Transcripts

FMM074- Failing To Succeed – Transcript

Hi, I’m Keith Mills. And this is episode number 74 of the Finish More Music Podcast. And in this episode, we’re going to be talking about failure, mistakes, getting it wrong, all things that are absolutely essential if you want to create anything original, but interestingly, all things that many people try to avoid. So in this episode, we’re going to consider why is it that some people are able to embrace failure and keep moving forward whilst others stagnate, avoid going into the studio and ultimately give up on their dreams of being a music producer.

This is the Finish More Music Podcast, a show for underground dance music producers who want to finish more and better music, and to share it with the world.

My name’s Keith Mills, and every week, we’ll dive into the mindset and creative strategies that will help you to move further and faster along your music production journey.

So I’m pretty pleased with myself because I just came up with a title for this literally moments before hitting record. So the title as you will have seen is Failing to Succeed. And why I’m so pleased about this is because it’s got a double meaning that fits perfectly with what we’re going to talk about in this episode. So I’m pretty pleased with it, but obviously as always, you be the judge. So here’s the deal. Failing to succeed can mean two things, right? It’s entirely possible to not achieve success, i.e. to fail to succeed. Simultaneously, no great success was ever achieved without failure along the way. So it’s a vital ingredient. And again, that means that we have to fail to succeed. So failing to succeed has this double meaning.

So then the question that we’re going to really be covering in this episode is what is the difference between the two? What is the difference between not succeeding and in failing in order to succeed? Why do some people continually fail and not see the success that they want with their music whilst others do fail and turn it into success? So they do get the results they want. Now, I think it’s best summed up with this really, really cool quote from Charles Kettering. And the quote is, “One fails forwards towards success. One fails forwards towards success.” Now I’m going to add my own little twist on this and really give you the main point of the whole podcast in one blast here. And I’m going to change that quote up. With reflection, one fails forwards towards success. Reflection is everything.

Now here’s the deal. The risk of failure is ever present. Whenever we’re going to try new things, we’re going to imagine new ideas. And then we’re going to take these ideas and try to make something from them. We’re going to turn them into reality. Whenever we’re going to do those things, which basically is the definition of creativity, it’s all about the use of new ideas to create new things. Whenever we’re going to do that, failure is inevitable. And another brilliant quote for you by Sir Ken Robinson. And if you haven’t checked out his TED Talks on YouTube, then you absolutely are going to want to do that. You’re absolutely going to want to do that. They’re incredible TED Talks. The first one particular about creativity. The man’s just such a great speaker. It’s kind of funny. It’s entertaining. It’s inspiring. It’s really, really great. So here’s his quote. “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never create anything original.”

So it must be really clear that we must fail if we’re going to succeed. If we’re going to succeed at anything that’s big and important to us, failure is an inherent ingredient in it. And yet, so many people are terrified of making mistakes, of failing to get it right, of trying something new, of trying to create something, of trying to write a piece of music. And they’re terrified that they’ll get it wrong, that something will go wrong. And one of these sort of the big words we hear around this is perfection. So you get this perfection paralysis, so scared of not getting it right, that you don’t move forward at all. Or you can’t move forward is probably a better way of putting it. Right? People who are really, really crippled with perfectionism, just can’t move forward. They are paralyzed. And procrastination comes up a lot. When we’re fearful that we might get it wrong, we tend to avoid doing it.

And maybe you felt this with your music and entirely possible, anything creative can bring this up in people, particularly when you first start. And then what happens when you do in your mind, get it wrong, or when you do fail? Well, for a lot of people, they then obsess over the failure. So there’s a problem. Something goes wrong. There’s a mistake, there’s a failure. And that then becomes the object of their obsession and they stay on it with what is called a problem focus. Now, this is something I went into really deep, episode 49, which was all about the pandemic and which was the way that you view things that happen.

And it’s equally applied to this when we get things wrong, when we fail, when we don’t get the result that we wanted or that we expected. You can either choose to stay in a problem focus, which means you will stagnate because you’re focused on what you did wrong, or what went wrong or what the mistake was. Or you can move it to an opportunity focus, which is when we reflect and we ask questions about it and we look for a way to learn and to grow and to progress. If you stagnate, if you focus on the failure, then typically what happens is people go into a downward spiral with this.

So they get caught in this cycle where they will procrastinate and try to avoid doing the thing because they’ve been obsessing on it and because they don’t want to make any more mistakes, because it always is such a big deal. So they procrastinate. They avoid, they naturally then end up making less music. So when they do start again, they’re more likely to hit the exact same wall that they hit before. And there’s only so many times someone’s going to go around this before eventually, they give up. It’s inevitable.

And as we all know, the only real time that you can fail when you’re shooting for a big goal is when you give up. Because until then, and this is another great quote, there isn’t failure, there’s feedback, right? There’s no such thing as failure, only feedback. I think that’s the quote. But what is feedback? It’s something to reflect on. And if we fail to reflect, then it’s like Groundhog Day. It’s the same mistakes again and again and again in the studio. And maybe you can relate to this, like keep buying new gear and not using it and just ending up with an overwhelming amount of gear or an overwhelming amount of sounds and presets, or keep sitting in the studio and watching loads of tutorials instead of getting on. Or following the same workflow that isn’t working, or keep bouncing to workflow, to workflow and these things aren’t working without really stopping to consider what’s going on.

Now, inside of Finish More Music, this is something that I call the cycle of failure. So here’s how it goes down. See if you can relate to this one. You watch a load of tutorials until you find one that you’re like, “Yeah, that lights me up. This new thing, this is the answer. This is the magic bullet. Or this new plugin, or this new piece of gear, this will be the one. Producer X makes amazing music and he’s got this. If I get this, this will be the one.” So you get really lit up by this thing and really inspired and motivated. And then you get it or you try the technique, whatever it is. And very, very quickly you find it’s not really working. It’s not the solution you’d hoped it would be. And you’re hitting the same old blocks that you’ve always hit. And of course you will be because really what’s going on is it’s your creative process that isn’t right. It’s not the lack of gear. It’s not the lack of new techniques and hints and tips. It’s the creative process.

But nevertheless, we get the buzz, we get that high. Then we try it and it doesn’t work out. So we get a low from it. And that means the stepping back, the avoidance, the procrastinating, staying out of the studio for a while, possibly feeling a bit down. And then we go back to searching for the next high, looking at the plugin reviews, looking at the new stuff that’s come out on Gearslutz, the tutorials, the new bits of kit, all of that stuff. And what happens eventually we get the buzz. So get the buzz, hit the same old block, get deflated, start avoiding it, start searching for the high. It’s kind of a little bit like being a junkie on this kind of wheel. It’s Groundhog Day. It just keeps coming around and around again.

And the quote you’ve probably heard me using loads for this. I don’t know who actually said this, but it’s such a great quote. “If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.” And the key to doing something different is to learn. And the key to learning is to make mistakes and to reflect on them. So I’ve got a brilliant equation for you on this one. Now this one isn’t mine. This is a gentleman called Ray Dalio, who’s a billionaire in the US, was a hedge fund manager. And his very, very simple equation is pain plus reflection equals progress. So it’s the pain of failure, of problems, of mistakes, of things going wrong, add reflection, and you’re going to progress. No, it doesn’t say failure equals progress or failure equals success. Reflection is absolutely the key.

Now to give you an idea, this is a guy who, he failed. I mean, one time spectacularly, but he failed on multiple occasions. I mean, you would, you don’t become a billionaire and a top hedge fund manager without dropping the ball on multiple occasions. But what he started to do is analyze not just the mistakes he made and the mistakes his team made, which is basically the things they got wrong, how they predicted the market incorrectly. He also started analyzing all the things that other people got wrong, all of their failures and predictions. He started going back in history, looking at all of those and learning and building a model based on everything that he learned to help him better predict the market. So he was actually not just taking his own pain. He was taking other people’s pain and reflecting on that as well and bringing all of that together to make incredible progress, to become that amazingly successful. I mean, a billionaire. That’s incredible.

I’ll give you another example of this as well. So one from the sporting world. One of my favorite tennis players, a guy called Stanislas Wawrinka, Stan The Man. Amazing tennis player, he’s won three Grand Slam tournaments. So this guy’s the real deal. And I’ve watched him… Mrs. M. used to play tennis to incredibly high level, so she’s always watching the tennis. So I watch a lot of tennis and I kind of watched this guy coming up, his career. And it was a hard slog for him. And it was amazing. It was one of those where you really see someone putting so much energy and effort in to reach their goal and keep losing, keep losing, keep losing and getting better, progressing a bit more in the tournament, a bit more, a bit more. And now he’s got three Grand Slams to his name. Now he’s got a tattoo. And here’s what it says. “Always tried, always failed, no matter, try again, fail again, fail better.” Always tried, always failed, no matter, try again, fail again, fail better.

And that totally sums up everything that I’ve seen from this guy. He put in an extraordinary level of effort. Failure is essential, utterly essential if you want to progress, but you’re only going to progress if you learn from it. So you can either choose to keep feeling the same pain, the same failures again and again, or you can choose to reflect and to grow and to move towards success. They’re the options. But the way to get the failure of course, is to put in that extraordinary level of effort. So I guess there would be another option in there, which is to sit around doing nothing. So maybe it’s choose to keep feeling the same pain and the same failure from sitting around doing nothing, or from doing the same old thing again and again when you do try, or you can reflect and grow and move towards success, welcome your failure, learn from your failure.

So what I thought I’d do to round out this episode was give you three really, really powerful techniques for you, with your music and all areas of your life to be fair, that you can use for reflection. So number one, journaling. This is such a huge game changer when you start taking this on. It is one of the first things I teach every member that comes into the Finish More Music community, how to journal. We’ve got templates on it. We have regular discussions about this in the community, the types of questions to ask, the different things to put in there, how to reflect, how to make the most from it to grow. In fact, in FMM Plus, my high level mentoring group, a number of the guys in there send me their journal every single day without failure.

So these are the people that are most invested in their music, and they’re smashing it out the park. The number of releases these guys are getting and the way they’re growing is incredible. And several of them send me their journal. Every single day, my phone goes off and it’s their journal entry for that day. That’s how committed they are. It’s a huge, huge game changer. If you’re not doing it, you’ve probably picked this up by now from what I’m saying, I can’t recommend it enough.

Number two, white space. So white space is something that I previously discussed in episode number 47 called when you need to slow down to speed up. Now this, and it takes me back a little bit, I was out in California when I recorded that podcast. I’m not sure if it’s the one that I did in the street down the road where we were in an Airbnb and, again, I think it was a Sunday evening. And some people, some other Airbnb guests had moved into the flat below where we were staying or the apartment I think it’s called out in the US. And they had a baby and it was like loads of row and stuff, so I had to go down the road and sit in the car, in the dark. It was quite murky in trying to record a podcast, sitting in the car.

But anyway, that time was amazing. And I was getting up every single morning. We were right by the beach. So I would just have a couple of minutes walk and I could walk along the beach and get into what I call my white space. So as I say, episode 47, I talk you through the whole thing and how you can do this too. But the general idea is I would walk along. I’d be listening to music or the music from my members, checking out what everyone’s up to. And I would be gently leaning into things that I wanted to reflect on. Not really turning them over in my head, like tumultuous, aggressively trying to figure out solutions or anything like that. Literally just resting my mind against them.

And that for me is white space, it’s where you’ve just got that piece of time. Any moment in your day, where you can grab a block of time and just be with yourself without interruption, without distraction, and just gently rest your mind up against something that you want to reflect on. Incredible things tend to happen. That’s when I get pretty much all of my biggest and best, most creative ideas and solutions that we need.

Then the third one… So we’ve had journaling, white space, third way to reflect, and this is huge. And these aren’t do one or the other. For me, I recommend do all three, is discussion with your peers. So, so important when you’re writing music, to be able to share experiences, to talk about things that worked in your music and to talk about mistakes and failures. These words sound so heavy now, but when we’re talking about it like this, they’re just like little blips. “Well, this happened. I got a rejection from this label. Now I got this feedback on this piece of music that I wasn’t hoping for. I’ve been in the studio and I’m not making the progress I wanted. I’m failing to get to where I wanted to get to. And I’ve been reflecting on this and I cannot figure it out. I cannot figure it out, guys. What do you think?”

Of course, with all those different perspectives, all those different angles, all those different experiences, you’re going to get way, way deeper, more varied answers and solutions and things for you to learn on in order to move forward. So three things, journaling, white space, discussion with peers. If you don’t have a peer group, if you’re not part of a community, it’s something that I’d put at the top of your list. You go faster alone, you go further together, which is absolutely what you want.

So in summary, if you want success with your music and let’s face it, you wouldn’t be listening to this show if you didn’t. So if you want success for your music, then you got to go all in. You got to put an extraordinary level of effort in. It’s not something that you can tickle with. You want to become good at getting the ideas from your head into finished pieces of music, at channeling your creativity, at getting feedback, at growing, at developing, at getting your music out to labels, bigger and bigger and more established labels. Maybe seeing your favorite DJs, playing your tracks, maybe playing them yourself. Whatever your version of success might be, in order to get it, you’re going to have to go all in.

And providing you reflect, providing you reflect, then I can guarantee that this one thing is going to be true for every goal that you set, every project you set out to achieve. You will either get the outcome you want, or you will get the lesson you need, providing you reflect. You either get the outcome you want or the lesson you need. And when you really think about that, there’s no such thing as failure anymore. And that’s how powerful reflection is. It’s a win-win for you.

So I hope you enjoyed the show. Please do hit me up on Instagram letting me know your thoughts on this episode. Are there things that you keep doing where you’re going around in circles and you need to give your head a bit of a wobble and sit down and reflect on them? I’d absolutely love to hear from you. And also, let me know as well if you’ve got different ways of reflecting? What do you do? How do you figure things out when you hit walls? When you hit these sort of perceived failures, how do you overcome them? So DM me @iamkeithmills on Instagram. I promise you I’ll read it. And I promise you I’ll get back to you as well. Thank you, if you have been hitting me up with DMs. I really do appreciate it. So show notes, www.finishmoremusic.com/074. I hope you enjoyed the show. Do stay safe and happy music-making. Until next time, take care.

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As well as taking the opportunity to get more of your creative output into the world, remixing is an amazing tool for building connections with other artists and strengthening your relationship with label owners. In short, remixing is essential. Try to think of a top level producer who doesn’t have a bunch of great remixes to their name. You can’t, right? So make sure you master the art of remixing so that when your opportunity comes, you’re ready to take it with both hands and accelerate your growth in the music industry. The ebook is totally free, so dive over now to www.finishmoremusic.com/remix and grab your copy. See you in the next episode.

FMM073- Infinite Creativity – Transcript

Hi, I’m Keith Mills, and this is Episode Number 73 of the Finish More Music podcast. And today we’re going to be talking about the concept of finite and infinite games, and importantly how this concept will empower you to create much more freely in the studio and with a whole lot more fun. Now, I see so many producers putting themselves under unbearable levels of what is to be honest, relentless pressure in the studio and it crushes their creativity and really drags them down.

Now, unsurprisingly, this leads to avoidance and less time pursuing the one thing that really lights them up in their life, writing music. In this episode I’m going to share a perspective that cuts through this pressure with ease. It makes writing music much lighter and a more energizing experience and it will ultimately help you to get a lot more done and have a lot more fun doing it. Let’s get stuck in.

This is the Finish More Music podcast, a show for underground dance music producers who want to finish more and better music and to share it with the world. My name is Keith Mills, every week we’ll dive into the mindset creative strategies that will help you to move further and faster along your music production journey.

Hello, and thank you for joining me for another episode of the Finish More Music podcast. So we’ve got a slightly interesting and a little bit left field of a topic to explore today. And it’s the concept of finite and infinite games. This is something that I came across a while back, but it was a video that I watched recently that got me thinking about this and creativity in general and the creative process that we follow in any art field, it doesn’t just have to be music. And then to the broader, more holistic, all our life kind of vibe. Now you will know that a lot of the things that I talk about on this show are things that affect general life and not just mere creativity and not just music production.

And that’s because everything that we do affects everything else, right? If you think about it, your health affects, your relationship affects, your art affects, your work, they’re all interlinked. If you don’t take care of your health, if something goes wrong and you get some illness, God forbid, and that takes you out the game, everything else goes as well. You’re not working, you’re not creating, you’re not able to foster your relationship, take care of your family, all of those things. And we can point to any things in our life and pretty much say if we drop that plate it has usually a large knock-on effect to the other areas, the other plates in our life.

This particular concept, finite and infinite games, you can apply this to life in general. I’m going to tie into creativity. Let’s get stuck in first of all and understand what I’m even talking about here, what the concept is. Well, there are two types of game. There is a finite game, which is a small game a short period of time. Has a start and an end very clearly, has a specified outcome and there are winners and there are losers.

You could think of this as, for example, a single game of football or any sport you want if football is not your thing. This is a single match, is played over 90 minutes plus some bit of extra time. And at the end of it there is very definitely a winner or loser or potentially a draw but if we were talking about a cup final there’s going to be a winner no matter what, and there’s going to be a loser no matter what. That is a finite game.

Now, in contrast an infinite game is a game that has no end, no specified outcome, and the goal of the game is constant improvement. The goal is to be the best player that you can be. We could think of this as the game of football, not a game of football but the game of football. Because if you think about it, no one has ever said, “Football is ending in,” whatever, “2026. Football is ending in 2026 and whichever club has over their history got the most medals and the most cups and the most trophies you win the football and that’s it. We’re never playing football again.”

That is the difference. The infinite game is about the journey and about becoming the best player that you can be, and the finite game is the small, definite winner, definite loser kind of vibe. Why is this important? I’ll use football, we’ll keep going down this road before I tie it really strongly into creativity. Let’s imagine the team loses the cup final, okay? What do you imagine the coach or the manager is going to be saying in the dressing room afterwards? Because it’s their job to pick the team up. They might have another game in a week, as little as a couple of days sometimes.

If they’re looking at this through the finite game lens where, “This is a catastrophe, we are losers. We have lost, it’s all over,” it’s going to be pretty hard to pick themselves up and it might feel like that in the moment. But it’s his or her job to come into that dressing room and put this into perspective. To put this into this perspective of, “We didn’t lose at the game of football, we just lost this particular cup.”

They’re going to be saying things like, “Look, we’re going to go again.” This hurts, this stings right now and that’s normal. That’s good, it’s part of the journey of life feeling all the highs and feeling all the lows, we want the full range of emotions. We often now don’t want to be anxious don’t want this… Actually, we do. We want to feel everything, right? You are alive, you want to feel every possible emotion and feeling that is available to you. So it’s a part of the journey.

“We’re going to go again, we’re going to analyze this match. Some of the stuff that happened in this match were spectacular. We did brilliant. We hit some of the little goals and the things that we set out past completion. And Bob’s dribbling was amazing.” I could probably think of a better name for a footballer than Bob. But you know what I mean? “Mane’s dribbling was incredible. And yeah, we made a few mistakes. There were a few errors, some stuff went wrong. They were better than us in certain areas, we’re going to analyze that, we’re going to get better. We’re going to hit it on the training ground and when that next game comes around, we are going to be stronger, faster, fitter. We’re going all in.” Think about that as a message, right? Really, really powerful.

Now, likewise before the game, if this game was also treated as part of the infinite game, the journey, the be the best we can be, the message and we often hear this from coaches in again any field, boxing, whatever you name it. There’s this idea of go out there and have fun, express yourselves, give it your best shot, give it everything you’ve got. Not “If you fail at this you’re all losers, you’re all dreadful you’ve got to win this thing.” Because that just keeps the pressure on and it crushes people and it stops them from being able to perform at their best.

Now, we can totally relate this to art and creativity. I love this quote from Sarah Lewis, “Masters are not experts because they take a subject to its conceptual end. They are masters because they realise there isn’t one.” There isn’t an end, right? You can’t win at the game of art. You can’t win at the game of music. You can’t put your hand up and say, “That’s it, everybody stop I’ve won. I’ve won music, no more music.” It doesn’t work like that.

And a creative, someone who thrives on creating things and bringing new and original ideas into the world knows there’s always more to learn. There’s always more to discover. They know that they’re going to score some goals. They’re going to miss some shots, they’re going to fall over their own feet, they’re going to score own goals. But the whistle never actually blows, there’s never an end to being a creative. There’s never an end to music. They play the game because they love it. They play to keep improving, to keep discovering, to keep learning new things to become the best player that they can be and to express as many ideas as they possibly can.

Here’s the main point of this before we dive on. And I think this is the takeaway to write down. This is the number one thing to hold on to. Imagine how light and how energizing it is to always show up and treat your creative process as a game, and as a game you can never lose. Think about that, a game, play, fun. Something to try out, something to toil at but nevertheless a game and a game that it’s not possible to lose.

Now, compare and contrast that. Think how different it feels to have the pressure of having to win everything in every moment. Like everything is a finite game and that’s all your tunnel visioned on. We can go back to our footballer and say, “They’d love to win every game.” Of course they would, it would be amazing, but it’s completely unrealistic and totally unhelpful to feel that they absolutely must and every footballer going on the pitch can’t possibly put a foot wrong or he’s a loser.

Losing is going to sting, is going to hurt. Nobody wants to lose for sure, everyone wants to win, absolutely. But if you view this specific loss, this specific miss, this specific mistake, whatever it might be on the football pitch, there’s just one moment, just one fleeting moment in an infinite game, in a journey and you put it into that perspective then it simply becomes an opportunity to grow and to come again stronger, it becomes a part of the journey. And this is one of the most common traits of professionals. They bounce back immediately. But not only that they’re free to express themselves right on the football pitch, to play with freedom, to stay motivated, to be driven for the next match.

Very, very important and it’s exactly the same with artists. If you treat every single track like it’s the be-all and end-all of the world, and it absolutely must be perfect, “I have to win this,” then think about the pressure, the oppression and how it stifles and crushes creativity. And that just makes it a miserable experience, that’s not fun, that’s not a game. That’s not a game you want to play put it that way, and it’s one you’re likely to avoid. If it’s all about failure, if it’s all about, “Ugh, if it’s not perfect I lose. If this doesn’t meet my expectations I lose.”

Whereas when it’s part of the entire journey and it becomes well, “That track was important to me and I hoped it was kind of turn out better than that but it didn’t and it took a bit longer than I’d have liked as well. I faffed about a bit and I got stuck over here and there was a bit of a bottleneck and I fell into that same trap again. This is not the end of the world, it’s part of my journey as a creative. And I’m going to grow from it, and I’m going to learn from it, I’m going to come back stronger to the next track.”

Same deal we see a lot with people comparing their progress to other people. It’s common that people look sideways at people who’ve started something around a similar time to them and compare their progress to the other person’s progress. But there’s two ways of doing that, right? Let’s say you start a course, maybe you’re a member of Finish More Music. You come in with a group of other individuals and at the end of the year, you look at some of them and you think, “Wow, they’re far ahead of me. I’m way behind them therefore I’ve lost. Therefore I’ve failed, therefore I’m not good enough.” Finite game mentality. How demotivating is that?

Versus, “Wow, they’re far ahead of me, that’s amazing. But look, there’s another year and another year. I’m going to give it my best shot this year, let’s see if I can catch up. That’ll be fun. What is it they’re doing? What have they learned I don’t know? If I reach out to them,” and I mean, this is one of the great things about Finish More Music is that people do reach out and the people further ahead go, “Yeah, look I’m doing this. This is what changed it all for me.”

But rather than holding this like, “Oh, I’ve lost,” be like, “Wow, how do I get to that level? How do I even overtake that? How exciting? I’m going to go into the game across this next year, this part of my journey and see what I can do, see where I can improve and we’ll see where we are at the end of it. And even then it will just be another amazing year in a part of this exciting journey that I’m on.”

Another big one for you. Any single walk of life is setting goals, so important. I talk about this loads on the podcast for you. I set goals over a 90-day period, so three months, right? I do the same with every single member of my team. In fact, our entire goal as a team is always divided into 90-day goals for across the entire year. I do this with everyone that I coach and mentor as well. We work to 90-day goals. And I emphasize so much that it’s a part of the journey and that we set the goal, but really the win more than hitting the goal, in fact way more than hitting the goal, the win is in the learning, the growth, the development, and being a very different person at the end of the 90 days to the person you were at the start.

Because if that person is stronger and better and more equipped, it doesn’t matter if we miss the goal. The goal was an arbitrary number we plucked out of thin air anyway, right? Sure it might have some intelligence, the educated guesswork behind it but nevertheless the goal is just the direction. So give an extraordinary level of effort to it. And here’s the deal. If we get halfway towards that goal and the person is like, “Oh man, I don’t think I’m going to hit it.”

Here’s where the finite infinite games thing comes in. If that’s a finite game and not hitting it means you’ve lost, what are you going to do? Give up, stop right there. Miss all of that amazing potential development that you’ve got for the other half of giving everything you’ve got towards that goal. We know the goals, the right direction, we’ve planned out. We’ve got to learn by doing. Do the thing, have the power. Missing the goal doesn’t mean that’s it, you’re finished, you’ve got to stop, you’re out of the race.

You can’t create another piece of music anymore. “Team, that’s it we’re going out of business, we didn’t hit that one goal. We’re going to stop helping everybody with their music.” This is madness, right? Instead it’s like, “Okay, probably not going to hit that goal. What can I do differently that still might give me the chance of it? What if in a parallel dimension there’s another version of me that does go on to get the goal, what the heck are they doing?”

And then you just keep trying. And even if you think you’re a week out and you’re definitely going to miss it don’t stop and throw the week away because this is a finite game it’s not, it’s part of a bigger journey. Double down. Let’s make the most of this next week, let’s kill it, let’s knock it out the park so when I set my next raft of goals, the next things I’m going to aim for in the next 90 days, I’m the best version of me that I can be showing up for those goals. It’s a really important concept and I love it because it’s around the notion of games, the notion of play.

Now, here’s a really cool story for you. This is one that a guy, Simon Sinek, I think you pronounce his name, he’s like a motivational speaker, focuses a lot on business. And he took to a story about infinite games and finite games to do with Apple and Microsoft. And basically he was at a Microsoft convention. He was speaking there and the Zune MP3 player had just come out that Microsoft had released. And he was given one as a gift by Microsoft and told, “This is a million times better than the iPod Touch.”

And sure enough he found out that it was, totally agreed with that. A little bit later a few months or so he’s talking at an Apple event and he gets in and shares a cab with an exec from Apple. And he said, “I’ve just been given the new Microsoft Zune and I’ve got to tell ya it’s a lot better than the iPod Touch.” The guy from Apple replies, “Yep, it probably is and that’s it. Yeah, maybe it is.” And that might seem like a strange reaction but Apple know that they’re in it for the long game.

Sure, the release of the Podcast on Zune may have been considered a finite game. Had a release date and who’s going to make the most sales and who’s going to produce the most effective product, but actually that’s just the release of a handheld MP3 player. And in perspective of the infinite game of what Apple are trying to achieve and their continual growth as a company, it’s just a moment in their journey. And just because that new product might be better than theirs right now, that doesn’t mean that Apple all of a sudden have to stop and they’re out of that game, they’re looking into the future. What lessons have they learned from that release? What did they learn from the marketing? What did they learn from the technology? How can they improve the next version of the iPod Touch or even they going to do something else, some other innovative, exciting product?

Microsoft on the flip side were looking at beating Apple. They were treating the whole thing as just a finite game where there is a winner and a loser. And so they were obsessing over, “Let’s make this product better than their one,” rather than, “What is the vision and the goal for the future for these products?” They were looking at it not as an infinite game of continual growth and improvement, but as this little boxed-in narrow-minded game. And by constantly reacting to Apple and constantly trying to beat them at whatever the new thing is, Microsoft across so many different areas are always trailing behind.

Interesting story. Now, I’m not getting into this PC, Mac debate here so don’t even tempt me. It’s got nothing to do with that, that’s someone else’s story not mine, but you can see how it works, right? And if you view your tracks, your label submissions, your goals as part of an infinite game, then you’re going to be able to create freely. You’ll be focused on your overall vision, you’ll give it your best. You’ll stay motivated no matter the result of that track or that label submission or that particular goal.

But if you lose sight of it being all about this wonderful journey, you lose sight of it being the infinite game, then you’re going to operate under far more extreme levels of pressure that will stifle and crush your creativity. And that’s when the risk of giving up or at least avoiding trying again if you perceive yourself to have lost at any stage. You’ll be slow. You’re effectively putting a whole bunch of unrealistic obstacles and expectations in your way. It’s a way clunkier, heavier, more labored approach at your creative journey and as I said at the top, life in general.

In summary, it’s a really simple but I think incredibly powerful mindset shift. Here’s the thing for you to try, okay? Have a go at approaching your music as a game, your next creative session as a game, your next label submission as a game, any goals you’ve set out as a game. But just to keep this simple, if you haven’t got this approach to your music, just for this week approach your creative sessions and the piece of music that you’re making as a game and importantly, a game that you cannot possibly lose. See how that feels and interestingly see how much more you get done.

Give it a try, hit me out please on Instagram DM at @iamkeithmills. I’d love to hear how you get on with this, what your thoughts are in general. I read and reply to every single comment, I’d love to hear from you so please do get in touch. Show notes are finishmoremusic.com/073. And as always, I’d love to have a review from you. Ping me a review if you haven’t yet if you’re enjoying the show, or hit me up on a DM if there’s a particular topic you’d like me to talk about.

I’ve had some amazing suggestions. If you’ve done that thank you very much. Ping them to me, I consider absolutely everything. If there’s something that you’d like me to explore, to talk about, absolutely let me know, I’m really, really open to that. That’s all for me. Stay safe, I do hope you enjoyed this episode you took some value from it. Happy music making and I’ll catch you next time.

If you’re serious about getting your music heard and climbing the ladder as a music producer, one of the skills you absolutely must master is remixing. That’s why I put together a brand new completely free eBook for you called The Art of Remixing. It features the most prolific remixes from my Finish More Music community sharing their strategies for creating successful remix projects, ready for you to share with the world.

Jump over to www.finishmoremusic.com/remix and download your free copy now. You’ll learn technical setups for creating your remix, how to add your own flair whilst respecting the original artist’s track, how to create quickly to a tight deadline, how to extract melodies and harmonies and so much more. As well as taking the opportunity to get more of your creative output into the world, remixing is an amazing tool for building connections with other artists and strengthening your relationship with label owners.

In short, remixing is essential. Try to think of a top-level producer who doesn’t have a bunch of great remixes to their name. You can’t, right? Make sure you master the art of remixing so that when your opportunity comes you’re ready to take it with both hands and accelerate your growth in the music industry. The eBook is totally free so dive over now to www.finishmoremusic.com/remix and grab your copy. See you in the next episode.

FMM072- Imposter Syndrome: The Poison and the Antidote – Transcript

Hi, I’m Keith Mills and this is episode number 72 of the Finish More Music podcast. And today we’re going to be talking about imposter syndrome.

Now imposter syndrome is a mindset block. It saps our confidence and it’ll stop you from grabbing opportunities that you really desire when you get the chance. Now, this can manifest itself as downplaying your achievements, an inability for you to accept praise, self-doubt, and of course the big one, a fear of being exposed as a fraud, particularly when you’re looking at sharing your art and your creations with the world.

Now, these thoughts seep in for everyone. Even the most accomplished of producers who you would imagine never think these things also struggle with this. But it doesn’t mean you can’t overcome these thoughts and grab the goals and the desires that you really want in your life. So in this podcast, I’m going to provide you with the antidote to the poison that is imposter syndrome. It’s a big one, so let’s get stuck in.

This is the Finish More Music Podcast, a show for underground dance music producers who want to finish more and better music and to share it with the world. My name’s Keith Mills, and every week, we’ll dive into the mindset and creative strategies that will help you to move further and faster along your music production journey.

Hello, and thank you for joining me for another episode of the Finish More Music Podcast. So I hope you are well. I’m recording this again on a Sunday. And it was really interesting. As I was coming into the studio, I remembered a conversation I had quite a while back where somebody said to me, “Keith, don’t you get fed up of having to work on the weekend?” Really, really interesting phrase, that. Don’t you get fed up of having to work on the weekend?

Now, the reality is, at one point, I did have a mindset like that. Things felt like maybe they were a chore. And although it isn’t the subject of this podcast, I thought it’d be an interesting thing to kick things off with, because it will be a future podcast. And I’m going to hopefully quite smoothly bring it into what we’re talking about today. But actually when I figured out my purpose and my vision and what I wanted to do, it didn’t become a situation of being fed up because I had to work. It became a situation of getting to pursue my purpose, getting to live into my vision on the weekend. It’s something I want to do. I don’t have this whole work-life balance thing. That isn’t a reality for me. I have life, and that’s it. And I get to show up and I get to choose to do what I want to do.

And the opportunity to empower other people, positively impact them in some way, and then for them to positively impact other people… Because it’s like chucking a rock in a pond, right? It ripples outwards. If you have a bad day, other people end up having a bad day, or at the very least getting influenced by your bad day. But if they have a bad day, then someone else might have a bad day. And the reverse is true. If you learn something, hear something, get lit up in any way by something that I do, the chances are you may then pass that on to somebody else, who passes it on to somebody else.

So the opportunity to do that. I get to do that. I don’t have to do that. I don’t have to work. I get to live into my purpose. Can’t think of many more things I’d rather be doing on the weekend, if I’m totally honest with you. So I’m going to talk about this in a future podcast, this idea of purpose, because it’s something that has really helped me on my journey massively. And it just came into my mind as I was coming into the studio. So I wanted to open up with that.

But the way that it links really well into what we’re going to talk about is, isn’t it amazing how things feel very different when we change the way we speak and the stories that we tell ourselves? Brilliant quote, right? “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” What a great quote. So feel the difference. Just feel the difference between “Aren’t you fed up having to work on the weekend?” versus “I get to live into my purpose on the weekend.” How different does that even feel to you? It’s huge.

And this is what we’re going to be talking about today, but in a slightly different way. We’re going to be talking about an absolute classic crippling mindset that holds so many people back called imposter syndrome. It’s like a poison, and the aim of this podcast is for us to address it, and also for me to give you what I feel are the best antidotes for it.

So let’s get stuck in. What is imposter syndrome? Well, it’s a persistent, nagging feeling of being a fraud, feeling like you don’t belong, devaluing your own worth, undermining the things that you have achieved. And despite all of your previous achievements and there being plenty of evidence there for you to dig up, this won’t go away. It’s this nagging, persistent feeling of, “I don’t belong. I’m a fraud. I’m not cut out for this. I’m not good enough.”

And here’s the crazy thing. It doesn’t matter where you are on your journey. This can rear up its ugly head. This poison can be injected into your life. Great podcasts for you that really, really exemplifies this is The Best of the Best Versus Fear. So we did a rerun of this, episode number 56. If you haven’t checked out this podcast, I really strongly recommend listening to it. It’s one of my absolute favorites. It’s one that has been talked about and discussed and I’ve been messaged about more, pretty much, than any other, I think. The inner bully, inner coach one was huge as well, and we’re going down that road a little bit here. It’s absolutely huge. And even if you have checked it out, I recommend going back and checking it out again. It’s really, really very valuable.

And it was an insight that I had when I was watching a show where celebrities were being put through a section of SAS special forces training. And during interviews, many of them were talking about imposter syndrome. They were talking about feeling like a fraud and feeling like they weren’t good enough. And this included people like Premier League winning footballers, Britain’s most celebrated female Olympic champion. Think about that. Won loads and loads of gold medals, loads of world titles in cycling, and still had a nagging doubt that she was going to get found out and she wasn’t good enough, causing them a lot of pain, a lot of anxiety, a lot of anguish. Even, would you believe it, Albert Einstein spoke about this, having imposter syndrome.

And it’s totally in the world of music. Of course it is. It floors creatives on a regular basis. Episode number 67, just a couple back now, Bushwacka! was talking about this. I mean, we’re talking about a guy with a career that spans over three decades, amazing music across multiple genres, and still it comes up for him. It’s persistent. It can strike at any time, and it can be completely debilitating.

So let’s talk about this. Let’s dig a little bit deeper into the negative ramifications of letting this take a hold of you, of letting this poison run through you. And then we’ll look at some antidotes, very, very powerful couple of techniques I’ve got for you.

So when this shows up, what is the damage that this can do? Well, it can really, really hugely stop you from moving forward in any way towards your goals. So let’s cover a few things here. You may well have, and almost certainly, I’d go as far to say, experienced this situation where it holds you back from doing the very thing that you want to do. Let’s say you wrote a couple of tracks that were beyond the level that you are used to writing. You’re like, “Wow, they are decent tracks. I’m really pleased with those.” And maybe they’re in a sea of what you might particularly, if you’re beginning, consider to be tracks that don’t really meet your expectations. You’re not too chuffed with them. So then imposter syndrome crops up and says, “Those tracks were a fluke. Yes, you wrote those tracks, but you’re not good enough. You’re no good. You’re not cut out for this. Those tracks were a fluke.”

Now, what happens in that situation? We’re likely to avoid writing any more tracks. Why? Because if they don’t reach up to that standard, it will prove to us that that was a fluke and we are no good, and we shouldn’t be here and we don’t belong, and who on earth do we think we are to be writing music in the first place? So if imposter syndrome gets in and says, “You’re not good enough,” then we’re likely to avoid doing anything that might prove that and rears that horrible voice up again. And of course, what we really want to do is be writing music, is be creating art.

Another classic one is sharing. So you’ve written a few tunes. You think, “Yeah, they’re decent. I want to get some feedback on those tracks.” And then the voice comes up again. “Well, but what if people tell you they’re no good? You’re going to get found out. Those tracks aren’t as good as you thought they were. You’re not as good as you thought you were. It’s going to shine a light on that.” So what do we do? We avoid getting the tracks out there for feedback from a kick-ass peer group.

The very thing that would move us forward, we avoid it. We avoid getting feedback, because it might prove to us that we’re not as good as we thought, or rather we’re not as good as that voice tells us. Right? It’s got nothing to do with us. And it’s the voice that’s blabbing away. The imposter syndrome. Same with sending to labels, comes up so much. I hear this so many times, right? Someone says, “Yeah, but I’m not ready. I’m not ready yet.” And the fear here is, “I’m not ready. I don’t belong. I’m not good enough. If I send it to a label, what if they reject it? If they reject, it proves that I’m not good enough and maybe I never will be.” And what is the thing that you really want? It’s to get a release on that label.

So I’ve spoken about this in the past, but the story that we tell ourselves creates the outcome that we want or that we don’t want. Okay? So here’s a really, really good thing to you for you to write down. When you live into fear, you get the results of that fear. Let me say that again, because this is so, so, so important. When you live into fear, you get the results of that fear. So, “I don’t have what it takes to write great music.” That’s a fear. Okay? “I fear that I don’t have what it takes to write great music.” Imposter syndrome. “I’m not good enough. I’m a fraud.” So you avoid writing music.

And what is the consequence of that? Well, you don’t get the exposure of writing music that builds up the skills to write what your version of great music is. “I don’t have what it takes to write great music.” So I avoid writing music because I don’t want to prove to myself that I don’t have what it takes. But actually the reality that creates is that I don’t have the skills to get to the level to write my version of great music.

“I don’t belong amongst people who release on labels.” We avoid sending into labels for fear of rejection that might confirm that to us, and then of course we won’t be in a group of people releasing on labels. We won’t get the very thing that we want. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. It creeps in. It is a poison that creeps into us. We’re a fraud. We start devaluing the things that we have achieved. “Yeah, I did think this tune was good enough, and I did think it was good enough to send to that label, but when it comes to crunch time, when it comes to the tipping point, all of a sudden, no, actually I’m not good enough. I’m not ready. I won’t send it.”

So the question is, how long are you prepared to let imposter syndrome win? What is the consequence of this? Where will you be one year from now if you keep telling yourself that you’re not good enough to do the very things that you’re passionate about doing? Where will you be? What will life be like one year from now?

And so you have a choice. Do you choose imposter syndrome or do you choose to believe in yourself? That is a choice. You can choose to show up and encourage yourself and to believe in yourself and to acknowledge the amazing things that you’ve done and achieved in your life. Or you can choose to let imposter syndrome keep telling you you’re no good, keep undermining you, keep devaluing you, keep causing pain, suffering, frustration, keep causing Groundhog Day, keep causing you to go around in circles. Believe in yourself or imposter syndrome. Your choice.

Here is the deal. If you live into your vision, then you will take the action you need to make your vision a reality. Great thing to write down again. If you live into your vision, what you really want, your passion. If you get clear on that, if you live into that, then you’re going to take the necessary action to make your vision your reality. If you live into fear, then you will make that fear a reality.

If you’re living to fear, you will make that fear a reality. If you don’t believe you have what it takes and you say to yourself, “I don’t have what it takes to write great music,” you’ll avoid writing great music and you won’t have what it takes to write great music. Really, really important concept to grasp. If you live into your fear, that fear is going to become your reality. “Do the thing, have the power.” I love that quote.

Here’s another brilliant quote, Eleanor Roosevelt. “We gain strength, courage and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face. We must do that which we think we cannot.” Now I’d like to add a bit of a caveat to that, because for me, it’s change it at the source. And that’s believe we can. Rather than do what we think we can’t, if we recognize that, we want to flip that round and say, “No, I can do it.” And then we take the action and that becomes our reality.

So let me give you a couple of antidotes, the most powerful things I know. I use these. They work incredibly well. They’re going to switch you from that place of fear and that horrible voice that’s digging you out into a place of confidence and encouragement.

So, the first one, okay? Objectively observe your thoughts and challenge them with evidence. Now here’s an incredible thing for you. It’s called the cookie jar. Absolutely loved this. So I heard about this from a guy called David Goggins, I think it was, maybe a YouTube video. If you’re not familiar with this dude, he is beast mode. This guy is crazy-crazy. He’s an ultra marathon runner, an ultra distance cyclist, triathlete. He’s also a creative. He’s an author. And he was a Navy SEAL in the US military. So like, he’s an animal of a dude. He’s a physical monster. And he pushes himself to absolute extremes, marathon after marathon after marathon in a row.

And what he said is he has this thing that he calls the cookie jar. And when he gets to a point where his mind starts to come up with the imposter syndrome stuff, “You’re not good enough. You can’t do this. Your body’s going to give away,” all of this stuff, he reaches into his cookie jar and he takes out a piece of evidence to the contrary.

So what the cookie jar is is you writing down all of the amazing things that you have achieved. Right? In fact, all of the things that you’ve achieved would be great, but most of them are way more amazing than perhaps you give yourself credit for. So we’re looking at past achievements and particularly past achievements where you’ve doubted yourself and then you’ve come through it anyway, or past failures where you had extrapolated the consequences of a failure being so dire, and actually you failed, but there were little or no consequences and you carried on just fine and you learned from it and you grew.

Because here’s the deal. You are so unbelievably strong. Unbelievably strong. Don’t believe me? Okay, think about this. Every illness you have ever had, every injury, any physical pain you have ever experienced, any pressure, any fear, any doubt, any circumstances that you have faced in your entire life, you have overcome because you are here right now, listening to me, talking to you on this podcast. Think about that. You have unbelievable reserves of strength and power.

But incredibly, imposter syndrome manages to completely avoid those. And so it’s on us to look all of those times, all of those moments and all of those achievements and put them in the cookie jar. And then to keep revisiting it, to have it in your head, so that when the imposter syndrome comes up, you can just reach in the cookie jar and go, “Yeah, but I’ve achieved this and I’ve achieved that and I’ve achieved the other one.”

So my cookie jar has got loads of stuff in it from work, from personal stuff. Things like Ana and I buying and renovating a house. And I remember a time when I felt really rock-bottom. I was in the back garden, this was at a previous property, scrubbing down radiators to get the old blistered paint off them, because we didn’t have that much funds cash-wise. I was about to start this business, and we put everything into buying the house and I needed to do a load of the donkey-work, because I’m not a DIY guy. So we’d hired in a painter and decorator. And one of the ways to save time is me doing this. And I remember my hands blistered and bleeding on the sixth or seventh radiator, feeling exhausted and rubbish and going, “Oh no, I can’t do this.” But we got through it. We got through it. We had a beautiful home at the end of it. We got through it.

Work things. I remember I had to go and pitch. When I worked in the city, I was pitching for business, and I went out to a place called Reading. So I caught the train out to Reading. And as I understood it, I was meeting my contact there, who I knew, and I was pitching to two of the partners in the Reading office. This is a top four accountancy firm in the world. Big deal. Biggest pitch I’d ever done. And it’s snowing. And anyone who lives in the UK will know that when it snows here, everything grinds to a halt. So the trains are all jammed up. It’s not working out, I’m running late. I get a phone call from my contact. “I’m off sick, but it’s still going ahead.”

So now I’m walking in there, I don’t know anybody, I’ve got no support whatsoever and I’m running late. And I’m sitting on that train, and of course the imposter syndrome is firing off. “Oh no, I’m not going to be able to do this.” I walk in. It turns out I’m not pitching to these two partners. I’m pitching to partners from every single office in the south of the United Kingdom. And they’re all on this conference call. And I’m wandering into this. Late, stressed out, contact isn’t there. I won the business. I never in a million years thought I would. Boom, straight in the cookie jar, right? Straight in the cookie jar.

And you are going to have so many things that crop up that you cannot imagine when you think through your life of all the incredible things you’ve done, the incredible strength, the incredible achievements. It’s such a worthwhile thing for you to do. I really strongly recommend it. And then don’t hide it and forget about it. Take a look at it a couple of times a week, just to remind yourself. It is the absolute opposite of what imposter syndrome is and what it’s trying to tell you. You’ve totally got it, and you’re going to prove it to yourself. Okay? So that’s a David Goggins thing. It’s called the cookie jar. Thoroughly recommend going for that.

And the second big antidote to imposter syndrome is getting around and confiding in people you trust, who will give you open, honest and constructive feedback. Brilliant quote, love this. “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” Ken Blanchard. “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” And we have found that to be absolutely true. Inside of the Finish More Music community, it is one of the biggest things that we do. We value it really highly. Members giving feedback on one another’s music, mentoring, coaching, it’s a huge deal. And it is a great way to shine a light on imposter syndrome. Our community absolutely thrives off of peer review.

Here’s a story for you. Recently we did one of our creative challenges where we create something cool for our community to do, to participate in, with an end goal. I love there to be an end goal, something that they’re going to achieve. And this particular one was our lightning releases collaboration project. So what it involved was members of the community, through a system that we set up, pairing them off, working together on a couple of tracks. And at the end of it, they were going to submit them to labels. So we laid out everything they needed. Okay? All of the different bios, the labels, the whole piece. So it was really streamlined. They show up, they write the music, they go through all the steps that they need in order to submit. We did master classes. We did all of these things.

Here’s the deal. At the end of it, when the members had sent their music out… And they didn’t have to. They didn’t have to send it out. It was entirely up to them. But at the end of it, in that month alone, and there’s a load more coming now, there were 30 unique releases. Not tracks released. Unique releases. So think. A release has one, two, sometimes three pieces of music on it, right? 30 releases from doing that alone.

And here’s the bit that ties in beautifully with this. The number of people who were on fire, lit up, motivated, excited, inspired, in the community, posting, saying, “I didn’t think I could do it.” Imposter syndrome. “I didn’t think I was ready. I didn’t think I was up for it, but because I collaborated with someone, because we had coaching and because I had feedback on this, it gave me the confidence to do it.”

And they did it. And it proved what? Once again, the imposter syndrome was BS. It was lies. Imposter syndrome is just beliefs. It’s just nonsense. It’s just telling ourselves we can’t do something when we’ve got a bunch of evidence to the contrary, and most times we’re absolutely going to kill it if we go for it.

Another story on this front, Mark Jenkyns. So I’ve worked with Mark closely for many, many years. Incredible tech house producer, constantly releasing on the biggest house music labels out there. Mark had this track called Sirens. If you’re into your house music, you’ve almost certainly heard of it. It was the smash hit of Ibiza. It was huge. Massive, massive track. Mark sent that to me before he sent it to anywhere and said, “What do you think? I’m not sure about this. I’m not sure about that. I’m not sure about this.”

I said, “This is dynamite. This is an incredible tune. This is great.” Sent it to Jamie Jones, runs Hot Creations, right? One of the world’s biggest DJs, one of the world’s best labels. And Jamie was like, “Yeah, it sounds fantastic.” And Mark was like, “Yeah, but it needs a bit of a mixdown and I need to make some changes and I need to do some of that.” Imposter syndrome, right? “It’s not good enough. It’s not ready.” Jamie’s like, “No. Rubbish. It’s great. I played it out this weekend. The place went off, signed it on the spot.”

Imposter syndrome. One of the best antidotes is to get around other people, to get around peers. Got to be people are open, honest, going to give you constructive feedback. That’s an important piece here. Right? But get around your peers, because they’ll shine a light on imposter syndrome, on the lies, on the false beliefs. They’ll shine a light on it in exactly the same way your cookie jar will.

So they are the two most powerful antidotes that I know. And they work a treat. If you are someone who has this voice in your head that keeps devaluing your worth, telling you you’re not good enough, try these out, because I’ve found them to be highly, highly effective.

So let’s wrap this one up. Imposter syndrome. It’s a nasty, spiteful, self-fulfilling prophecy. And that’s the thing to remember, right? If you live into your fear, then you are going to make that fear a reality. This is not something to leave unchecked. You’re going to want to jump on this. The reverse of that, if you live into your vision, then you’re going to take action and you’ll make your vision a reality. Do the thing, have the power. Cookie jar. Peer group. Give it a go. If you’re struggling with this, if it’s holding you back, get involved with both of those. They are the most powerful antidotes I know to the poison that is imposter syndrome.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed the show. I’ve got a big request for you on this one. I would love to hear from you on Instagram via a direct message. Okay? And what I’d love you to send me, show me that you’re doing this. Show me you’re doing this and you’re going to overcome this and you’re going to smash this out the park. Send to me one evidence of imposter syndrome that you have that holds you back with your music, back with your creativity, back with your vision, and then one item that you’ve put in your cookie jar that is the antidote to it. So it could be anything that you’ve done that proves that you’re good enough.

Send me that. I’d absolutely love to receive both of those. One thing the voice is saying, one thing the imposter syndrome poisonous voice is saying, and one thing that you’re putting in your cookie jar. I promise you I’ll read it. I promise you that I’ll get back to it. I always do. I don’t miss a beat on this one. It’s not going into a black hole. You’ll definitely hear from me.

Show notes for this, been a bit of a long one, finishmoremusic.com/072. If you haven’t subscribed to the podcast, you’re enjoying it, make sure you click the button. You’ll be kept informed as soon as any new episodes come out. We do sometimes do a couple a week, so you don’t want to miss any of these if you’re enjoying it. And please do leave a review. I’d love to hear from you. I’d love to know what your thoughts are on the show. It means the world to me to get feedback. Do take care, stay safe. I hope that you’ve enjoyed this episode and I’ll speak to you in the next one.

If you’re serious about getting your music heard and climbing the ladder as a music producer, one of the skills you absolutely must master is remixes. That’s why I put together a brand new completely free ebook for you called The Art of Remixing. It features the most prolific remixers from my Finish More Music community sharing their strategies for creating successful remix projects ready for you to share with the world. So jump over to www.finishmoremusic.com/remix and download your free copy now. You’ll learn technical setups for creating your remix, how to add your own flair whilst respecting the original artist’s track, how to create quickly to a tight deadline, how to extract melodies and harmonies, and so much more.

As well as taking the opportunity to get more of your creative output into the world, remixing is an amazing tool for building connections with other artists and strengthening your relationship with label owners. In short, remixing is essential. Try to think of a top-level producer who doesn’t have a bunch of great remixes to their name. You can’t, right? So make sure you master the art of remixing so that when your opportunity comes, you’re ready to take it with both hands and accelerate your growth in the music industry. The ebook is totally free. So dive over now to www.finishmoremusic.com/remix and grab your copy. See you in the next episode.

FMM071- Finding Your Own Sound – Transcript

Hi, I’m Keith Mills, and this is Episode number 71 of the Finish More Music podcast. And today we’re going to be talking about originality, or more precisely finding your own sound. Because nobody wants to be vanilla, to be a copycat, to be same old, same old, or indeed to be boring, or to be a second version of somebody else. How do you go about finding your own sound and standing out with your own identity? Well, it’s not actually the struggle you might think it is, it’s not that much work to do it, in fact it is one of the easiest things for you to pull off as a creative. How exactly do you go about it? Well, I’m going to pull back the curtains in this episode so let’s dive in.

This is the Finish More Music podcast, a show for underground dance music producers who want to finish more and better music and to share it with the world. My name is Keith Mills, and every week we’ll dive into the mindset and creative strategies that will help you to move further and faster along your music production journey.

Hello, and thank you for joining me on another episode of the Finish More Music podcast. I had a couple of days off this week and it never ceases to amaze me how I lack this inherent ability to realize when I need a damn rest. And I’m really making a concerted effort going forward to be a bit more cognizant of this.

You may be similar to me on this front, in that you work a lot, you’re a busy person, you’ve got a lot going on. I absolutely love what I do for a living. I’m incredibly fortunate, there’s not a day that goes by that I’m not showing gratitude and being thankful for the opportunity that I have and for the amazing people that I get to work with on their music as well. It’s huge, it’s incredible. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t burn me out.

And I got to this point where I realized that I had the weekend and I’d pretty much just flopped around which is so not me, and I needed a couple of days off in the week. I needed to draw a line underneath it. And I think it’s so easy to think that you’re working and you’re putting the time in, and because you’re putting the time in you’re making big progress, when actually it can be so much better just to have a couple of days where you’re chilled out, you’re deliberately very intentionally resting or doing the things you love to get yourself back up to full productivity levels. And actually over the following couple of weeks, you’re going to get a hell of a lot more done than if you’ve kept trudging through the mud.

So I learned a few lessons doing it. I’m going to share them in an upcoming podcast with you. But it’s so, so important, this week what I’ve got coming up is massively, massively busy for me. To give you an example, two of the evenings I’ve got coaching calls in my high level mentoring group FMM+. Another one I’ve got a coaching call, an online call that is all about our label affiliation and dissecting tracks. Inside of Finish More Music, we have the opportunity for our members to release tracks on a whole raft of labels that we are working with. We’re now over 70 labels across multiple genres and they get the opportunity to get tracks released with them.

It’s the same deal. The label only signs the music if they like it, but we facilitate everything from the submission to the following-up, to fast turn-around times, getting feedback, and a beautifully searchable database with example music and all the different things about their distribution. There’s a load that we cover and we’re doing a live call on this where we’ll be doing a Q and A but we’ll also be analyzing and deep-diving into some of the labels.

I’ve got all of that going on and I’ve got rammed days, every single day is also full. It’s a lot, but I’m only going to be able to show up as the best version of myself because I took after myself, I looked after myself, sorry, for a couple of days. And actually I’m recording this podcast for you now on a Sunday, and I’m cool with that because this is something that lights me up and gives me that bit more energy anyway, but I wouldn’t have been able to do this if it wasn’t for those extra couple of days that are I just needed.

Maybe you’re hitting that wall. I wanted to put a flag in the ground for you just in case that’s you at the moment. And often we think, “Oh my God, I’m going to fall behind with stuff.” Or, “The world can’t possibly function without me for a couple of days.” And it’s rarely true, right? If you were to get ill, if you were to be poorly and you weren’t able to work life would go on and everything would be just fine. Taking a couple of days for yourself, if you’re feeling a bit burned out and you’re hitting the wall, absolutely go for it. As I said, I learned some great lessons so that will be in an upcoming podcast.

But I just wanted to put that out there for you right now in case you are someone like me and you’re going to find that valuable. It’s not what this episode is about. This episode is all about originality and finding your own sound. And it’s true to say that we all want our music or our creations, whatever they might be to be unique, to stand out, to stand for something. Nobody wants to be vanilla or seen as a copycat in any way, we want our art to have a piece of us in it and it to be unique and original in some way.

And it reminds me of this amazing quote and I’m sure it must have been adapted from something else historically but I absolutely love this. “I can’t understand why no one buys my music, it sounds exactly the same as everyone else’s.” What a great quote. “I can’t understand why no one buys my music, it sounds exactly the same as everyone else’s.” So true, right? So then the question becomes, well, how do you find your sound then? How do you stand out? How to have people saying, “Oh, that’s one of your tunes, I could tell straight away?”

Here’s my response to how you find your own sound. You don’t find your own sound, your own sound finds you. And that’s what we’re going to be diving into. I thought it’d be great to have a discussion around this because it’s important. If you try to force originality, you try to force a sound, then it’s not going to be authentic, it’s not going to be exactly what you love. That’s what authenticity is, what you love, right? And if it’s not authentic, then of course it can’t be your sound. And I think there’s a double whammy in this as well, because forcing something, I mean, just listen to the word the way that we’re putting that, forcing something. It’s not that pleasant and creativity is about play and exploration. So it’s forcing versus doing what you love.

Being authentic is doing what you love, what lights you up, what is exciting, forcing is the reverse of that. But also it’s a double whammy because you’re going to end up with something that’s not you. Forcing it is not the answer, going out deliberately to try and find my own sound and worrying about this which I know a lot of people do because I get a lot of questions. “Keith, how do I find my own sound? What have I got to do? What do I have to do to stand out?” It’s just on people’s mind and they’re deliberately trying to figure this out, and it’s not the answer. See, the deal is that if you’re brave and you follow your heart and you explore and you experiment then the byproduct of this, the natural outcome of this will be the discovery of your sound.

And I’ll flip that around because that is the only way I can find a fit, in a sense, the discovery of your sound. But like I said, you don’t find your sound, your sound finds you. It’s one of these situations where you’re minding your own business and then you just realize, “Ah, that kinda sounds like me.” Or more likely somebody else says, “I knew that was one of your tunes.” Or, “Your music’s really starting to sound like you.” It happens naturally, it’s more of a realization. I guess you can argue that you’ll just discover it one day, but it’s not through the process of deliberately forcing and cajoling and pulling your hair out trying to figure out a way to be original.

Let’s start at the top of this then, what does having your own sound really mean? Well, I think there’s a strong argument right there. It’s all been done before already and everything musically has been explored in some way. I think there are exceptions. There are things that maybe we can say these felt like perhaps defining moments. If you think about tech house, for example, which of course is the merging of techno and house but it was quite a fresh sound when it very first came on the scene. Drum and bass strikes out to me. Yes, it was the morphing and the changing and the evolution of breakbeat and hardcore that got us there, but it did feel fresh. It felt like there was a bit of a jump there. I think the same personally with dubstep. You might disagree, you might be thinking of other genres.

They were things that felt like quite big leaps but how rare are they? How rare are they? If what we’re saying is having your own sound means it’s something so fresh and unique, probably we’re on a hiding to nothing. Not only are we trying to force it but that absolute chance of finding something so original and unique is so slim, it is absolutely so slim and it’s not enjoyable. And it’s outcome-focused and outcome-focused is always an issue because it’s out of our control. You’d be super disappointed if it doesn’t happen, and if it’s highly unlikely to happen, well, we can see how this is pretty much worth this kind of direction to be going down.

Forcing stuff isn’t following your heart. It’s not authentic, it’s not you, it’s not self-discovery and therefore it also can’t be your sound. Because, let’s say you did discover something new and you were forcing it and you’ve somehow managed to come up with, I don’t know, Hungarian goat-step, modern jazz trance, whatever it might be. You come up with something new but you don’t like making it. Why have you forced it if you don’t like making it? Is that still your sound, something that you don’t even like making? You’re going to keep plugging away at this thing that you don’t like?

So forcing it can’t be the answer. And maybe I haven’t even properly answered the question, what is your own sound? Here’s a definition for you, my definition. It is when someone or you can clearly identify a track as being made by you. It doesn’t mean it’s strikingly different, it just means they can tell it’s made by you. I’ll give you a couple of examples from the Finish More Music community.

One that stands out to me is Mha Iri. If you haven’t checked out her podcast, we actually had two episodes back-to-back, it was such an epic podcast. She talks all about being a professional and stepping into the role as a professional producer and a professional DJ right now, before you’d actually be considered it, before it’s a full-time career, before you’re big news, acting like it right now and stepping into that role. Very, very powerful podcast. If you haven’t seen that scribble it down now you’re going to want to go back to it.

But Mha Iri, okay, she makes techno, awesome techno. Regularly charting in the top of the track charts, like against all of the big guns, she’s killing it, absolutely amazing. When I listen to one of her tracks I can tell. I’m like, “That’s a Mha Iri track.” Why? Well, she records her own vocals into often snippets and bits and pieces and it’s got a bit of a, what I would call a trance vibe and I hope that’s not going to be offending her in any way. And no, I don’t have anything against trance whatsoever, I cut my teeth and it’s one of my favorite music still to this day. But that’s my perception of it. It’s not strikingly different, it’s not vocal techno trance. It’s not a new genre, but it’s just got a thing. There’s something about it that’s Mha Iri and it’s a 100% authentic. It’s totally her, it’s what she loves making and what she loves doing.

Another one is Paul Lock. Again, brilliant, brilliant podcast if you haven’t checked it out. Particularly if you’re someone who’s busy, you maybe got a lot of commitments, young family, full-time job, and you have a belief that that means you can’t achieve the things you want. If that’s you, go back into the podcast archive and check out Paul Lock, amazing, amazing episode again. He makes deep disco music, and again, he’s releasing on all of the top labels in his genre. He’s right up there with every single one on the top labels, loads of remixes for people who were once his idols and then now his mates who he’s hanging out with all the time.

When I listen to his music there’s something about the bassline, there’s something about the drum programming that’s in there and I think something about his use of arpeggios. I can’t even quite put my finger on it and that’s the point, I don’t have to be able to. But when I listen to one of Paul Lock’s tracks, I know it’s one of Paul’s tunes. I could pick it out of 50 tracks by other producers, I’m pretty damn confident. But it’s not mind-blowingly different, it’s not so strikingly different that it’s a new genre or it’s someone’s discovered fire, it’s just Paul. It’s his journey, it’s what he’s discovered along the way.

I’ll give you one more. Let’s go outside of the community. Here we go superstar style we go to Sasha. Sasha has a lot of commonalities in a lot of his tracks. He uses a lot of these glitchy effects particularly on vocals. Often if there are vocals in a Sasha track it sounds like what he would do with vocals. I can often hear from the arrangement the way that he builds the track up before it gets to any main introduction of a thematic element or even the breakdown. And he often has this bassline, stabby baseline chord combo in a lot of his music.

Again, there’s not a new genre here. And if you’re a Sasha fan I’ll wager that’s just listening to my description, you’ll be like, “Yeah, I could absolutely hear the things that you’re saying and maybe you’ve got a whole bunch of other stuff as well.” It doesn’t have to be strikingly different, it just has to be you. So here you go, this is the big one. I’ve boiled this down into an equation for you. I’ve thought this down into the most simplistic, basic terms I can come up with.

Scribble this down and if you’re not able to, maybe you’re driving, you’re in the gym, out and about, whatever it is if you’re not able to scribble this down then just remember the number 071, because that’s the number of the podcast. finishmoremusic.com/071 will get you the show notes and I’ll have got all of this down for you so you don’t have to remember anything or be scribbling it down on the back of your hand or anything like that.

Here it is. Quantity plus authenticity equals your sound. Let me put that another way. If you are prolific and authentic then your sound will naturally occur, naturally occur as a byproduct of the quantity that you put out and the authenticity with which you approach your music, your production technique, the way that you show up for your creativity. I’ll break this down, let’s start with authentic, right? Authenticity. It means being real, it means being genuine, it means being true to you and it means doing what you love, what lights you up, what you’re passionate about. It is the exact opposite of forcing something, it is the exact opposite of copying someone.

Now let’s be clear, in art we are inspired by other people. We may copy little bits and pieces and take stuff, that’s cool. What I’m talking about is not the exact copy. We’ve probably all heard this famous quote, “Be yourself, everyone else is taken.” It’s something like that, right? The idea is you might borrow things and you’ll of course be inspired by lots of different stuff. But put that together how you would put it together, be yourself, everyone else is taken.

Let me give you some tips on how you might want to facilitate this. First up, listen to a wide range of music. It’s important to cast your net wide, it doesn’t all have to be dance music, okay? If you’re listening to this and most likely you’re an electronic music producer, there’s a whole world of electronic music to explore that doesn’t have to be dance music, and then of course there’s a whole world of music beyond our bubble. Explore, listen, step outside your comfort zone and check all types of different music out. Feed your muse and identify what you like about the music and what you don’t. And really importantly, ask yourself why? Be curious.

What is it I like about that? And things will fire off in your mind and you’re like, “You know what? I could take that thing from the them tuned to X film that I like. I could take that thing from…” I don’t know, “Some ambient track that I like. And I could introduce that into my style of music and see how I get on with it.” And that’s the idea of it, it’s not taking whole pieces of music that someone else has written.

It’s saying, what are the different characteristics? What are the things I like? Maybe you don’t even take the thing that they’ve got going on but there’s just something about it. You ask yourself why and you’re like, “Ah, yeah, that kind of rhythmic pattern that they’ve got on the chords, I’m going to bring more rhythmic patterns into my chords instead of just having loads of long sustained pads.”

Maybe it’s something that you haven’t used before. And you’re like, “Yeah, I’ll bring that in.” And it doesn’t matter if you haven’t heard anyone in the genre doing it before, what happens if you try it? It doesn’t matter if you don’t like it. Maybe you don’t like it but you’ll learn one thing. There’s something about it you do like that inspires you to move forward. Maybe you love the rolling basslines of techno music and maybe you like ambient stuff. You like the chords, you like the movement, maybe there’s a darkness about it. What is it that you like? What happens when you put them together?

And maybe you like tribal house? What happens if you take some of that tribal feel, some of that percussion and stick that in what are you going to get? Now, am I saying that no one’s done that before? No, I’m not. But if you like those things and you love those things you’re being authentic and I guarantee you this, how you put them together and how you interpret them and how this evolves over time for you will absolutely result in one day the realization that the way you approach music, your production process, the things you do and the sound that you’ve ended up with is going to be you. And it might just be a percent over here, a percent over there, a percent over here and it comes together, the way you process something. It could just be all these little bits and pieces and it will evolve into something that sounds like you.

Be an authentic, a massive part of that equation. And the other one is quantity. Heard this so many times before, right? Quantity over quality. Quantity, finish, finish, finish. The more you finish, of course the more you get to experiment and the more you’re going to learn about what you’re making, how you’re making it, what you’re hearing, the more you’re going to be able to discover. Of course, the more you finish, the more you learn, experiment, discover. And so when you’re trying different things you get to try more things. Try them more times. You’re going to learn a whole load more and this is going to work as you evolve step-by-step, by-step into your sound.

Great example of this. We had Roberto do a masterclass in Finish More Music. Fantastic producer, a very good friend of mine and he’s absolutely brilliant. And he said that it took him around two years of relentlessly writing music. And I’m pretty sure but don’t quote me on this because I might have this wrong but he said it was about 200 tracks or something like that in as well that he started to identify that there was some things that were very him in the music. Now, also he started out as a drum and bass producer but he just couldn’t quite get to grips with it. There are different aspects of writing drum and bass that he didn’t feel he excelled at and he was struggling and not enjoying it so much. But he realized that he loved rhythm. That was the thing that he really enjoyed.

And he thought, “Well, techno music’s got a load of rhythm in it. I quite like techno, I’ll have a crack at that.” Took to it like a duck to water, part of his journey. And interestingly in the masterclass he was breaking down how he works, very sample-based showing us how he puts all the samples in and all the things that he’s doing as well as his hardware stuff how he brings that in. And one of the things that he’s got a lot of is still drum and bass samples and he puts that into his techno.

Now, I would never have guessed. I would never have guessed listening to his music and go, “Oh, there’s some drum and bass samples in there.” But there are and it’s that 1-2% again. We’re into his journey, the things he loves, what lit him up, the amount of music that he created to get him there has resulted in a sound that again, you play me 100 different techno tracks, I’m pretty confident that I’d pick out Roberto’s tune out of all of them. I know his music, I know his sound. I’ve heard a lot of his tunes now and they’ve got these little things about them that make them Roberto tracks.

Another great masterclass, Chris Page, same deal. A couple of years before songs started to sound like his own. Quantity is absolutely key. If you want your own sound, if you want to be a highly skilled producer, if you want to release on top labels, you got to finish a lot of music. It is no coincidence that our community, that the content, the system, everything I teach is under the umbrella Finish More Music. Picked that name for a very specific reason, it is the key that opens the door to absolutely everything else.

Again, quantity plus authenticity equals your sound. If you are prolific, if you are authentic, if you make a lot of music, if you’re relentless about that and if you’re authentic about listening for the things that you like, about practicing the skills, the techniques, the processing that you enjoy, your sound is going to naturally occur for you.

I’ll go back to my quote again, okay? But I tell everybody who says to me, “Keith, I’m struggling with this. How do I find my sound? It’s really important to me to be able to have something that’s got a uniqueness about it that I make.” You don’t find your own sound, your own sound finds you. And here’s the great thing about this. You can file this under, “I don’t need to worry about it,” because it happens naturally. It is not a matter of trying to be original, it is simply a matter of doing what you love, writing loads of music and writing what excites you. Writing the music that turns you on in the way that you enjoy, in the way that lights you up. Do that and your sound is going to naturally appear and you’ll just realize it’s stepped up beside you one day.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the episode. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, as always do hit me up on Instagram. DM me @iamkeithmills, I will always come back to you. And know it’s so funny I say this every episode and I still get people saying, “Oh my God, I didn’t expect you were going to reply.” I will always reply to every single message. I absolutely love hearing from you having conversations about this stuff. It lights me up, I’m super passionate about it. You’re not bugging me, you’re not taking my time unnecessarily, you’re not doing any of those things, I legitimately love hearing from you.

It’s @iamkeithmills, send me a direct message on Instagram. And as I mentioned previously, show notes for this, finishmoremusic.com/071. If you’re new to the show, make sure you hit subscribe on this as well so you’ll be notified as soon as the next episode comes out, you’ll always be kept in the loop. And I’d love to hear what you think about the show.

If you leave a review that would be absolutely amazing, it also helps other people to find the show. If you’re finding it valuable, if you think other people can benefit from diving into some of these topics and subjects with me, then hit the review button as well and scribble something and let me know how you’re finding the journey in the show. That’s all for me. Stay safe, I’ll speak to you next time and until then, happy music making.

If you’re serious about getting your music heard and climbing the ladder as a music producer, one of the skills you absolutely must master is remixing. That’s why I’ve put together a brand new completely free e-book for you called the Art of Remixing. It features the most prolific remixes from my Finish More Music community sharing their strategies for creating successful remix projects ready for you to share with the world.

So jump over to www.finishmoremusic.com/remix and download your free copy now. You’ll learn technical setups for creating your remix, how to add your own flair whilst respecting the original artist’s track, how to create quickly to a tight deadline, how to extract melodies and harmonies. And so much more. As well as taking the opportunity to get more of your creative output into the world, remixing is an amazing tool for building connections with other artists and strengthening your relationship with label owners.

In short, remixing is essential. Try to think of a top-level producer who doesn’t have a bunch of great remixes to their name. You can’t, right? Make sure you master the art of remixing so that when your opportunity comes you’re ready to take it with both hands and accelerate your growth in the music industry. The e-book is totally free, so dive over now to www.finishmoremusic.com/remix and grab your copy. See you in the next episode.

FMM070 – What all labels must do you for you or they SUCK! – Transcript

Hi, I’m Keith Mills and this is episode number 70 of the Finish More Music Podcast. Today, we’re back on the solo shows, so it’s just you and me. We’re going to be diving straight in to the uncomfortable, controversial deep end talking about a subject that nobody wants to think of themselves as, and that’s entitlement.

So I’ve noticed a lot of people in recent years, believing that labels should, must absolutely have to relent to all of their demands or the label sucks and the label owners are evil, ill-intentioned money grabbers. Well, personally, I don’t buy it. I think the issue often lies with the artists who are throwing around these demands. And actually it’s the artists who are doing themselves more harm than the labels are. So, let’s deep dive into this edgy little topic and I’ll share my perspective and thoughts on what I believe is a better way to navigate the business of getting your tracks signed to labels.

This is the Finish More Music Podcast, a show for underground dance music producers who want to finish more and better music and to share it with the world. My name’s Keith Mills and every week, we’ll dive into the mindset and creative strategies that will help you to move further and faster along the music production journey.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Finish More Music Podcast. I’m back with the solo shows. We’ve had an amazing run with the artist series. I hope you enjoyed it. If you haven’t checked it out, you’re going to want to go back and check out the last five, six episodes. I can’t remember. It’s six episodes. Yeah. Amazing, amazing producers. We’ve had top people from Dubfire to Nick Muir, John 00 Fleming, Bushwacka!. These guys alone have got over a 100 years combined experience of producing music as creatives, performers, DJs. So you can imagine the gold that they had to share.

And then we had some of the newer faces on the scene, Adysin, Daniel Dubb who although new have got releases on an absolute who’s who of the top labels and they come with different perspectives. And across all of these artists series, we’ve discussed loads of diverse topics, the music industry, the great side of it, the dark side, the bad side if you like, various pitfalls for you to watch out for as you’re progressing through your music career. We’ve talked about their creative ethos, how they think about music, some incredible perspectives and the feedback that I’ve had as well of how it can take one sentence, right?

It’s just one comment that somebody makes that can make all the difference to the way you think about your own music and the progress that you make, the way it moves the needle forward. And we’ve talked about workflows, technical things, loads and loads of stuff, the future of the industry and the scene. So if you didn’t catch them, it’s the last six episodes before this one. And even if you did catch them, we had a really interesting conversation in the Finish More Music community. Just the other day, when I was doing a live Q&A, and someone was talking about revisiting content, we have a core training track inside of FMM that’s designed to take people from a place where they’re finishing little, maybe no music at all for years and years and years and it makes them prolific and it gets them regularly releasing their music.

But it’s also really fantastic for people who are already further along. They come in and it builds the solid foundations and grows them so they learn stronger workflows, better mindset, all of these things. And here’s the deal. Going back and revisiting something that second time over, if it resonated with you in some way in the past always, always yields new lessons, new perspectives, new connections. And it’s something I do. If I read a book and I’m like, “Wow, that was a cracker of a book.” Then I save that in a specific place and I’ll revisit it. It’s not uncommon three, four times in a year because every time I pick up the book again, I’m further along.

Maybe I’m in a different state of mind. Maybe I’m more focused this time. Maybe I read something else and it connects new dots and new ways of learning. So even if you checked out those podcasts, I recommend going back and giving them another listen. Because there was so much gold in them that I’d be absolutely gobsmacked if something didn’t hit home with you even harder. And there’s a difference between hearing something, understanding something and getting it, right?

We’ve all been through a piece of content, a video at some point, or read a book or a manual, some kind of tutorial, whatever it might be and understood it, but it didn’t really permeate into us. It didn’t land. It didn’t hit us as hard as it could. And often the second or third time around, it does, it becomes a part of who we are and how we operate. So definitely recommend checking those out.

For this solo show, we’re diving straight back into the somewhat controversial, uncomfortable, difficult topics. Because I know you love them and I’m going to be talking about a word that most people don’t like to think they are, I think, but I’m seeing it cropping up quite a lot and wait for it, cringe, the word is entitlement. The world owes me something or another. And I’m going to focus specifically on record labels and getting music signed. Because this is something I’ve seen a lot of lately. All around the interwebs, I’ve seen it in our community as well. We’re getting a huge number of our members at getting their tracks out there. Absolutely incredible.

And we’ve had this year alone well into the hundreds, probably four or five hundred pieces of music of now being released from the members of our community alone. So I’m seeing a lot of the thoughts and opinions and ideas that come up. And one of the things I’ve just been seeing in general is that people feel that labels should, must, have to deliver something. There’s a demand on it, right? There’s an entitlement. They must master my tracks. All labels must offer a mastering service and if they don’t they’re rubbish or they’ve all to got offer a 50/50 split. And if they don’t, they are conniving, evil, bloodthirsty money suckers.

It’s this kind of talk about that I’m seeing a lot. And I really wanted to speak to that in this episode because what happens is when we feel entitled, when we make demands, that things must, should have to happen. Typically, when they don’t, which is somewhat inevitable, a lot of the time we end up frustrated, angry, potentially outraged, hard dumb by. “The world’s against me. Why does it always happen to me?” There’s normally a whole raft of negative emotions that get attached to this. And it’s a very rigid way of thinking it’s either on or it’s off, right?

They must do it. If they do, they’re right. If they don’t, they’re wrong. It’s on/off. So it’s very rigid and it typically leads to us missing fantastic opportunities that if we were more open, we would see. So my main point, the main thing I want to talk to in this episode is that if you live from a place of entitlement, a place of demand for certain things, then you’ll also be living from a place of frustration and difficulty and most likely outrage, no doubt. And just a whole raft of negative emotions and rigidity in a place that I’m sure you don’t want to live your life from.

Now, I do want to be clear, that is of course your choice. You get to demand and feel entitled to things if that’s what you want, but I’m going to propose a different way of looking at things in a way that I think is a lot lighter and doesn’t mean that you’ll be in any way disadvantaged to getting the things that you want, but actually things will flow much more easily, and you’ll have a much more open view about the world, and in this case labels. Because when we’re operating from this place of a label must do something or if we take advice from someone and it might even be a kind of throw away remark, they didn’t think about how articulating it, put it that way.

But they say like, “Yeah, all labels must master your music,” right? And you take on that advice or you operate from the place of all labels must master music or they are crappy. They’re rubbish. I won’t pay attention to it. It’s totally your choice. I want to be really, really clear on that. But what I’m wondering is if you operate from a place that all labels must master my music or they’re crappy or they’re no good, then how many labels outside of that, outside of master your music are perfect and would deliver you with all the opportunities and all the promo and all of the great stuff that you could want and amazing label owners to connect with. How many of those might you leave behind?

It’s kind of like having an opportunity to buy your dream home, but passing up on it, overlooking it, because you don’t like the color of the walls. And if you did take it on, you’d actually get to paint the color of the walls perfectly to what you wanted, right? And that’s kind of similar with mastering. If you gave it to someone else to do, if that was the deal, you could get it dialed in exactly as you wanted it. And this is the point, this demanding, this sense of entitlement, we all live from it so, so often all of us.

I’ll give you another example that I’m absolutely confident you can relate to. It’s something that I keep battling with myself and keep catching myself on this, the weekend, right? So we say things like, “Ah man, it’s been such a hard week. I absolutely have to get in the studio this weekend.” Place that with whatever you want. I’ve got to put four hours in the studio. I’m going to have a beer or I’m going to get to kick back and watch the football, a nice glass of wine and my favorite book, hanging out with the girls, hanging out with the guys, whatever it might be.

There’s a demand on it. This absolutely must happen. This should happen. It should happen because I worked myself into the ground this week. It should happen. And we wake up on Saturday morning, I had a bit of a lay in, get up, feeling fresh, ready to get in the studio. And just as you’re about to go in there, the doorbell rings and it’s mum and dad. “Hello, darling. How are you?” Kiss on the cheek. “How was work this week?” And you’re just like, “Ah, man.” You love your parents. Of course you do, but it’s just like, “Oh no.” And then they sit down and your other half gets around to teasing and the chocolate hobnobs and they’re chatting away, and then your other half starts asking them about when they first met.

She’s asked him three times before, but she knows they like it and you’re sitting there looking at the clock thinking, “Oh my God, I should be in the studio. I should be kicking back watching the football. I’m going to miss the football.” And what happens? Anger, frustration, madness and then they go and there’s still like an hour left to get in the studio. Do you go in there or is it “life’s not fair, I’m outraged. I can’t possibly go in there.” And the other half says, “Oh, you’ve still got an hour to go in.” “You don’t understand. You shouldn’t have got the chocolate hobnobs out” and off it goes, right?

And it’s this place of rigidity and we miss any opportunity to get in the studio. Maybe if we just said to our other half, “Well, you know what? I did gobble up a bit of time. I’d really hoped to have four hours. I know we’d planned to do this. What’d you think if I grab an extra hour? Would you be cool with that?” There’s a whole world of opportunity. Maybe your other half says, “Well, I really wanted to do this, but how’s about we move X so you can get in there?” But you’re so filled with rage and anger that you just leave the rest of your Saturday furious about this must, should, must demand what I was entitled to.

And that’s the deal, whether it’s the weekend or any other things that I’m sure you’re already thinking about in your mind that you do this with. Because I know I catch myself loads doing this, whether it’s the weekend, whether it’s that the label must give you a 50/50 split or it means they’re evil, they’re bad, they’re blood suckers or they must get my music in the hands of X or they’re no good. They’re not serious. They’re not professional. Or they’ve got to communicate and respond to my emails within 24 hours. Whatever it is, when we put these kind of demands out there that this thing must happen or something bad is going on, there’s some slight towards me, then we just get consumed with negativity and we have this really rigid.

Now we’re really building up an opinion potentially about them and actually they might be awesome in so many different ways. It could be great for us. Now here’s the kicker. Here’s the bit that’s really going to sting in all of this. None of it is true. So let me take this example because this is one that I’ve seen quite a lot. This idea of all labels must master your music or they’re not a good label. You should go somewhere else to someone that does master your music.

So all labels must master your music. Is that true? Of course it’s not. Because if there was just one label out there that’s doing well that doesn’t master your music, then the statement all labels must master my music must be nonsense and of course there is. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of fantastic labels that do not master music for their artists. They prefer their artists to do it and they’re not crappy. They’re great, great labels and they offer a whole raft of other incredible opportunities.

And add to that, there are loads and loads of artists who don’t want the label to master their music. They prefer to do it themselves because they found a great master and engineer who gets their music exactly how they want it, who represents it in the way that they originally intended. And they don’t want to label that says, “Yeah, we’ll master it.” And there’s a chance that there’s someone who’s got no more experience than you do, sticking it through some preset on iZotope Ozone or something like that. And then it comes back and you hear it and you’re like, “Nah, well that’s how they like it and it is louder. So it would be passible.”

But actually that vocal snippet in there that might only play three times in your tune, but it kind of sets the tone, it’s an important moment. It’s something that really meant something to you. It’s important to the integrity of that track. Well, now it’s lost in the mix because they’ve pushed up a load of things around it and it’s not having the effect that you wanted or the grooves gone. Something about it, the balance of it just isn’t right to you. So it absolutely can’t be true, can it? That all labels must master your music.

It can’t even be true that the label in front of you right now must master your music. It can’t be because they were already releasing tracks from other people and they’re doing just fine. So it’s not true. Not only are we making ourselves mad and angry and missing opportunities and getting frustrated and thinking the world and the label and everyone is against us, we’re doing it over something that isn’t true. It’s bonkers. So is there another way? Well, of course. Of course there is another way and it’s very simply to give yourself a choice and to be a bit more relaxed about the whole thing and to recognize what is true.

So we’ve just seen clearly what isn’t true and demands, pretty much, I can’t think of a demand that ever will be true. So I think all demands are false. Let’s look at a lighter way of doing this. Choose what’s important to you and have a statement like this. It’s important to me that a label will master my music because I don’t want to go elsewhere or don’t want to spend my time on that or find someone, whatever it might be. It’s important to me that a label masters my music, but I appreciate they might not do it. And that’s okay, I’ll go and take my music somewhere else.

Or I would prefer if the label masters my music. If they don’t, I’ll say to them, “No problem at all and I’ll take it somewhere else.” And that’s kind of a condition that you can then start putting in. In fact, really it’s either saying it’s important to me or I prefer it, but I understand they might not do it. That’s going to be one statement. The other one, which you most likely will have is that you introduce a condition into a way that you think about these things. So it might be, if this label doesn’t offer mastering, then I choose not to sign with them and I’ll send my music out somewhere else.

Or we could make it into a statement that says something like if they get the music into certain people’s hands or they master it or they promote it in a certain specific way or they give me remix opportunities, whatever it might be, whatever’s important to you. If these criteria that are important to me get met, then I’ll sign with them. Otherwise, I choose not to. And in fact, options are a threefold when you think about it, okay? Because the important word here is offer. If they offer to do the mastering, if they offer to get it into certain people’s hands, and this is, I think the crux of it, this word offer. And somewhere in this world of entitlement and the things that I’m reading and hearing people say to me, somehow, this has got lost.

Here’s the truth. Here is how this works. You send your music to a label. They like it. They say, “Hey, we like it. We’d like to sign it.” And then they send you a contract. That is their offer. That is them offering to sign it and the conditions under which this is going to happen. Your consideration is the music. Their consideration is what they’re prepared to pay you where they can get this music, who they can get listening to it, who they can send it to, wherever they master it, how they promote it. It’s their offer and you have the choice. Do you accept the offer or do you decline the offer?

There isn’t the label must, should, definitely has to do X. There isn’t. There’s quite simply, here’s the offer. You don’t go into Pret A Manger and pick up a sandwich and go to the front and say, “This must be two pound.” You look at it, it says it’s four quid. You go, “No thanks.” Four quid for a cheese and pickle sandwich, “on your bike”, or you go actually, “Yeah, that’s a good deal. I’ll have that.” Exactly the same with the label.

Option number one, Yes. Smashing. I love it. Thank you very much. How do we move this thing forward?” Option number two, “No, I don’t like the look of that. I really appreciate that you like my music and that you wanted to sign it. I’m over the moon to hear that, but the contract doesn’t do it for me. Thank you very much. I’ll go somewhere else.” Option number three. “You know what? I’m really over the moon you like the music. Contract’s good. There’s just one thing that’s missing that’s really important to me. Do you think we could get that included? If yes, amazing. If no, sorry, it’s not for me. Thank you very much.”

It’s about a choice. It’s not about a demand. It’s not about an entitlement. It’s not about who they are and what it says about them and their label. If they do or don’t offer something in particular, it’s simply a choice. And this is the amazing thing. When we create demands that are out of our control, when when we give ourselves choice, it gives us control. The label must do this. Well, no, they mustn’t. I’ve got news for you. They must not do it. That is out of your control. When you say “It’s important to me that they do. But if they don’t, I’ll do something else, but … choice point.” I can choose what I’m going to do, depending on what they’re going to do. They have a choice. I have a choice. Let’s move on.

No entitlement whatsoever, but I get it. Right now I might be saying this to you and you may have just got your first contract come through to you or you’ve just signed one, or maybe it’s your third or fourth, whatever. And you’re listening to this and you’re feeling a bit tight and you’re going, “Well, but yeah, but they should do this but I can’t let this go.” And I totally get it because there are a couple of things that I’ve picked up on in a lot of conversations I’ve been in and that I’ve seen.

And I’m sure there are more than this, but the two big ones that stand out to me is blood, sweat, and tears, right? “They should do this and they should do that and they should do the other one because I’ve been producing for five years and this is my art. And this particular track took six weeks to make and it was really hard. And I had to rewrite the bassline five times. I was practically in tears and I thought I was crap. And then I thought it was great. And then I thought I couldn’t do it. And then I thought I was a genius. And here is my work of art. You absolutely got to master that.” Well, I got news for you, they don’t care. Your listener doesn’t care. The end user of your product doesn’t care.

The label isn’t sitting there going, “Ah man, we have got deal of the century here. Bob spent six weeks struggling away at this thing, six weeks. Oh, we’ve got an absolute deal.” They’re not saying that. And likewise, they’re not saying, “Ah man, we got the rough end of this deal. Bob come down on a Sunday, hung over, got his bowl of cornflakes, sat in his pants, was only intending to install a plugin and three hours later, it created this belter. Ah man, we’ve been ripped off offering this contract.” Of course it means something to you. Your art means the world to you, how that track was made, the story behind it.

And listen, I’d love to hear about it. You’re in our community, all of your fellow members would love to hear about it. Your peers down at the pub having a beer with you would love to hear about it, but it doesn’t make the track more or less valuable to the end listener or to the label. Again, it’s a truth to let go so that we can see what is real, the what is. And the second thing I think that comes up a lot is fear. Particularly if it’s your first release or it’s a label that you really care about. Because the voice then in your head might be saying, “Ah great. Someone’s picked up my track. This is amazing. This is a benchmark for me. I’m really excited about that.” And of course you are, of course you are.

This is great. They’re going to sign it and then the contract comes through and you’re like, “Ah man, this is not great. I don’t like the split. I don’t like the this. I don’t like the that.” It’s easy to then be like, “Well, I’m stuck now because I’m scared I can’t get this signed somewhere else. And this means so much to me.” And so what was a preference and what was important now becomes a demand because we feel boxed in, we feel trapped. Where it’s them or it’s nothing at all. And maybe you’ve told people, you’ve got your track signed in and it’s all been exciting. And you’ve been shouting about it to your mates and your family and anyone else who’ll listen. Of course you’re excited and now you’ve got this contract you don’t like, and you feel you can’t go anywhere else.

So now it’s they must do this. They are awful. They are evil. They’re only in it for the money. It’s all of this stuff. But that fear isn’t true, right? Of course it’s not. Because if you like your track enough and you thought enough of it to send it to a label and if the owner of that label thinks enough of it that they want to sign it, then you can bet your backside that somebody else is going to want that track as well. And as soon as we open that up and go, “Yeah, that seems like solid reasoning and a solid evidence funnel to me.” We go back into a place of choice and back into a place of control.

Okay, that label isn’t really for me because of their contract or I didn’t like the way that they communicate. Maybe they just take too long to come back. It feels unprofessional. To me, that is a huge deal. More than if somebody wanted me to master a track and if they perhaps couldn’t get it into some people’s hands, but they had a few defining things I liked in there or even if the label, let me swap that around. If they did everything, if they did everything that I wanted, but they didn’t communicate, I’d probably be out of there rather than signing because that’s so important to me.

I wouldn’t be making judgements about them. I wouldn’t say they’re awful people. They might just be super busy and that’s okay. They might not really value communication and that’s fine. Look, they offer everything else. That’s incredible. But to me personally, it’s really important that anybody that I work with whether they’re on my team, whether they’re people, I mentor, whether they’re affiliates and companies that we work with to cross-promote and do all of these things, it’s absolutely vital.

And no matter how big, how cool, how much of a dream student, someone is, if the communication isn’t there, I’m going to be stopping that really quickly. Because my time is important to me and knowing where I stand is important to me. I won’t say bad things about them. I don’t think evil about them. I don’t think anything like that. I don’t think they should, must, have to do this. It’s just that’s important to me and my condition is if somebody isn’t able to communicate, I’ll bring it up. And if they choose not to or they don’t that’s okay, but I won’t carry on working with them. And that is perfectly okay.

So really the moral of all of this, the point that I’m trying … moral, the moral – blimey, it sounds like some old tale, doesn’t it? But the key point that I’m trying to get across here is this idea of entitlement and this thing of labels must, should, do all of these things. I don’t know where it’s all come from, but it seems to be pretty big and prevalent now. No, as we’ve proven, they mustn’t, shouldn’t, don’t have to do anything they don’t want to and neither do you.

So to wrap this up, just be really mindful of this, not just with things like labels, but anything that you’re doing in your life, watch out for when this entitlement and these demands and this rigidity is entering into your life. Whether that’s your personal beliefs in the way that you’re looking at something, or maybe it’s just the advice from someone or someone you’re hanging around with. Just keep an eye on that stuff because it very quickly leads to us missing opportunities, being narrow-minded and feeling a whole raft of negative and bitter and outrage and all of these kinds of emotions.

Whereas if we stay open and we look at conditions and what’s important to us and what we prefer, then what we’re seeing is the real world. We’re seeing the truth and it gives us choice and it gives us control. And it’s much easier to navigate from a place of strategy when you’re sending your tracks to labels, who you’re going to go with, who you’re not going to go with. Rather than a place of fear and demands and unrealistic expectations, which actually rather than it feeling like you’re getting what you want tends to lead you more often than not to getting something you don’t want and being pretty angry and upset about it the whole time.

Whereas the other alternative is being happy and light and things might miff you. It was important to me and so as that label and that I didn’t like the contract and I’m feeling a bit rubbishy about that. But that’s nowhere near as bad as outraged, angry, frustrated, and all the rest of it and rigid and not ready to move on versus I’ll move through the lesser emotions and I’ll go somewhere else to get the result I want.

So I hope you’ve found the episode useful. One thing I’m really keen to hear from you on Instagram, DM me @iamkeithmills is of course expectations and things that you might have about labels whether you agree with this or not. Because I know that I’m flying in the face of a hell of a lot of opinions that I’ve been hearing online here. But also I’d be keen to hear where else you see this cropping up in your life and whether you have the same hunch and inkling and perspective that I’m seeing. And I’m aware, this is only a perspective and that’s why I’m really keen to hear from you.

Is the world moving more towards a place where people feel that they’re more entitled to things in general? Because I kind of think I’ve been spotting a swing in that direction just in general. It might just be it’s more in my face, in everyone’s face because it’s online. But I’m just wondering, do you experience that or is it just me? The more people that sort of talk about this, the more of a clear map of reality we can get. So I’m very keen to hear your thoughts on it. DM me @iamkeithmills on Instagram. I’d love to hear from you.

I absolutely promise I will read and reply to every single message. It’s not going to go into a black hole. You won’t get ignored, okay? And the show notes for this over at finishmoremusic.com/070. O70, okay? So I hope you enjoyed the show. Do stay safe, take care and happy music making. I’ll catch you next time.

If you’re serious about getting your music heard and climbing the ladder as a music producer, one of the skills you absolutely must master is remixing. That’s why I’ve put together a brand new completely free ebook for you called the Art of Remixing. It features the most prolific remixers from my Finish More Music community sharing their strategies for creating successful remix projects, ready for you to share with the world. So jump over to www.finishmoremusic.com/remix and download your free copy now.

You’ll learn technical setups for creating your remix, how to add your own flair whilst respecting the original artist’s track. How to create quickly to a tight deadline, how to extract melodies and harmonies and so much more. As well as taking the opportunity to get more of your creative output into the world, remixing is an amazing tool for building connections with other artists and strengthening your relationship with label owners.

In short, remixing is essential. Try to think of a top level producer who doesn’t have a bunch of great remixes to their name. You can’t, right? So make sure you master the art of remixing so that when your opportunity comes, you’re ready to take it with both hands and accelerate your growth in the music industry. The ebook is totally free. So dive over now to www.finishmoremusic.com/remix and grab your copy. See you in the next episode.

FMM069 – Dubfire – Transcript

Keith Mills:

Hi, I’m Keith Mills and this is episode number 69 of The Finish More Music Podcast and today I’ve got a huge superstar of underground music in the hot seat for you. In this episode, we’re joined by Dubfire. Ali is a Grammy Award-winning recording artist, performer, DJ, and will already go down as an absolute techno legend. He saw huge global success as one half of Deep Dish, and then incredibly went on to hit the same heights within the underground dance scene under his new moniker Dubfire. I’ve been super, super excited to bring you this episode because Ali is someone who thinks very deeply about his music as an art form. Boundaries he wants to break, what he wants to say, the new territory he wants to explore and the connections that he wants to make with his audience in live performance.

Keith Mills:

He recently blew away the members of my Finish More Music community with an absolutely incredible master class with his engineer Matt and I’m confident you are going to leave this episode feeling super inspired and itching to get into the studio yourself. So let’s get stuck in. This is The Finish More Music Podcast. A show for underground dance music producers who want to finish more and better music, and to share it with the world. My name’s Keith Mills and every week we’ll dive into the mindset and creative strategies that will help you to move further and faster along your music production journey.

Keith Mills:

Hello? And thank you for joining me once again for another episode of the Finish More Music Podcast. So massively, massively excited for this episode. I’m joined by one of the very, very best DJs on the circuit, incredible producer. Won a number of different accolades. Runs a forward thinking label. Encourages so, so many of the up and coming generation to step into the best version of themselves to pursue music. So forward thinking it is none other than Dubfire. Ali welcome to the show. Thank you very much for joining me. How are you?

Dubfire:

I’m good. Thank you Keith. Nice to see you again.

Keith Mills:

Yeah, totally. Totally. So off the back of sort of the Finish More Music master class that you did that blew up. I mean the inspiration kind of flew through the community, which was amazing. It’s been a little while since then and the world’s upside down. I know you’re like a massively motivated, really active person in terms of your music and so much of the things that you do in your life. What have you been doing to fill your time in this kind of the new normal at the moment?

Dubfire:

I mean, I think like everyone and especially on the weekly live chat that I do with Truncate, Chris Liebing, Drumcell and Radio Slave. We tend to just talk about our emotions and feelings not only about what’s happening in our surroundings and politically, but also reflecting on our industry. Like where we’ve come from. You know, exploring our individual roots. Having guests on the show that we’re able to take kind of a journey with from those early days of dance music to kind of become re-inspired again. Because it’s hard to maintain inspiration and positivity and hope for the future of our industry when we’re kind of all stuck at home wondering when things are going to get kick started again. You know, just under a general cloud of uncertainty. So that’s been a bit of a group therapy session I guess, that we all crave and we like to have guests on at times and other times we’d like to just kind of discuss what’s happening in our individual lives and in our industry with one another. So there’s a lot of conversations that happen.

Dubfire:

During the chat there’s a lot of conversations that we have in a group chat that we maintain on a daily basis. I’ve been back into the studio with my engineer, Matt. Just trying to finish up some projects namely one with Cosh. A collaboration with my good friend Cosh, which we finally wrapped up about, I think it was Friday and Cosh and I both decided because we’d been listening to it constantly for the last three months, I would say three, four months that we would give it some space. We both feel like we kind of achieved sonically what we had set out to.

Dubfire:

Both of our individual identities are represented in the tracks and we wanted to give it some space and then come back to it to see if it’s still exciting to us and if it is then we’ll kind of go on to the next steps of plotting its release and then there was a remix for Dense and Pika that I was working on for the second time. This might be interesting for your listeners that… You know, the guys asked me to remix something from their new album and I did it once, but I wasn’t 100% happy with it. I sent it to them. I told them that I’m not a hundred percent happy with it and that they wouldn’t hurt my feelings if they were feeling the same way and they were feeling the same way. So I’m like, “Great. You know, I’ll give it another shot.”

Dubfire:

And I did another remix and this one took a slightly different and faster approach and in the end I ended up using less and less of the original parts and when I finally listened to what I had finished, it was so far removed from the original that I just decided that perhaps nothing is going to really happen idealize with me trying to remix the song. So I was going to email the guys today funny enough, to tell them that and that I’m happy to explore remixing something else, but sometimes that’s how it goes you know. The thing is to give it a shot. Sometimes it’s just not going to work out no matter how many times you take a crack at it and understanding that that’s always going to be a part of the creative process is something that you should make peace with because it’s going to be right there alongside you as you evolve from a beginner and a novice to professional musician.

Keith Mills:

Yeah. That is really fascinating and actually I love the way you’ve put that to be at peace with it, because I think there is an allusion that perhaps once I’ve learned all the gear, once I’ve learned all the process, once I’ve learned all of this, it will always be plain sailing and certainly to look at someone like you and you know, all the things that you’ve achieved and all the remix work you’ve done. All the original work, spanning to totally different genres, obviously Deep Dish then going into your solo moniker as Dubfire and to look and think, “Well, you must go into the studio and almost click your fingers and a piece of music comes out the other side.” And I think it’s very empowering to realize that whilst of course you’ve gotten better in so many different ways, one of the big secrets is actually the mindset of making peace with the creative process.

Dubfire:

Correct. Yeah. I think artists tend to try and frame what they do in a very glossy manner because we don’t necessarily… At times I think we want people to look behind the curtain and to see all the blood, sweat, and tears that go into the creative process and the finished result, but generally artists have always wanted to maintain that kind of cloud of mystery around their workflow and especially if they do something that becomes like really timeless and a classic and journalists write about it for years and it gets dissected. You know, most people don’t realize that we struggle with the same things.

Dubfire:

It’s something we discussed on the Finished More Music chat that, people don’t realize that we also struggle with the same things that the average person struggles with and different artists have different proficiency levels whether it’s engineering skills, technical skills, or knowing how to play an instrument. You know, someone like James Blake can probably sit down at the piano and he’s got an amazing voice. That’s a fact, and he’s got great skills and he’s got a unique perspective on piano and voice performance. So he can probably make it feel and look effortless to anybody watching, but he’s probably also struggling to create and retain a certain sense of identity, unique identity and a lot of those struggles can be technical struggles or they can be kind of things that are just kind of swirling around in your brain that are hard to articulate or hard to express to somebody who wants a window into your soul. The soul of an artist.

Keith Mills:

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I was talking to Matt Benjamin, Bushwacka! and he was talking to this as well. He’s like super profession, studied percussion to a really high level and he was talking a little bit like what you’re talking about, where he was reaching the point of, you know am I still relevant? Is my… What do I need to do with my sound? And so there were a whole world of different concerns and even as you’re going along the journey from starting out as a creative, and there might be a lot of, am I good enough? Can I do this? And comparing yourself to other people. Every step of the way from then going out into the public and the bigger the profile you become and the longer you’ve been in it, trying to be different, there’s so many different kind of things that come at it. What… Well, how do you think about music? What’s kind of a strategy that if you have these things creeping in that you employ? How do you help yourself or do people help you in order to sort of get around or overcome these things and not let them in be too intrusive into your creative process?

Dubfire:

I think for me, I always have to remember why I’m an artist. I just fell in love with music, musicianship, the technology behind it, the different genres of music, especially alternative music. For me it’s always been the discovery of new music and new artists that kept me inspired all these years and I don’t think that’s changed really. I was just speaking with Heidi the other day. I think I posted on my Instagram story that I was really into this group called Div, D-I-V and then we got to talking and I found out, and I I’ve known her for years, but I found out that she’s been posting like an album that she’s in love with once a week on her Insta story and you know, just we had a general chat about all these incredible new bands that either I didn’t know about, or I was turning her onto and vice versa and that’s really at the heart I think of who I am as an inspired artist. For me the inspiration comes from being inspired by other artists.

Dubfire:

I don’t think that has ever changed and that’s kind of what has kept that internal flame burning as brightly as it has all these years. It’s that it’s seeking new ways of expressing oneself musically and sometimes you find it in a band called Div. Sometimes there’s another band called [inaudible 00:13:51]. There may be amazing techno artists who are doing something really interesting with the production process and sonically how they’re conveying their ideas, but it’s that constant need and want of exposing myself to like as much music as possible. Somehow that gets filtered through the system and the ideas trigger original ideas in me. You know, those production ideas that I’m listening to. Because we musicians, I think we kind of… You know, if you’re like an art gallery curator or someone who collects art, you can probably dissect a piece of art a lot better than the average person would be. You’ll see things that the average person probably wouldn’t, and you’ll see references to other artists in the past and maybe in the future… Oh sorry, in the present and that’s the same way I think with musicians. It’s like when we hear a piece of music, yeah, we’re listening to it, but we’re also kind of dissecting it whether we’re trying to or not.

Dubfire:

You know, we’re listening to the groove, we’re listening to how things are layered, how many hooks there are. We’re listening to how loud or how quiet the vocals are or how in your face that the drums are, what kind of drum programming, Oh, I wonder whether it’s samples or drum machine, or what scene sound that you… So there’s so many different variables that are constantly without us being conscious of it and also being conscious of it, especially when you’re talking about it with another artist, you’re dissecting all of that and everything that you dissect serves as some sort of trigger that becomes an inspired trigger when you sit down to make music.

Keith Mills:

So in many respects, you’re I guess, what we call feeding the muse. You’re constantly searching for new things and taking bits and pieces from other tracks. It’s funny when you talk about the sort of subconscious and sometimes consciously dissecting music, it’s quite interesting. So I think it can get in the way sometimes as well, or certainly it can for me when I just want to listen to a piece of music. I think particularly anybody who’s ever DJ-ed or started to practice DJ and will have had the experience of how now going to a nightclub or a festival is quite different because you’re not just in the music, you’re often zoned into it what’s the DJ doing? And all of that, which is a… I enjoy it. I enjoy that sort of deeper level of learning for sure. I remember as well that you said another thing that you do is you listen to documentaries and things. Is that right?

Dubfire:

Yeah. I try to watch a lot of music documentaries. The last one being, I re watched it actually, I’ve seen it maybe four times already, but every time I watch it, I’m reminded by the sheer artistry of musicians and I… Especially with someone like Nick Cave. I watched Nick Cave’s documentary for the fourth time. 20,000 Days On Earth. He’s got a few documentaries that are just… I would recommend everyone to check out, but he’s so articulate in describing his creative process and… You know, and I don’t know if people like Nick Cave or other artists, if they… Just going back to what I was saying before about what works for me and what works for other artists, friends of mine is the constant exposure to new music, but then there’s… The flip side to that is there’s artists out there who prefer to kind of live and work in a bubble, in a vacuum and they don’t want those outside influences to creep in, especially if early in their career, they become identified with a very unique sound.

Dubfire:

You know those artists become very protective of that and they feel like if they expose themselves to other styles of music that they become fans of, it’ll kind of filter down into what they’re doing and it’ll influence it maybe in the wrong ways. So I think you have to realize… Each person has to realize what works for them. You know, we’re all unique individuals and there’s no kind of a one size fits all creative workflow blueprint for everyone. It’s a… You have to like try to understand who you are as an artist, what turns you on and how you want to express yourself and whether you need constant outside stimulus from other styles of music or none at all.

Keith Mills:

Sure. I mean, I guess you sort of be the flip side of that in many respects because you’ve reinvented yourself, you’re seeking new whether it be advancements in technology, different directions to take your music and I think it was one of the things you mentioned about when you decided to pursue your solo career as Dubfire, was that you felt that Deep Dish… It was coming to the end of its creative cycle, I think was the term you used, which I thought was a lovely way of putting it. How do you know when you feel that you’re coming to the end of a creative cycle in anything you’re doing and it’s time to explore new territory?

Dubfire:

Well, it depends on the situation that you’re in. I was in a situation where I felt creatively stifled. Like I maybe had ideas that I wanted to explore within the framework of this partnership, but because we didn’t see eye to eye on where we wanted to take Deep Dish sonically and it was a constant battle to win the argument of which kick is the better kick or which had to use, or whether to use a hat at all or which vocalist I prefer and which he prefers. You know I think in my situation specifically, I just felt stifled. I felt like maybe I could maintain if that partnership stayed positive. If there was a lot of wiggle room to go off into weird tensions and explore different things without feeling like you had to kind of make the team happy and do things for the wrong reasons, whether they were to try to get into the charts or to try to, I don’t know, maintain a more commercially accessible sound. I don’t… It was probably a combination of all those different things that drove a wedge between us and then that just became bigger and bigger until we were pretty far apart and it just made sense to kind of go our separate ways.

Dubfire:

So for me, it was like the constant feeling that I had to compromise that I couldn’t fully explore everything that I wanted to. That I was unhappy in a situation that I dreamed of being in which was to be a successful recording artist and have a successful DJ career. You know, I woke up not just one day, I woke up many days and I was just unhappy with where I was, even though we were having some of the best success that we’ve ever had in our entire career. So for me, it was a kind of… I mean, I knew what had to be done.

Dubfire:

It took a long time to actually work up the nerve to do it, but I think for anyone that finds themselves in that position and I’ve known many over the years. You know, some kind of just suck it up and they realized that all the stuff in the periphery that goes along with that kind of success, they prefer to keep that going at the risk of losing their creative identity and other people feel like, well, their creative identity is the reason why all those other things are possible. So if that’s stifled then all that other stuff is going to go away and it’s just going to chip away at who you are and what you want to represent and what’s the point of living life if you’re not going to be… And what’s the point of doing something that you love if you’re not in love with it. So for me it was pretty obvious what needed to be done.

Keith Mills:

Yeah. It sounds… The way you’re describing it is a very bold move. It must have been quite a challenging time for you making… You knew you wanted to make a step, but it was a big leap into the unknown basically to pursue something that it’s still art, but it was a very different sound. You went down a whole kind of new road. How did you make the transition? What was that journey like? Was it a very bumpy road to start with? Did it go well?

Dubfire:

You know, it was really scary. I was… You know, I was still… The same promoters that were booking… You know, as a DJ, the same promoters that were booking Deep Dish, they obviously wanted to continue booking us separately, but not all. But I would say maybe more than half of all those promoters I knew and I’d known for a long time that they weren’t the right promoters for me in terms of where I wanted to take my career musically. I had to work with a whole range of promoters that I hadn’t been working with or that I maybe worked with very early in our career because we started as like an underground, deep house techno act, and it just evolved into something completely different. So I knew that I would be taking many steps back financially. I would be taking… I would be giving up a lot of opportunities. I’d be working less, but I knew that… You know, I knew where I wanted to go. You have to be able to see across the finish line. You have to have some sort of an idea.

Dubfire:

It’s okay to not have an idea at times, but you need to try and visualize where you want to end up career wise or with whatever it is you’re trying to achieve and then think about… It doesn’t have to be so methodical, but you should think about what it’s going to take to get there. How long do you think it’s… You know, how long do you want to give it before you can achieve that. 10 years, five years, two years because that’ll determine the level of sacrifice and hard work that’s going to go into it. Obviously I wanted acceptance from the techno community from day one, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I had to prove myself despite all the success and the Grammy Award and all that stuff that I had achieved in Deep Dish.

Dubfire:

So for me, it was kind like going back to the roots, back to the reasons why I started. It took a lot of visits to Ibiza, checking other DJs, being inspired by what was happening around the time with like minimal techno. It was a lot of different things that I… You know, I was kind of like sponge again. You know, I’d always been sponged like in my constant need to absorb all the great music around me and all the great artists, but I needed to be that sponge again and I knew that there was a certain sound in my head that I wasn’t hearing anybody else represent and that just turned into a lot of studio sessions with Matt and I knew that it can’t be just one or two things. It’s got to be like a concerted effort to constantly reinvent myself from one remix or one production after another and I remember telling Matt that, I said, “Look, we need to just be relentless with our work ethic and I need to try to get as much incredible music out there and translate all these crazy ideas in my head as possible.” And Matt helped me kind of realize that.

Dubfire:

You know for a while we were using… We had this white noise kind of crash that a lot of people associated my music with that was funny because we didn’t set out to do that, but like I recalled all the times where I was on the dance floor and you had like liquid nitrogen blast and how amazing that sounded on top of the music. I’m like, “Wow, I wonder if we can kind of create this white noise crash, could we make people feel the same way? You know, there’s a lot of venues that don’t have that. So can we replicate that somehow?” And then other ideas in minimal music, minimal techno music that I thought weren’t fully fleshed out. I wanted to like take ownership of that and create… And give it my own spin.

Keith Mills:

Where in that journey? I kind of… I don’t want to jump around too much because I’m really keen to understand what your day in the life of when you were doing this intense studio stuff was? But where in that timeline did Roadkill come into proceedings? Because for me that’s an iconic track and it was a very different track and it was a track that transcended genres as well that could be dropped into most sets and it would go off and yet it’s still had a very unique techno identity. Where did that come in the timeline and how did that come about?

Dubfire:

Yeah, I think one of the first things I produced was the I Feel Speed track, which was me singing on it and it was cover of a love and rockets song and when… You know, with the last Deep dish album, we were exploring a lot of… You know, we exploring this hybrid of like alternative rock and dance music and trying to be kind of like… You know, I guess like The Chemical Brothers and groups like that. We were just trying to inject a bit of rock and roll into electronic music and when I first went solo I thought I wanted to pursue that and go in a less… You know, a darker direction. Less poppy and less commercial than Deep Dish and so the idea was to continue to explore this rock dance hybrid.

Dubfire:

So I could have conceivably gone into kind of an Erol Alkan’s Justice left field direction, [Indy 00:30:55], direction. I think I wanted to be Indy, but I also loved what was happening in techno. That was very inspiring to me and then RibCage and Roadkill were the two other tracks that I produced just after I Feel Speed and when RibCage got signed as the first release on Loco Dice’s label and Roadkill started to get played by people as diverse as Testo and Richie Hawtin and everyone in between, I knew I was onto a good thing there. So then it became… Well you know, we’re getting a lot of like great feedback from where we’re going musically with this stuff.

Dubfire:

So why don’t we leave the vocal indie kind of thing to the side and go more in that direction. So it was that feedback that we were getting not just from our colleagues in the industry and I had a lot of friends by that point, having achieved the success that Deep Dish had and having come from humble beginnings, where I was friends with a lot of the guys not just on the techno scene and sort of the EDM scene. When we started… When I started to get recognized by diverse group of artists, I knew I was going in the right direction and it just became a question of like continuing to explore things to see if I could get everybody playing it as opposed to just like the Richie Hawtin’s and the Chris Liebing’s.

Keith Mills:

Sure. I think every everyone was playing. I mean, I remember talking to you about it. It was a track that when I was DJs to play it all the time and the place went off wherever it was, wherever it was, it was that tune. It was just huge and I know we’re jumping back a bit, but can you remember like how that came about, because it is one of those tunes and that is it… Was there a load of inspiration or it just flew out of your mind? It was one of those tracks. Can you remember the creation of that?

Dubfire:

Yeah. You know, I’m not going to tell you what samples we used, but there’s some cleverly used samples in there that people wouldn’t expect mainly with the drums. There’s one drum loop in particular that nobody would ever figure out where that’s from, but it’s a very old record, a jazz record but it just sounded techie when we ended up pushing it through all the crazy processing that we were working with at the time. I guess for me, it was just sitting down and obviously I had my struggles initially with the creative process and trying to figure out and articulate to Matt, my engineer because he’d been used to working and he comes from live music kind of background. He was used to working a certain way and I was going in this new direction and I was trying to act like I knew where I was going and I knew what I was doing, but I had no idea. But you know, I’m the captain and I’ve got to like give everybody on my team the impression that I know what I’m doing and I know where I’m going.

Keith Mills:

I’m in control. Yeah.

Dubfire:

And I’m in control of where we’re headed. So don’t ask questions, just follow me, you know. So it’s like… It’s a scary thing because you don’t want to let anyone down including yourself. So I guess suffice it to say that I didn’t know what I was doing. I just knew that whatever we were doing had to be different. So there was a lot of banging our heads against the wall when maybe we had done something that was great, but it wasn’t innovative enough. You know, that it wasn’t like pushing things forward and for me, I think that ethos of like embracing new technology and new production techniques. You know, it was all about like pushing the envelope because maybe instinctively I knew that I would be noticed if I did that at the very least. If other producers whose work I respected would listen to my stuff maybe they weren’t into it, but they would think, “Oh, wow. I wonder how he achieved those frequencies or that groove or how did he create that synth sound or that or wow, it’s so hooky, you know?” So it was all these different things that were at play.

Keith Mills:

Right. Sure. And you mentioned that the… You know, you took a really strong work ethic into that period. What would a day in the life of you back then when you’ve come back from Ibiza and that you’ve soaked everything in and you’d like going in the studio with Matt and it’s like “Right. Man on a mission.” What would that have been like being… You know, looking over your shoulder back then?

Dubfire:

It was a lot of arguments with my girlfriend at the time because you know, like when you’re that motivated, time kind of becomes an irrelevant idea. I mean, we were working around the clock. There wasn’t… You know, as you get older maybe you start a family whatever. You start to carve out a particular amount of time per day that you’re going to give yourself to work on music, do music related things and you start working more trivial adult things into your daily life, but back then I was so motivated by this. Going into uncharted territory on my own without Sharam, that I knew I had to work twice as hard as I was when I was in Deep Dish, but I was motivated. You know that was the difference. It wasn’t like I was dreading like having to work around the clock in the way that we were working.

Dubfire:

So there was a lot of… Like a lot of long hours. A lot of late night sessions. I used to prefer to work overnight back then, but by the end of that 10 year stretch, I just felt like… You know, and I started to kind of shift things around and work more during the day and I felt like I had more mental space and mental energy if I got a good night’s rest and woke up early and tackled it during daytime hours. So I think it’s just realizing like putting yourself in the right situation where those creative ideas are able to get tapped into and captured. For some people it’s at night when you’re tired, the phone’s not ringing, there’s very few people awake, you’re being left alone and for other people it’s having a daily regimented schedule. Kind of a nine to five approach to music making.

Keith Mills:

Yeah. I’m a very much a first thing in the morning person, which is going into the everyone’s still asleep thing. I find there’s something magical about waking up and my studio after I leave the house just across the garden to come in here, but it’s silence. No one else is about. No one else is up. It feels like there’s the edge of the day and that feels like a nice time space Oasis to step into, to create or to work on whatever. Now in terms of you exploring new directions and things with your art, you’ve pushed the envelope in so many different ways Deep Dish, now is Dubfire, and you’ve done everything from your hybrid shows to different even directions in techno, the remixed and that sort of that I’ve… You know, you’ve showed sort of broke down in the master class in FMM which again was anything but minimal techno.

Keith Mills:

It was this beautiful remix of an ambient piece. You’ve talked about sort of adding guitars, pianos, your voice and everything like that. Right now what are your thoughts on new artistic territory for you to explore? Is there something else at the moment that you’re looking to say?

Dubfire:

Yeah. I mean… You know, my brain is Kind of going in two directions. One, there’s been a lot of like electronic body music that’s been championed by people like… You know, artists like Ancient Methods that I’ve been heavily into and that’s kind of taking me back to my new wave and EBM kind of era, loving bands like Front-242 and wanting… You know, I’d always wanted to I think, make that kind of music and that kind of music all of a sudden is relevant again and being updated in innovative new ways by new artists, who’ve also maybe rediscovered that genre of music that was kind of forgotten for a long time. You know, industrial music. I was heavily into industrial music and there’s a lot of like kind of techno with industrial soundscapes and ideas and then there’s also like a lot of really cool mid to down temple kind of techie Indy stuff that I’ve been listening to a lot lately that also has inspired me to continue working with like alternative styles and electronic dance music and singing more. That’s something I want to do more as well.

Dubfire:

It’s gotten easier to just kind of lay down your own voice and process it very quickly and mimic the voices of all those great singers that you worshiped when you were trying to do it by singing in the shower. Yeah, so there’s… Yeah, there’s these two kind of creative directions that I’m exploring right now. Something that’s a bit like more industrial, harder edge, and then something that’s a bit more like shoe gaze for lack of a better expression.

Keith Mills:

And so do you sort of go down those both in parallel? Do you try to merge them? What’s your approach to exploring them both? And then will you typically find that you’re sort of leaning one direction because a bit like you said, when you started out as Dubfire, you had these two parallel ideas and you ended up leaning in one direction. What’s going to be the process of sort of getting stuck into these and exploring them?

Dubfire:

I mean, I like… The more parallels you have the better I think and I find because just when you get stuck or tired of going down one direction you’re also into all this other stuff. So then you can kind of shift mid gear and go and explore a different kind of creative direction and then keep jumping between all the different ones and at some point the influences of all these different creative ideas and sounds that you’re trying to articulate, they start coming together in unique ways, you know. So I don’t like to get, and I typically don’t get like tunnel vision when it comes to whatever it is I’m into and whatever I’m working on.

Dubfire:

I’ll at some point lose interest in it. There’ll be something… You know, some sort of a roadblock or hurdle, whether it’s technical or creative that will stop me in my tracks and then I’ll need to re ignite the flame so to speak and I’ll need new inspiration. So then I’ll just go and explore another idea that we have kind of like on the back burner and then I’ll get tired of that and I’ll jump into something else. So it’s just jumping around really. It’s not like an ideal solution to actually being able to like finish something, whether it’s an album or song, but whatever it takes I guess and sometimes that’s what it takes.

Keith Mills:

It’s interesting, you mentioned the sort of like button up potentially against the technology and that’s something you’re super passionate about. You’ve utilized, you’ve been at the forefront of things. It was interesting because when you were mentioning the white noise crash sounds that you had, I remember back to when I watched you play at Matter at the O2 in London and even then you were… Like you had a really advanced DJ setup. You were very much at the forefront of it and I think you actually had that sound ready to go whenever you wanted. There are huge moments and that was mapped out along with… You know, I think you were playing four different decks and all sorts of stuff was going on. Is there anything new at the moment that is exciting you either in the DJ booth or in the production process, new technology that you’re exploring?

Dubfire:

No. To be honest with you not too many. You know, I pulled out my old Roland Space Echo and I’ve been using that a lot in my DJ set. It’s just the live streams that I’ve been doing. I haven’t really opened the can of worms. I know there’s a lot of incredible new… You know, there’s a company called Black Corporation, which make incredible synths. I think they have one called the Deckard’s Dream that I want to check out. There’s kind of… You know there’s a few pieces of gear that Matt and I are looking at acquiring and exploring, but we just haven’t had the time to be honest with you. I also wanted to kind of look at what I currently have and try to master those things or explore those things further. You know, all the crazy third party. We just got the new V collection from Arturia updated. You know, sound toys are making incredible Plug-Ins. You know, iZotope is another great company making great Plug-Ins.

Keith Mills:

Yeah. You’ve got to go into Iris at all?

Dubfire:

I think we haven’t.

Keith Mills:

They’re sort of spectral synth thing that… Yeah, that’ll blow your mind if you want something new and… Well, it’s not so much new anymore, but it’s quite different to a lot of the things out there and it’s particularly actually, as you were mentioning industrial sounds and things like that could be one that would light you up without wanting to risk sending you down a rabbit hole like we often can when we’re into our tech.

Dubfire:

Yeah. I’ll definitely check it out. They just came out with a new updated version of Stutter edit as well, which was revolutionary when it first came out. It’s like a brainchild of my old friend BT as well. So that’s something I want to explore as well.

Keith Mills:

Sure. And if we got the crystal ball out, any thoughts even might be dreams may be of where the technology might take us next and again, that could be from a live performance side of things. I know you’ve done loads of cutting edge stuff for your hybrid shows in that area or studio maybe dare to dream, even if you’re not sure if it’s coming.

Dubfire:

I’ve always wanted to create some sort of an immersive experience for people, where you have like the artist. You know, I don’t know why we’ve been conditioned to think that like the audience always has to be on one side of the room and the artist on the other, on a stage or a riser. Why not put everyone together and create an immersive experience by… And then having like an LED wall behind the artist? Why not like a projection mapping or LED technology on all four walls and the ceiling and the floor to kind of like create a virtual world and create an immersive sound experience as well? Why can’t we have kind of a surround sound immersive experience running parallel to the visual immersive experience?

Dubfire:

So that’s something that obviously it’s hard to do because you need the right venue and the right technology, and you need promoters who believe in that or you could do it on your own. So it’s something that I’ve always wanted to explore and something that we might get… I might get more serious with in the future for the next kind of incarnation of my live show.

Keith Mills:

Cool. And also in the crystal ball, what about the future of the scene so to speak? I’m particularly interested in what has been maybe not even parallel, but perhaps intertwined or maybe the better word is tangled world of the underground scene and what was the commercial EDM? And I don’t like using the term because it’s always what we used to call our music, but it became the commercial name in many respects for it. How do you see those two working? Do you see there potentially be more of a separation now?

Keith Mills:

Because certainly festivals things kind of got a bit messy with what used to be underground events that everyone was going to very much infiltrated. I’ve spoken to a lot of people whose have their like local clubs that were always underground had their favorite artists and can’t necessarily blame promoters and business owners for going what’s lucrative at the time, but I’m interested to get your take on where you see that going in the future and that the scene as a whole.

Dubfire:

I mean with the shutdown of our industry during this pandemic, it’s served as sort of a reset. You know, you’re going to see unfortunately a lot of casualties as result. A lot of promoters or a lot of venues, a lot of events that won’t return and that’s going to be unfortunate because ultimately like we get booked to play for a promoter or venue. So that’s going to make it difficult, I think for everyone and it’s an industry wide reset, whether you’re in EDM or techno circles, but out of that struggle to return to normal you’ll likely see a return to maybe that pure clubbing experience and what is that? Maybe people are going to tap into why they created this club in the way that they had. Whether after all these years of doing it still makes sense. How can we reinvent ourselves?

Dubfire:

I think a lot of people are also asking one another is how can we reinvent what we’ve grown accustomed to for all these years and how can we reinvent the roots of this music in new and exciting ways? And I think what’s happening and maybe you know on the road to coming back to how things were pre-COVID. We’re going to discover some things about ourselves along the way, and we’re going to have to evolve and adapt into new ways and I think it’s definitely reset the playing field.

Dubfire:

You’re going to see for sure fees come down. You’re going to probably see less… Especially in EDM circles, less production value. You’re probably going to see a more raw and pure clubbing experience, where the initial emphasis may just be in making sure everyone can have a safe clubbing experience and everything else is going to be secondary and it might just be, you know Kerri Chandler said it best with a release he had in the ’90s. A basement, a strobe light, and a feeling. Maybe that will be the way things get going again. You know back to basics and raw and out of that, a new normal will emerge and hopefully a better [inaudible 00:53:37].

Keith Mills:

Is this one of the… Because it is great you’ve got a very positive sort of spin and it’s quite exciting even listening to you talking about the way that you think things might come about. Taking it kind of full circle I guess, in a way back to the very beginning when we started to talk about the DJs and beers, and you were talking about staying optimistic and motivated. Is this one of the things that you’re sort of leaning on is the excitement and the potential positive outcomes that will come out the other side of where we are right now?

Dubfire:

Yeah. I think right now I mean, everyone’s been cooped up for so long and will probably continue to be for another six months or so that anything is better than status quo. I think things will gradually return from a back to basics level and we have to remain positive and hopeful that we’re going to return better than before. We’re going to have to, and we’re going to have to also be… There’s a lot of conversations being had right now about being more socially responsible.

Dubfire:

You know, I think we need to have more balanced lineups in terms of… I mean you already saw that with more and more female artists entering the fray and promoters making sure they’re conscious to book people from both sexes equally. So we need to make sure minorities are included in that. You know like our industry has always been colorblind. A lot of the roots are from black artists and black music, and that needs to be acknowledged and that needs to be supported more so today than ever before. So I think you’re going to see more social responsibility emerge as a result of this, which is a very positive thing that is going to come out of this crisis.

Keith Mills:

Sure. So I want to take a slightly different angle, but still very much on the people front that you’ve just been talking about and that’s just to talk about mentoring a little bit, because I know that you’ve been mentored and that you’ve acted as a mentor and been facilitated a lot of opportunities for up and coming artists. How does that typically come about where you end up mentoring someone and what does the relationship look like?

Dubfire:

I think for me it just feels like I’m paying it forward. You know it feels a natural extension of what I should be doing as an artist having achieved the success that I have and being the age that I’m at. I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for people like Danny Tenaglia and Carl Craig and others who mentored me in those early days and I feel a sense of duty to kind of preserve those qualities. To make sure not only other artists see that and do the same but to make sure like our industry is going to be a better industry for the next generation.

Dubfire:

To make sure that the next generation don’t make the same mistakes that we make and I also learned from the new artists. You know it’s not purely a one-sided kind of mentorship situation that’s happening. It’s like everything that I’m communicating is all of the knowledge that I’ve grasped over the years and maybe there are new ways of looking at that and I think anytime I have a conversation with a new artist we’re learning from each other and so it’s a quid-pro-quo kind of thing. It’s very for lack of a better word transaction. It’s a very… You know it’s just nice to have that dialogue from one generation to the next about where we’ve come from, where we are and where it could go. I have my vision, they have theirs and collectively we can come up with new solutions or new ideas and make sure that the industry for that next generation is going to be stronger than ever before.

Keith Mills:

Yeah, sure. So it’s kind of like the mastermind concept when you put two minds together. In fact, even we can use the analogy of the third record. Mixing the two tracks and getting the third record, and that it is exactly the same with… And I find this to be completely true as you’ve mentioned, the meeting of different perspectives and different ideas almost creates a third mind, a whole new thing to explore and the more you do it providing you’re open, you have to come to the table not as the, “I know everything. Get my way or the highway.” But if you’re really open and receptive to listening to everybody and value everyone’s opinion in that relationship, you take a huge amount just from the ” God, I never looked at it like that before.” A totally exciting perspective that somebody’s brought to the table. At the moment do you still share your music with your peers and vice versa? How much feedback do you give on people’s music and they give you at the moment?

Dubfire:

I mean with new artists because I have the outlet for that in my SCI+TECH label, I do that quite regularly. With my own music? Yeah. I still need, and I crave the recognition and the guidance from my peers so. You know, certain people I trust and I talk to regularly I’ll send them bits and pieces of ideas that I’m working on or finished pieces of music and you may not always agree with their perspective, but you respect it and I’ve often felt the same way. If I’m being given advice about something, maybe I just need reassurance that I’m either going in the right direction or the wrong direction. You know, I need a second set of ears and that’s helpful. I think it’s important to, you know.

Dubfire:

Then again, that works for me, there’s other people like I said before, who prefer to live in a vacuum and not have any opinion or outside influence and that keeps their ideas pure and honest. I think I’ve said this before in other interviews and possibly with the last chat that we had is, at the end of the day whatever it is you do, you have to try to be as honest with yourself and with your art as possible and if you can manage that, the rest kind of fall in place quite nicely.

Keith Mills:

You might have just ruined my question here, but I’m going to ask it anyway Ali. Which is… Sort of to wrap things up is what would be your one piece of advice to anybody who’s just starting out on their creative journey? So kind of right at the beginning of things, and maybe it’s something that you could think of if I jumped back to me right at the beginning when I first got into this world, what was the one piece of advice that would have been awesome if I’d have known that?

Dubfire:

I think these days people just need to be more patient and let things. Not try to force anything, just let things continue to take shape until you feel like you’re ready to let everyone be exposed to whatever it is you’re working on. I think these days everybody wants a fast track to success and fame, and maybe they’re… Because dance music culture is so embedded in our social culture these days and you know, kids these days are spending so much time on social media and they have to realize that we only convey what we want you to see. You know behind the scenes everything looks different. So don’t be influenced by what you see and how you see people express themselves on social media, just focus on your art, try to be as honest as you can with it and make sure it’s good enough. Be patient and if it’s meant to be it’ll happen.

Keith Mills:

Yeah. Wonderful. It speaks back to that deep connection that you were talking about with the art and the reason why you love making it and focusing on that as a sort of the spine I guess, of everything that you do. So coming up for you, anything your fans can be looking forward to excited about. You talked about some of the work you’ve been doing in the studio at the top of the show, what’s coming out? Anything that we can get stuck into at any point soon?

Dubfire:

There’s a remix that I did for Kevin de Vries who’s a very amazing up and coming Belgian. I believe he’s Belgian. Belgian artist who lives in Berlin. He did a collaboration with the Ilario Alicante an Italian artist who is a good friend of mine and they have an EP coming out and I did a remix of a song called Segue-2 which I believe comes out on the 24th of this month. Hopefully my Cosh collaboration will be out at some point this summer and I am happy to say, I don’t have any other commitments and I’ve already started working on like this kind of left field Indie album project that I want to represent the work that I’ve made during this kind of shutdown period.

Dubfire:

I think a lot of artists because it’s been more than three months now we’re thinking, okay, something really amazing artistically has to come out of this shutdown. We have the time so let’s see how creative we can get and let’s see if we can come out with an iconic piece of music whether it’s an album or a few singles or whatever that really represent the struggles that we’ve faced during this COVID pandemic situation. So that’s a-

Keith Mills:

Brilliant. It’s like another positive take on it as well. I love it. It’s really good. It’s been amazing talking to you on this front because there’s is such a kind of positive energy of what might come out the other side of this, which has been wonderful and thank you hugely for joining me, I was very excited about the interview. I mentioned this before to you that because I noticed such a strong what I would call spiritual connection to your art and to me that means the whole why you’re doing it, why you’re invested in it, the role that you play, what you want to say, what you want to put out there, the way that you want to experience new things, inspirations. I was like dying to dig into this and get much deeper on the subjects with you and it’s been absolutely fascinating and awesome. I can’t wait for the show to go out. So thank you very much.

Dubfire:

My pleasure. Thanks for having me Keith.

Keith Mills:

Ali you’re an absolute legend. Thanks very much buddy. Take care and I want to get you back on the show soon as well.

Dubfire:

For sure.

Keith Mills:

Hopefully when you’re back out DJ-ing we can somehow sneak an episode in somewhere. I know that would be very difficult.

Dubfire:

Definitely. Anytime. Thank you.

Keith Mills:

All the best. Take care. Thank you.

Dubfire:

Bye.

Keith Mills:

So what do you think about that then? I always love talking to Ali about music because he’s got such an intentional, such a spiritual approach to his art and I always leave every conversation feeling really lit up really inspired. I find it absolutely fascinating in a way so insightful, but how do you feel right now? What take-aways have you had? And most importantly, what are you going to take forward into your music practice? Let me know. Hit me up Instagram @iamkeithmills. I really want to hear from you about this one. Let’s chew the fat on it. I promise to read it. I promise to get back to you and you can grab the full show notes over at finishmoremusic.com/068. Be sure to hit subscribe as well if you haven’t already, you don’t want to miss a beat on the FMM podcast. Until next time, take care and happy music making.

Keith Mills:

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Keith Mills:

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