6 Strings in My Head, 88 Keys in My Hands

[00:00:01] This is the story of how I always wanted to be lead guitarist in a metal band or a punk band, but I finally accepted that I'm a pianist. I'm Richard Kasperowski. My music project is called Sótano Épico. I have to call it a music project because it's not a band, because it's just me. My day job is that I am co-founder and CTO of a health-tech company, a gov-tech/health-tech company. We help first responders with their mental health. We use AI and help first responders with mental health. I've got lots of fun projects on the side, and this is one of them. There will be two digital interactions showing me there. Oh, and we've got the Apple stuff, so if they do stuff like that, you see balloons, scan the QR code with your digital interaction device, which is also called a phone or type menti.com and type in that eight-digit number

For people who are in the room, I brought gifts because, like any cool band, I have stickers and if you get lucky, there's temporary tattoos as well. That's really cool.

Transcript continues for 34 minutes...

[00:00:01] This is the story of how I always wanted to be lead guitarist in a metal band or a punk band, but I finally accepted that I'm a pianist. I'm Richard Kasperowski. My music project is called Sótano Épico. I have to call it a music project because it's not a band, because it's just me. My day job is that I am co-founder and CTO of a health-tech company, a gov-tech/health-tech company. We help first responders with their mental health. We use AI and help first responders with mental health. I've got lots of fun projects on the side, and this is one of them. There will be two digital interactions showing me there. Oh, and we've got the Apple stuff, so if they do stuff like that, you see balloons, scan the QR code with your digital interaction device, which is also called a phone or type menti.com and type in that eight-digit number

For people who are in the room, I brought gifts because, like any cool band, I have stickers and if you get lucky, there's temporary tattoos as well. That's really cool.

[00:01:34] Oh, great. Some people are there. So, before I did this startup, I was also sort of a professional speaker, and I would get people to interact with me doing stuff like this. So on a scale of one, on a scale of Nope, not at all to Hell, yeah: Do you love music and technology? Are you great at music production?

[00:02:06] And then I pause and take a sip of water.

[00:02:13] And it always works this way somehow. I don't know how that happens, but it always works that we really want it, but we're not good at it yet and therefore I'm here. And then there's somebody there who answered, Hell yeah, I think somebody here is Hell, yeah. Also, some of these images, some of the first screen, this is a album cover for the single that's being launched on Tuesday the 13th. And if you're old enough, you'll recognize that this album cover. So my music is covers of really awesome metal and punk songs. And my designer, I have this guy who's a really great digital designer. He just knows what to do. So this cover is a cover of the original cover as well. And this cover is also from the first EP I did. And so here's the whole story. A long time ago, I was a teenager in a rock band. One of my mom's neighbors kept this cutout from the newspaper. I don't know why my mom's neighbor kept a cutout of me, but she did. And then she gave it to my mom. I dunno, about six months ago. I had this cool band, but I really wanted it to be a metal band, but it wasn't. It was just sort of like a pop rock band. I played keyboards.

[00:03:48] I really wanted to be a guitarist, and I also had a guitar. I can just hack at it, but I really kind of suck. I've been playing with computers and piano and keyboards since I was about 10 or 11, and I started doing this when I was a teenager. It was super fun. And then I moved over here to Boston. You can tell this is the West Springfield Record. I grew up in West Springfield, Massachusetts, and then I came here to Boston. I left the band. They played for another year or something without me, and that was that. But this music project, this band, Sótano Épico, with my awesome graphic designer who just knows what to do.

[00:04:27] In the year 2000, you might remember there was a pandemic. Remember that, right? 2020, 2020, yeah. I'm off by 20. Yeah. 2020. There was a pandemic. Where I live, and it happens around here too, they call it like Alston Christmas or Christmas in July or something. Everybody was clearing out their houses. Everybody was doing spring cleaning and really deep spring cleaning around where I live in Newton, and I was taking a walk one day. It was late at night. I was tired, and somebody threw away a digital piano. I hadn't really been playing piano for about 30 years. Somebody threw it away. I walked up the door, I was like, does this work? The woman said, "I don't know. My kids, who were in their thirties, or something, told me it doesn't work. So I just put it out there on the street in the trash." I was really mad because I was tired and I just actually wanted to go to bed, but I had to come back and take the piano. And I started playing piano again. I started doing really serious daily practice, daily real training, but very specific training. I didn't want to play any classical music or any of that kind of training. I just wanted to play the music I like. So I really started doing blues piano training, which it turns out translates well to lots of other fun stuff.

[00:05:48] And that's how this project got started back in 2020. Since then - here's another album cover or a single cover. I've been able to publish a bunch of songs. I think art doesn't exist if there's no audience. So I had to somehow share this with people, and this is what I've been sharing. And here's the example. You've been hearing this as the sound check. This is the most recent single I did back in December, I think.

[00:06:45] So I'm taking the idea - jazz musicians have the idea of the standards and everybody, I can't, but everybody except me can play the standards. You can just sit in with any band and you can play the standards. I think there are standards or there's the standards of metal and the standards of punk, and I'm kind of playing the standards my way. I'm going to share a lot of stuff really shallow. And if anybody wants to go deeper into things, we can do that like afterward, or another time, or in between these things, it'll be fun. So here's the idea: I get an idea for a song. I arrange it for piano and voice. I record it, I publish it, I mix it. All the stuff. It takes anywhere from a month to three or four months, depending on the song and how long it takes me to arrange it and rehearse it and be able to play it. I'm actually playing everything. I'm not typing this in with a really cool keyboard. I'm performing. I perform all these things. Like, I can play and sing at the same time. I don't do that when I'm recording. I want the piano to sound good, and the voice to sound good.

[00:08:00] All the music is guitar music, right? Guitar, drums, bass, two guitars, a singer, maybe more than one singer. Arranging that or translating that sound to piano and voice, to one person playing a piano and one person singing, is interesting. And so that's one of the challenges. How do you take something that's really hard rocking, distorted guitars, distorted bass. And I've intentionally, since 2020, I've intentionally just decided I play piano. When I was a kid, I would take my synth then run it through guitar amps and stuff and make it sound like a guitar. I play piano. I have a piano. There's no pitch wheel on it. There's nothing else. It's a piano. It's set up at standard piano height. It's got three pedals. It's a piano. So take that instrument and be able to play metal on it and sound something like the original.

[00:09:03] And because I always wanted to be a lead guitarist, if there's a guitar solo, I'm going to play that guitar solo. And that's interesting because I can't bend strings. I can't slide up and down the fretboard. There's no microtones. If somebody's doing that in their guitar solo, I just have to figure out something that works on piano. And the piano is a really big instrument. If I was playing that piano right now, you wouldn't be able to hear me singing. I just don't have a strong enough voice. Pianos are big and loud, and bigger and louder than most humans. So learning how to make space for my voice. I'm not a professional engineer or producer, so learning how to help my voice stand out through all that sound was interesting. So taking guitar parts, translating them to piano is interesting. Here's an example of an original, and then my version of it, and this might work …

[00:10:18] Here's a song - everybody knows this guitar solo. It's a distinctive guitar solo. He plays it the same way every time. This is live recording. He screams. He's got this distinctive voice.

[00:10:44] And then here's another version of it.

[00:11:23] That's it. That's an example of an original. And my arrangement and performance of it. For arranging, I'm using OnSong. If anybody's used OnSong as performance tool, it's a good tool for - just put it on the piano or put it in front of you on a stand and play along with it. Sometimes I'm arranging using StaffPad, which is really fancy: draw notes on a real composition paper, and it turns out really nice. The 12.9 inch iPad is really important to me because that's the size of a piece of paper, and I want a piece of paper on the piano in front of me. And I don't know if this happens to any of you. I get a lot of really creative ideas when I'm dreaming or almost dreaming or just was dreaming. So taking care of myself and getting good sleep is the way to get ideas. I'm trying to think of how to arrange something right now. Here's an example of OnSong on the left. What's the name of this thing? StaffPad on the right, and the output from StaffPad there sort of in the middle. So it produces a real score, and you draw on it with the pencil.

[00:12:45] Yeah, you withdraw with the pencil. It draws the notes like that. It's like the pencil is the input device, and it draws them like that. It takes a long time to get used to the drawing technique, but once you do… I wouldn't be able to do it right now. I haven't done it in about six months, but once you get good at it, it's pretty cool. And you just circle notes and drag them up and down and move them around.

Recording. Here's some of the gear I use. I've got this really nice digital piano that feels like a really awesome grand piano. It's really important to me that it feels good. There's a piano in the park where I live. It's always the worst piano I've ever played. The action is uneven. One of the black keys is broken. The keys don't spring back up.

[00:13:30] This is a really nice piano. I hate playing pianos in people's houses because they're never tuned, right? It's a really great piano. Running it through old fashioned MIDI, the one with the circular connector, and all that through a digital audio interface to this computer to Logic and a really awesome piano plugin called Noire. And then for my vocals, I got this nice mic with a little Cloud Lifter for it. It goes into another audio interface to Logic, and that looks like this. So there's the piano with the three pedals and everything. Standard piano height. That thing in the middle is a pedal. It's a Bluetooth keyboard that if you think of it as a keyboard, it's a keyboard that has an up arrow key and a down arrow key or something like that. Maybe it's left and right, I don't remember. And I use it to turn the pages when I'm playing. When I'm playing, it's really nice to have that up my left foot and turn the pages. Instead of doing this to turn pages. There's the audio interface and you can see logic with the piano plugin there. The piano plugin is super cool.

[00:14:42] I've customized it just a little bit. It's like a super great sample and model of an awesome grand, including pedal sounds. And I've got it so you can hear the pianist sort of moving in his chair a little bit, and you can hear the hammers moving and everything. It's really nice. There's the mic. There's the Cloud Lifter. There's the audio interface, the digital interface for the mic. I actually like this digital interface more than - everybody uses a Scarlet. With this one, I don't have to keep pressing the phantom power button. Every time I turn it on, it just stays on. So I never forget phantom power. It's just on. Editing, editing, video, editing, editing. I try to keep it sounding natural and real. I mostly, but it turns out when you're doing a recording, it's different from a live performance. It actually has to sound good.

[00:15:44] Has anybody read David Burns' book How Music Works? So he talks about the difference between a live performance and a recording. A live performance - you can tell that something happened on stage and your ears adjust to it, your eyes adjust to it. But on a recording, you don't get those cues. So if something's wrong on a recording, it just sounds bad. So you have to fix things. And I'm recording MIDI onto this awesome piano plugin. I'll adjust the timing. What I actually do is I play through it and record it five times, and I pick the parts that sound the best and I stitch 'em together, and I adjust the timing. If I play a wrong note that's just wrong, I'll fix it. If I played a wrong note next to a good note, I'll just lower the volume a little bit. I want it to sound like a human was playing, not a computer and somebody typed it in.

[00:16:34] So it ends up sounding natural, like a human played. I played it, even though I'm making corrections. And the same thing with the vocal. I sing it five times. I pick the parts that sound best. When I discovered Melodyne, it changed everything, right? Because it turns your voice - I have monophonic Melodyne - it turns your voice into that same kind of MIDI piano role. And you can change tempo, you can change loudness, you can change pitch. It's a very natural, I don't want to call it autotune, it's a tuner, but it's very natural sounding. And I don't try to over-tune either. I still want it to sound like a human is singing. I really need the help, but I still want it to sound like a human, not like a robot. So I'm using Melodyne for that. So some other plugins. Izotope RX is just an awesome plugin for making things sound good.

[00:17:32] De-reverbing - my room is pretty good. That mic is very directional. There's still just a tiny little bit of room noise. My mouth makes noises easy to get rid of those clicks. Or sometimes I tap something in the room that's easy to get rid of. And de-ess. Discovering Neutron Unmask was really cool to make space for my voice within the piano. So it's a dynamic equalizer, and I've got it. I don't really know what side-chain means. I've got it side-chained to the main vocal. When I'm singing, part of the piano gets a little bit softer so my voice cuts through a little better. And when I'm not singing, it comes back up. That's cool. So a little bit of creating space with that dynamic EQ. I've also figured out some artificial vocal doubling, because I tried real vocal doubling where it says like you sing once you sing again, you play 'em at the same time.

[00:18:37] It makes your voice sound bigger. Actually, two voices - it turns out if you are correcting the voice with Melodyne, there's nothing to double anymore. Perfect. And you try to double it with something, and it just sounds bad. So sort of artificial vocal doubling, stereo widening, and just a little bit of delay. So it sounds like a different voice. I actually take it and I de-Melodyne it a little, so it's not quite on tempo. It's not quite the same pitch, but still very close. And has anybody heard of the VSX headphones and the matching software? I thought about making some software. Okay, so the first single I produced, I was really, really proud of it. It sounded awesome. I mixed it on AirPods. I didn't know not to do that. And I published it and it sounded great on AirPods and then I played it somewhere else.

[00:19:36] I was like, this is crap. What happened? It must be these speakers. It sounds great. And I played it somewhere else, and it was crap. So it wasn't the speakers. The VSX. So I thought about writing some software that would simulate different listing environments, so I'd be able to hear what it would sound like in different places. The VSX does that. Somebody wrote some software that goes with a set of really flat equalized, flat frequency response headphones and lots of simulated rooms to listen to this stuff. And it really very, very improved my mixes and how they translate to different systems. So here's just a screenshot of the RX and the Neutron as the side-chain thing for the dynamic EQ neutRon. The Izotope RX is ridiculously easy to use. Far on the left you can see the whole effects chain for my voice.

[00:20:46] There's the Unmask, the dynamic EQ. There's no music playing, so there's no really cool spectral lines there. And this is the VSS software. You just scroll through these different rooms, listen to what it sounds like in a room, make an adjustment, make a different room. I just go through all the rooms while the music's playing and make adjustments as it goes and go back to the beginning and keep going until it doesn't sound bad on any of them. And that's helped a lot, especially with popping sounds like P's and S's and stuff like that. This has helped a lot to sort of bring those to the right place.

[00:21:33] Finishing touches, making this easy for myself. So somebody else is mechanically mastering it for me. Somebody else is distributing it to all the places and then I'm doing fun stuff on my own for marketing. It's a hobby project. So eMastered is a pretty good sounding mastering service. My first releases were not mastered at all. And this just makes them sound alive. Mastering people joke that it's just "turn up the volume." It makes things louder, and that's actually important. You have to win the loudness war. You actually have to. And it does other cool stuff. It makes it sound more alive, more dynamic. Does the right stereo separation stuff. Somebody who's good at this, good at mastering, could do this. It's just a piano and a voice. Or just pay a little bit of money, and it's really just a little bit of money, and somebody else does it. And it's really a lot better. DistroKid for distributing the music to all the platforms. It's pretty inexpensive, again, and if anybody wants anything mastered or distributed through DistroKid, let me know. I'll do it for you. I've already paid. You don't have to pay. Really.

[00:22:58] And the hobby project website. So that's a screenshot of it. The hobby project for mass SMSing. People who have definitely subscribed, they've definitely - don't worry - or they have any complaints. They're all friends. They're all friends. It's cool. I was using a service to do it, but I really just wanted to write my own. So now it's like 1 cent per SMS or something instead of $20 a month. And it was fun to write the code. Email list, Instagram, TikTok - apparently if it doesn't exist on TikTok and YouTube, nobody will find it. So you to share your music on TikTok and YouTube for people to find it. And if you want people to listen to it more than once, it has to be on Spotify. So you just have to, and again, there's no art if there's no audience. So you have to do these things to share music.

[00:24:00] There's TikTok stuff. I hate doing it. And I think last time - I wasn't here last time - you were talking about using Claude to help you do things. I wasn't going to show you. But I just throw together a prompt that's like: Hey, I'm going to do some social media stuff. I use Buffer to schedule things ahead of time. I can buffer 10 posts without paying for Buffer. And here's some ideas I have. Oh, I'm going to be here on May 8th. Let's make sure we mention that at least once. And I have a single coming out on Tuesday the 13th. Let's make sure we highlight that. Write me 10 social media posts. Tell me what to use for an image or a video. Tell me what to use for caption text. Tell me exactly what day and time I should publish it. And it just does it, and it's pretty much right.

[00:24:57] And you, too, can do this more stuff. Oh, the piano architecture, mapping to roles in a band. So think about that AC/DC song, or that Metallica song. There's four or five musicians, and I'm just one. So the voice, obviously there's a voice, and those bands don't have backing vocals, so that's easy. Usually my left hand is some combination of the bass and drums, like the rhythm section. My right hand is kind of like the rhythm guitar and the lead guitar. It's kind of obvious, but that's pretty much how all the arrangements always come out, sometimes something else. But that's pretty much it.

[00:25:41] Sound masking. So things like getting rid of the room noise, which it's a very quiet room. It's actually my basement and it's underground. Two of the walls, the other walls are pretty quiet as well. So it's a pretty quiet room, but it's a small room and you can actually hear the reverb in the room. The directional mic helps a lot. I've got some sound treatment on the walls, but the Izotope RX helps a lot. And then using the dynamic EQ to bring down the volume of the frequency range of the piano helps my voice come out. And the standards - pick the right songs. And these are really just the songs that are in my heart. They're the songs that I love since I was - if you read the research that says the music you were listening to when you were 13 is the music you love.

[00:26:31] That's the music I was listening to when I was 13. So it's music I love, and I just have the music in my head. It's the stuff I want to play. Even though I'm a pianist.

I've got a checklist. The first time I did this, it was hard. I didn't know what I was doing. I had some idea - when I was that teenager in the photo, at the beginning, I had a four-track recorder. It was awesome. I had a drum machine. I was doing stuff on my own. I had a bass guitar. I was tracking on my own stuff.

[00:27:04] So I sort of knew what to do overall. But now I just have a checklist. I'm just going down the checklist, and it's easy. So I got this, and the last song that I produced is just "copy as New project." And that's the next song. And it's pretty much all set up. Oh, and I'm a software developer, and this is sort of a joke, but not really. I'm small scale famous in the world of agile software development. I teach the course at Harvard called Agile Software Development. I've done a bunch of talks and keynotes on this stuff. I publish whatever I'm working on every week. I set aside Wednesday mornings to do music editing and recording. Yesterday, Wednesday morning, I published a new version of the next song. Work in Progress. And however it sounds, and people can tell me it sucks. People tell me it's good. It's just work in progress. The piano isn't edited yet. My voice isn't tuned yet. It's just what it's, and it's important to me to just put it out there, maybe get feedback on it, but actually have something done every week, something new done.

[00:28:22] And that's the weekly release on SoundCloud. Free account, no big deal. Just publish it, get it out there. And Friday the 13th, obviously a very metal day. So on Friday the 13th is when I publish collections like EPs and albums. And Tuesday the 13th, it turns out in Latin America, is also an unlucky day. So Tuesday the 13th is for releasing singles. So that's why this Tuesday the 13th, there's a new single coming. That's it. Questions, comments. I'd actually love feedback. Go back to that digital interaction device and let me know what you thought and it's just like, tell me what you thought. Tell me what would make it better.

[00:29:08] Ask me questions as we go.

[00:29:21] Audience: I mean, how you have the time to work put in music you have,

[00:29:42] How do I fit this into my time? What drives me? I just like making music. I like creating, right? So creating software is one way of creating. Creating music is another way. I've written books, too. I brought this as an example of a book. One of my hobbies is practicing Spanish as well. So just another thing to do for fun, I wrote a short novel in Spanish, just to practice Spanish. And this is based on the story of me being a kid in that band back in the eighties. And this is the story of some kids in a town, in town in Massachusetts, but it's based on real characters, like the characters in my band, more or less with a different name. If anybody wants to check that out, I'll just leave it there. I just set aside time for it. Every Wednesday is music editing day, every Wednesday for 60 to 90 minutes is music making time, and I know what to do with that.

[00:30:43] Music making time. It's five minutes of vocal practice. It's 15 minutes of just playing songs I like. It's 20 minutes of real piano exercises, and it's 20 more minutes of working on the next song. Just like arranging or rehearsing. It's just that. Yeah. And every Wednesday it's: set aside time. Every Wednesday morning it's: do the recording editing. And it's Wednesday mornings because my wife teaches at Boston University, and she's usually not home on Wednesday mornings. So the house is quiet. It's important if you're going to be tracking vocals, the house has to be quiet. In the winter that means turning the heat off, because the heat in my house is loud. It's all the stuff that I learned when I was a kid in little recording studios. It's like, turn off the lights because they buzz a little. That's Wednesday morning.

[00:31:37] Audience: Yep. How did I come up with that routine?

[00:31:46] I dunno, getting good at anything is really just doing it. So just do it for an hour a day is pretty much what I do. Hour to 75 to 90 minutes a day is just playing music. It didn't take long to rebuild piano technique, and it didn't take long to become a decent enough singer. It's just: do it every day. I also have very flexible work hours. I put a lot of time into work, but most of my colleagues, we don't have an office. My co-founder is in Seattle, the person I write code with every day is in California. So I actually have a lot of free time in the morning. We meet, me and my code-writing colleague, we meet at 11 o'clock Boston time for our first conversation of the day. It gives me a few hours in the morning to do stuff. Well, I'm still sharing screen. Oh, that's me. Of course. You can email me at [email protected] if you want to, or you can just talk to me. If you're here in the room, and I gave you stickers if you're here in the room; if you're not here in the room and you want stickers, let me know. I'll send you some. And the new single on Tuesday, listen to it. All the music at sotanoepico.com. You can text to my cool text thing called SMS Blast.

[00:33:17] Jess: How did the remotes get stickers? How do the remotes get stickers? Sam …

[00:33:22] Tell me you want a sticker and I'll mail it to you.

[00:33:24] Jess: Yep, that's the answer, Sam.

[00:33:25] I'll do it. Spencer and I are friends. He'll just come to my house and get stickers.

[00:33:32] Jess: I see. Okay. All right. Thanks everyone.