is to be seen.

Michael: James, give it to me right now. Give me the software.

James: I can say that any person who's monkeyed around with ChatGPT and then opened up a software like Pro Tools or Ableton has thought, man, wouldn't it be great if the mouse-over help window—

I could just ask, will you just do this for me? Instead of mousing over the effects send and saying, this is the effects send, why doesn't it say, you should put reverb on there. What kind of music are you trying to make? I'll put it on there for you. Turn it up halfway. Here's a suggestion. Here's a good starting point.

We are beyond capable of that technology. It's just a matter of how it gets integrated and in a way that is most effective for the lives of the creator. And that, I think, is the top priority on behalf of anyone on my radar: to make sure that it is introduced elegantly and in a way that feels good for the end user.

Michael: Cool. Well, that's very exciting to know that collectively, as a music technology world, this technology is possible and that people for sure are thinking through it and creating it. I mean, that idea of intent-based creation feels like that's gotta be the future of what these tools—to get the tools as minimal as they can feel, so it just taps directly into the intent, the better.

James: Yeah. I'll just mention, too, another one of my—honestly my favorite application of AI in music right now. And I'll say that I've been mixing and mastering for 15 plus years professionally, but I'm sure all of you are familiar with iZotope software. The iZotope Ozone 11 software is unbelievably powerful, and the results that it generates using AI frameworks or LLMs, large language models, is incredible. You open it up, and it's your traditional interface where you're creating modules like Master Rebalance, yada yada, or you just hit the little spirally brain-looking button, and it says, here's a great starting point.

You have to hit play on your song at the last chorus, and it listens for about 10 seconds, and it says, turn your speakers down. And you turn your speakers way down, and then boom—here comes your song like it's out of a Hollywood studio. And the beautiful thing about it is that, yeah, it throws it together for you, but "here's a great starting point" is what it shows on the screen. And then you go to each module that the AI put together for you, and you can deconstruct it. It'll walk you through what it did and why, and you can learn.

As a lifelong mastering engineer—and I understand the LUFS and the RMS and the peaking and the phasing and the phase alignment and everything—I still have learned a bunch in the past year from that AI model, even on my own music. 'Cause I'll mix down a song, no big deal, throw it in my master channel, build my own custom master channel, get really good results, and then I'll bypass my master channel, throw Ozone 11 on there, hit the little spirally button just to see what it'll do. And then I'll be like, wow, it sounds honestly almost as good as my master. Not as good, but really fricking close. And then I'm like, but what did they do here?

And then I can see step by step the signal flow path and everything that it did, and I have learned a lot about mastering through that interface. So damn, Ozone 11 is awesome.
 And then the same manufacturer, iZotope, they make the RX bundle, which is wildly powerful. It has a ton of latency, so watch out. But I've had situations where somebody kicks the mic stand, and you throw the De-click on there, and that shit is gone right over the middle of a word. It's just—how. Or De-reverb—it's not just a gate. It is ripping the thing apart into stems and then putting it back together without the reverb, and there's no hollowness at all. It's shocking.

STEM separation, too, is another incredible technology that I'm sure you're familiar with, where no more need to find the original multitrack masters to make a remix—just by the WAV. Ideally—even people do it with MP3s; I don't—but get your hands on a full-res WAV, upload it to the internet, wait 20 seconds, and now you have vocals, drums, bass, guitars, keyboards, and you listen to them by themselves, loud, in full res, and you're like, it sounds like the original multitrack. I do not hear—the vocals are crisp and loud, and there's no phasy—this at all.

And that's a really powerful tool. Think about the origins of hip-hop and house music. These are sampling-based genres where it's like, wouldn't it be great if you could just get the chord progression from that Marvin Gaye song without the singing, or any iteration of that combination. And now it's two clicks away, and it's—for now—it's free. So that's really powerful.

I'll mention, just for plugin random things—I don't even know these people—but obviously Serato Studio is a great stems ripper. iZotope RX has a stems function. But my favorite one is a free one. It's called UVR (Ultimate Vocal Remover). You can get UVR online—just "UVR online." If you Google that, it's a free one. You just start uploading WAVs, and bam, you're getting stems, and it's like you feel like you're in the Star Trek Enterprise or whatever—not to date myself. But it's wild. And for making remixes and such, it's insanely powerful.
 So those are some ways that I love the way AI works, 'cause it enhances my creative experience.

Michael: Very cool. What a time, what a time to be alive with music. Very cool. It's wild. Well, James, really appreciate you coming on the podcast today to talk a little bit about your journey so far, and very exciting kind of seeing the current state and imagining where we can go—to—with or without a brain interface.

For anyone that's listening to this right now, would love to hear a little bit more about what you've created with Slam Academy. And if someone here is interested in being able to supercharge or turn up the dial on the quality of the music that they're creating, how can you help them?

James: Absolutely. Thank you very much. If you're a singer-songwriter, or if you're a musician that plays a singular instrument and you want to have full ensemble backing tracks and full arrangements, or of course if you're somebody looking to learn more about electronic music production in general, which is used in every single genre nowadays, as you know—it could have been said true accurately 20 years ago—Slam Academy is an artist-driven place that exists for the sole purpose of helping you create the music that you love. And we succeed at that. We've been doing it for 14 years. We are one of the only Ableton Certified Training Centers in the United States. We employ some of the greatest instructors in the world, some of the greatest producers in the world.

And we are also really disrupting the industry because it's really, really affordable to go to Slam. If you want to have access to all of our materials, it's a hundred dollars a month. If you want to take a live instruction course where you meet weekly for three hours with a professional producer and they review your songs and everything, it's an additional 150 a month. So max out of pocket is 250, which I have spent that much in two hours going out to dinner—easy. In fact, one hour going out to dinner. And this is a life-changing experience.

All of our curriculum and our learning environment is very state-of-the-art and very snappy, and I'm really proud of everything we have to offer. And no one leaves disappointed. There is—the industry of music education is constantly changing.

Twenty years ago it was gold records on the wall and SSL consoles and tape decks. Five years ago it was associate's degrees and iMacs. Those schools are closing too. The biggest one in the U.S. just closed last week. It's called ICON Collective. A bunch of wonderful people running this school. Unfortunately, just being in L.A. and Hollywood and charging $40,000 a year, the model just does not work for people who just want to express themselves and create music.

So we're here to catch all of that demand and provide a wonderful experience for the cost of one nice dinner. And with that subscription, you end up having more than enough content to chew on every day of your life.

Please check us out if you're out there and interested in learning more about that, especially if you're interested in using Ableton or you're already an Ableton user. Everyone in our squad is hardcore Ableton users. Of course, we welcome you from any world of DAW, especially in our mixing and mastering programs, sound design programs—you can use any DAW.

But we have vocal production courses, songwriting. We have 20 different programs that all focus on the various facets of music, including music business. And we have a really exciting Artist Development Mentorship program as well. So if you're in a position where you're already creating really cool music, but you're not getting the reach you want, or maybe people aren't hearing your story enough or understanding you to where you're captivating people and attracting an audience, the Artist Development Mentorship course—it's small format. You start with a vision board of the story you're trying to tell, and by the time you're done, you have social media campaigns, release strategy—all the stuff that might not seem super fun to a creative musician person or music producer but is essential in 2025.

We're here to help you with every step along the way. So slamacademy.com if you want to check us out. Thanks for listening to my plug. Everything we do comes from the heart, and we're here to work with you and make sure you're living a righteous life. So let's do it.

Michael: Awesome. Thank you for sharing. And like always, we'll put all the links in the show notes for easy access. It just makes me grateful to be around in a time where we have access to resources like this that can literally change your life without needing to be physically in person. You can learn from decades of experience. It's pretty awesome.

So, thank you for coming on here to share some of that insight and experience with the community. Definitely recommend anyone that's looking to elevate their music production or quality to check out Slam Academy. And I'm looking forward to connecting hopefully sometime here in the studio here in Orlando. James, I'd love to invite you to come hang out.

James: I also have to take a moment for people out there who maybe don't have the time or schedule available to enroll in a low-maintenance educational experience like Slam Academy to also just consider going to Amazon. As much as I'm not a huge Amazon fan, you gotta use it sometimes.

Just search Ableton sound design. For instance, if you type those words into the search field—Ableton sound design—the top two hits will be my two most recent books. And they are all about creating your own original sounds using Ableton Live. They're very, very in-depth. They both come with a free online course at Slam Academy. So when you buy the book, you will become a member at Slam included, and you'll get over 50 workflows and downloadable presets and samples that are made throughout the duration of the book and the end of every chapter with each book.

So this is a really high-value package option too, as a really fun way to deepen your experiences with audio through the sound-artist lens, especially if you're an Ableton user. So check that out.

Michael: Cool. Very cool. Yeah. We'll put the links in the show notes for that as well. Cool. Perfect. James, thank you so much for being on the podcast today.

James: My pleasure, Michael. Thanks for having me.