Episode 31: New Year, New Tools

New Year, New Tools: Music Production Innovations for 2025

In the first episode of 2025, hosts Rich and Justin kick off the new year by discussing exciting new tools in the music production world. They introduce three innovative tools: Hook Theory, Dubler 2 by Vochlea, and Muse. Hook Theory helps musicians with chord progressions and music theory, Dubler 2 allows users to convert their vocals into various instrument sounds in their DAW, and Muse enables seamless remote collaboration between artists using different DAWs. Listen to this episode to find out how these tools can enhance music creation and make the process more accessible and collaborative.

https://www.hooktheory.com/
https://vochlea.com/
https://www.musesessions.co/

00:00 Welcome to the Face Your Ears Podcast
00:40 Introduction to the Podcast and Hosts
01:16 Studio Updates and New Projects
02:06 Monthly Live Sessions Idea
04:48 New Year, New Tools
05:46 Exploring Hook Theory
14:22 Introducing Dubler 2 by Vochlea
19:12 Collaborate Remotely with Muse
26:40 Wrapping Up and Final Thoughts

For Production Services, Coaching and Lessons, visit:

www.rjbmusicproduction.com

For help prepping your songs/voice for the studio:

www.bozicvoicestudio.com

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Transcript

Rich 0:06

Welcome, everybody, to another episode of the Face Your Ears podcast, the first of the year. Welcome back. How you doing, Justin?

Justin 0:18

I'm doing well here in the year 2025. It sounds so futuristic. I just learned that technically speaking, George Jetson is three years old at this point. wherever George Jetson is in the world, three years old, it's amazing, but yeah, I'm doing great. It's great to kick off our first episode of the new year.

rich_1_01-06-2025_104717 0:39

all right. yes. for those of you who are new listeners, welcome. We have a website. at www. faceyourears. com. We are also on social media. Just look for face your ears podcast. We try to release an episode at least once a month. We're going to try to maybe kick it up this year. We'll see how things go, but for sure, once a month, typically on the last Tuesday of the month, you can catch us and we like to talk about. All things music and recording related. And speaking of that, Justin, how is everything going in the studio?

Justin 1:20

Things are going well. I've got some new ideas cooking. So like I discussed in the Face Your Year episode that we wrapped up 2024 with, I'm continuing to work on some Logic Pro videos. what I want to do is really help people that have no Background, no familiarity whatsoever with using a DAW like Logic, Logic specifically. And help them just get started. So I want to get them set up And going and working on their first song. So I'm working on that, that's been a lot of fun. Very challenging. It's a lot of work but I'm focused and, passionate about that project. And last night, you and I were hanging out And, we were playing a little a little video game action. MicroMages, for, those curious. It's an excellent 8 bit game. Anyway, during that rousing round of online gameplay, I, brought an idea of having a Once a month or something, I'm still fleshing this out, like a, once a month live session, like an hour long or so to talk about logic and get people into it and, familiar and so on. So I just thought it might be a great way for me to market myself and what I'm able to do. and bring to people in terms of logic pro. So, yeah that's, a couple of big things going on right now. How about you

Rich 2:55

First of all, I think that's a great idea. Definitely keep us posted if you decide to go through with that. When you decide to go through with that, keep us posted. That'd a great thing to announce to our listeners. Of the podcast. Things are going well here. Back in action with the teaching. full schedule. I got a lot of recordings coming this month. I got quite a few students who have completed some songs and we got to lay down some vocals in the studio here. So that should be fun. I'm also finishing up an album with My good buddy, Alex, co writer, collaborator extraordinaire,

Justin 3:35

you're in for a treat, people. You're in for a treat. Rich gave me a little taste. We got to hang out over the New Year holiday and I got to listen to some of it and it's excellent. I'm very excited for it to be released.

Rich 3:48

Thank you. So we're, working hard to get that out there. So that's happening and then aside from the podcast, I've been also jamming with some people weekly here, just, little cover band happening, which is fun. I've never actually been in a cover band before, so this is a fun little endeavor, but that's about it here.

Justin 4:10

Not even in your youth, you weren't in a Cover band.

rich_1_01-06-2025_104717 4:14

no, I from the beginning, the moment I picked up a guitar, I was already trying to think of my own songs and writing from the beginning and then got into bands where we mostly wrote originals. played some covers here and there, but yeah, so this is like a full on cover thing happening, which is great.

justin_1_01-06-2025_104717 4:35

Awesome.

rich_1_01-06-2025_104717 4:37

Justin, you look excited. You look as if you have a topic for us today. What are we talking about today?

justin_1_01-06-2025_104717 4:48

So we got together last month and started to flesh out some of the things we wanted to talk about. And I was thinking to myself hey, it's a new year. Why not talk about new tools? So in this episode, we're going to focus on a few tools that I've been really excited about that I just wanted to share with you Rich, and with our audience. And so here we are to talk about a new year. New tools. So that's going to be the focus of our very first episode of 2025.

rich_1_01-06-2025_104717 5:21

Excellent. Justin, when you're talking tools, Are we talking like, screwdrivers and a ratchet set here to tighten up some loose screws in the studio?

justin_1_01-06-2025_104717 5:30

Not quite. I'm going to share my screen here with you, Rich. there's, actually three tools that I've come across in recent months that I am really excited about and that I've dabbled in a bit and I just wanted to share them. So first off is a website called hooktheory. com and I first learned about this through a really fantastic YouTuber slash producer named Sides. She did an episode touching on this and I was like, Oh, this seems really cool. So I went out myself and I I checked it out. So let's dive into what we're looking at.

rich_1_01-06-2025_104717 6:12

Alright! What is Hook

justin_1_01-06-2025_104717 6:15

there's a lot of different, I guess sub tools or, features of this website, but it's a website that's basically harnessing the power of music theory. So it. It allows you to go here and get a sense of things like chord progressions, chord possibilities things like that. It allows you to look at, which songs use which chord progressions. So what are the popular chord, most popular chord progressions and that kind of thing.

rich_1_01-06-2025_104717 6:48

So are you saying this site is designed to help you with song craft?

justin_1_01-06-2025_104717 6:54

Yeah, I think so. I've, used it for that very purpose.

justin_2_01-06-2025_105537 6:58

And so, what we're looking at is like, core progression trends. and, so Right now I'm just using the key of C major. I've got a dropdown menu to, to select the key and the, mode, whether it's like major or minor or we can go into to other modes like Dorian Fri and and so on. I selected the chord D minor and so. Right away it's like, Hey, here's 953 songs in C major that contain the chord D minor. And so it's Whoa, that's crazy. And so now if you look here, I've got these little bubbles that show me like the likelihood. yeah, And the left hand side, it's showing me like the percentage of Likelihood this chord was used next. So like I see. Let's see. E minor is pretty low on the list. So I'm going to go to E minor And now it shows, it's like whittling the songs down. Now it's only showing me 82 songs. So I see like until the night by Billy Joel, for example. And so I'm going to click F cause that's the biggest one. It's 59%. That's far and away the next chord that most people use. The likelihood of that being the next chord. Yeah. So it's kind of a way to be like, Hey, I'm going to fall in line with what most people do or what has worked well or the opposite of like, Hey, I'm going to kind of go down the path less taken and use these chords that haven't really been used very much. Yeah. There's a song here by Bruno Mars called Count on Me, and in this song, he uses the progression of D minor to E minor to F, and so, what you can, actually do in this is you can click on The chord and hear what that chord sounds like so right now I'm just, like clicking on these chords, and I'm hearing like block chords playing, but I can also just you know, Play the track and hear it in context So it's a really cool way to kind of analyze some of your favorite songs and you can even like search for songs And get an analyzation of, what chords are being used and what the melody looks like and so forth. And so I also like, over here on the right tells me the key gives me, some scale degrees in each chord. Lets me know which notes will sound more stable that kind of thing. And also just the tempo of the song. So like I just find this to be like a really cool way to get inspired quickly and easily and, get a sense of what works well and what doesn't and just, it's a fun tool just to see like, what some popular songs are using. Yeah, I think this is great, especially if you're not like a super great keyboard player, for example, like this is a great way to kind of go through a song that maybe you're even trying to learn. At a slower pace and get a sense of how it works and everything. But yeah, that that's how I've used it. The way you described it, which was like, Hey, I just, want to like tool around here and get it, and put some different courts together and see what they sound like quickly. So with hook theory, you've also got popular chord progressions. So it it tells me the most popular chord progression is 4 and so It shows me a bunch of songs, gives me the tabs for that, and then it gives me a bunch of other different progressions, like one of these says effective in all genres so I think that's cool to say hey, if you're just looking for something to get started, right? If this is effective in all genres, try this one, and again, you can just click on the chords and hear what that chord would sound like. Here's a, here's one called gaining popularity and it's one, four, six, five. And so you can play that, get that in your ears, see what that sounds like and also see what other artists have used that chord progression. So you can kind of hear it in sort of that context of like a pop song or rock song or, or whatever. There's timeless which is a timeless chord progression. It's got over a hundred songs using that chord progression. So yeah, I just, I love the fact that it's immediate. You don't have to, write out a bunch of chords in your DAW and pick an instrument and stuff. This is just boom, here are the chords. Here's what they sound Like, Here's how they've been used in other contexts and so forth. One other thing I, just wanted to talk about. that I think is cool on Hook Theory is this infographics section. So, it shows us things like chords and major keys, the most popular chords and major keys. So you get an infographic. about what those chords are, popular keys by scale. So like the most popular minor keys, the most popular mixolydian keys. And then I think this is fun decades. So like here are the chord progressions in the top 10 songs of the 1980s, the 1990s, the two thousands, et cetera. Albums, chord analysis of all the tracks in an album. So like here's midnight. By Taylor Swift or happier than ever by Billy Eilish. So this is just such a cool site for somebody that, wants to learn more about some of their favorite artists to just getting inspired and having some pretty cool interactive and accessible tools to use as well. Yeah. Yeah, and what I'll say last thing to wrap up hook theory is, of course, we're going to link to this, but also link to sides video on this resource. She does a great job of diving into it in more depth than we can hear. But if you head over to hook theory, just find the resources menu. And towards the bottom, you'll see some of the things we talked about here on this show, like infographics, popular chord progressions, that kind of thing. So, yeah, that's hook theory. one of the things I mentioned before is that some people aren't as skilled in playing an instrument Like a guitar or a keyboard. And this company, Voklia, has released a product called Doubler. And now they're on Doubler 2. It was so popular and so successful, they created a second one But Doubler 2 has been used by a lot of prominent producers and singer songwriters and stuff. And what it is a microphone. It's really not a special microphone, just a generic microphone. A dynamic microphone, I should say. That you plug in And then it has software that allows the user to essentially sing parts with their voice into their DAW. And so this software comes with a ton of different sounds like, trumpet And. bass and piano and all those different things. So you can actually sing your part and get the the instrument that you've selected to, to play. And of course record into your DAW. And it doesn't do just melodic stuff. You can also do things like drums. So you can basically like beatbox and you can train it to To respond to certain sounds that you're making. As you're sort of beat boxing, which is kind of cool and you can also set it up to play chords. You can set up a key signature and like, uh, you know, the different chords that are being used. And it allows you to easily play chords. Like maybe you're using like sustained sounds like a string section or something like that. You can actually just sing into the microphone and boom, it's going to capture. that for you right away. And so very cool Tool. Yeah. So this is a piece of software that you purchase. So the software itself, if I'm not mistaken, is a hundred and. 49, U S yes. Cause We have some of our friends overseas that do not spend us currency. So yes, 149 us just for the software and that's it. So once you, you buy that, the software is yours kind of thing, a rare thing in this world that we live in today. But there's also the kit and this kit comes with the software, of course, but also a USB microphone, right? You can, it just has to be a dynamic microphone. Exactly. Yeah one of those like Shure SM58s or something like that. But yeah, it's pretty, cool. You, again, you can select from virtually any instrument you can think of, and then you could just start singing into your DAW. So if your strength is, as a singer, and you're not necessarily an instrumentalist, This is a definite game changer, because you can now just sing your parts into the microphone, into your jaw and, capture it right away. I love this tool yeah. Yeah there's a bunch of people demonstrating how it's used across all these different genres and styles. So definitely check it out. It's vocalia. com. And of course, we're going to link this in our show notes so that you can jump in and check it out yourself. It is. They have some, you know, further resources that you can pay for, but what I was looking at and showing you is definitely free, there is one other tool that that I've started to use that I absolutely love in this tool. Uh, is free, but there is a paid version that of course unlocks other, features. And this is called Muse. So Muse is a tool, it's basically, if I had to sum it up, it's like Zoom, but for musicians. And so it allows people to collaborate remotely regardless of the DAW or digital audio workstation that they are using. So, you know, Rich, you can be using Logic Pro, I can be using Ableton Live, and we can, hear each other and collaborate together. It sets up a lot of basic things that we're used to nowadays in collaborating online, like video chat, text chat, right? We can hear each other, we can see each other. But this goes a step further in that it allows me to stream my audio from My DAW to the other person or persons. It's another cool thing is that it's not limited to just one person, but I can collaborate with several. And so I can, you know, open up my Logic Pro, open up a session and pump my audio right from Logic into this Muse, virtual session with my collaborators. And so they can, hear what I'm working on, they can respond to it, they can react to it and so forth. but it doesn't stop there. It also allows you to record audio. So like rich, if I were a client of yours, you could actually control my computer remotely. And record me onto your computer, or it could record to that person's computer locally. And so, it's basically like being someone's sound engineer from, you know, a different time zone. Um, and it's pretty remarkable in that you can record someone remotely like that. Either onto their computer. or onto yours. So, pretty incredible that it allows you to do that. And again, it doesn't matter if they're using a different DAW than you are, it all just works Yeah, it, it is, they have a, uh, free version, um, and they, they are a subscription based. They, follow that kind of new model of making everything subscription based. But the free version allows you to have, up to, let me double check. I think it's up to three, collaborators per session. and you can have a 60 minute session for free. you get, a couple channels of audio, so it's a little more limited, but, you know, if you're just working like one on one or with a small group of three people or something, like, it works really, really well. And then beyond that, they unlock a lot of other features like unlimited sessions, unlimited session times, unlimited, audio devices that you can use in the session, all this cool stuff. And that's about 13. 33 a month if you pay for an annual subscription, but if you just want to pay month to month, it's about 15. 99 per month. Yeah, not at all. Yeah. one other cool thing that this does is, it doesn't do just audio. So you can actually send MIDI. So rich, if I wanted to play a virtual instrument or even a, an instrument in your studio, like a hardware instrument. I could play my MIDI keyboard here in Michigan and it would play your device in New Jersey. So you can send MIDI through the session as well. And I tried this out with our friend, Barack, and it's cool. It works. There's a little bit of latency. However, if you're just trying to convey an idea or like a chord or like, you know, something like that, it's perfect. It's great. know, if you're like, oh, I think it, the cord should sound like this. Or, you know, this little melody part just on like that, you know, you can do that and you can, you can play that person's instrument from very far away. Yeah, absolutely. a couple things to mention just, on Muse is that it, like Zoom or any, you know, other, Online meeting space. You can do file sharing very easily, which is great because if you're like, oh, there's a very specific kick drum. I want to use in this project, right? You can drop it into your muse session with your collaborators and they can easily add that into their DAW You know, if they're using a different DAW, it doesn't matter because it's just like, here's the file added into whatever you're using. And another thing that I think is cool is that, you can find other people to collaborate with. So there's like a community aspect to Muse. So if you're looking for people to collaborate with, it has that element built into it. and then I just, I kind of glossed over it, but you can remotely control someone's computer with screen control. So like you can track, you can mix, you can master. So what you recall, we, we did a session Muse and it was, it was a little bit cumbersome, you know, the way we were doing it. It worked. Yeah. I think the way we were doing it is we, we kind of had to rely upon the client a little bit to, to navigate the computer and stuff. And what I like about this is they can just do their thing. Like, they can just sit back and sing. Somebody else can take control, um, and, and hit record and capture the audio and do all of that. So, um, that's really the ideal situation in a recording. Context is that the performer can just perform like they don't need to worry about audio engineering and technical stuff. Like they can just give their best and what they do. So, that's really everything I wanted to talk about in regards to muse. But, as you can tell, it's pretty incredible. and the times that I've used it, I've been absolutely impressed. And I think it's really going to be, something that we use in RJB music production, going forward this year. So very excited to have this in our toolbox.

rich_3_01-06-2025_111930 26:40

And then, last but not least, Muse, which allows you to collaborate with people remotely, in a more seamless fashion, allowing you to share ideas and even do remote recording sessions. with a nice nifty little plugin. So thank you everyone for tuning in, and thank you Justin for looking into these things for us.

justin_4_01-06-2025_111930 27:04

Absolutely. It was a lot of fun. I've had a lot of fun, learning about these and using them. Like I said before, we will include helpful links for you, dear listener, to check these out on your own, dive into them yourself, and get the most out of them that you can. With that, we'll wrap things up here. Thank you so much again, everyone, for listening, and we'll catch you in the next episode. Bye for now!

rich_3_01-06-2025_111930 27:30

Bye.