Join us on The Hero Show as we explore the awe-inspiring journey of Marcus Manderson, an accomplished musician, music producer, composer, and audio engineer who is using the universal language of music to revolutionize the world. In this episode, we will delve into Marcus's mission to make a difference in our culture and the lives of others through his creative works.

Discover how Marcus's passion for music production has enabled him to create memorable music experiences that stand out from the crowd. Be inspired by his personal story of dedication and perseverance, and join us on an exciting adventure around the world as we witness the impact of his art.

Get ready to learn how Marcus is making a significant contribution to society through his music and how his determination to achieve financial sustainability is driving him toward even greater heights. Don't miss this opportunity to explore the fascinating world of music with one of its most visionary artists on The Hero Show!

Hello, and welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews [00:01:00] and today I have the pleasure of having on the line Marcus Manderson. Marcus, are you there?

I'm there. I'm here. I'm everywhere.

Awesome. Glad to have you here today. I'm actually really excited to have you on. This is a new business category for The Hero Show. I said we've done a little over 200 episodes now and not once have we had someone who does what you do. So before we get too far into our discussion.

I wanna talk briefly about through your intro so we can get into your story. But Marcus Manderson, AKA Da Fingaz is an accomplished musician, music producer, composer, and audio engineer layered with his background as a church musician. His musical influences from his home state of Virginia, as well as his music, his parents often played while growing up.

Marcus can easily adapt and create various music genres. He's created music for Disney, Stars, National Geographic, the Natural Resource Defense Council and more. He's based out of his home production studio in Virginia where he enjoys spending time with his biggest inspiration as his wife and their two children, son and a daughter.

Yeah. Thank you for having me. And happy to share the musical journey so far, and the plans for the future. It's been an interesting journey, and happy to talk about it.

So, why don't we start off with what you're known for, right? This question sets up who you are now, what your business is like, who do you serve, what do you do for them?

So right now it's interesting cause I am someone who creates opportunities. So, the pandemic has helped a lot with focusing on sort of the musical journey and I really started putting out a lot of music. Personal music, just putting it in auto streaming platform. So I would sit down one day and say, I would like to do an album for artists that I wanna work with.

So I wanna do an album for I did one for Usher, R&B Singer. I did one for, you know rapper Rick Ross. I did one for Hitmaker, who was a hit songwriter, did one for Rocky, who was an incredible singer songwriter. So I would sit down and come up with these concept albums. Along that line I would also do cinematic albums.

And then put out a couple last year and just started as I put out an album, I learned more about the trailer music space and joined communities. So it's been a journey of putting out music and from putting that stuff out, getting opportunities. So it's more of like passive marketing. And of course I share it on social media like, Hey, I have this album.

You're creating music and because you're creating music, you're getting opportunities to create music for hire, like for Disney or for National, what was it? National Geographic. That's pretty awesome. So, just by virtue of creating the music that you create, you're being noticed by some of these big companies are being asked to create more music.

And once you're sort of in, you're in, cause there's a certain bar level production-wise, music-wise, or if you're doing film, whatever you're doing, when you work with certain companies there's a certain bar level that they have for all of their projects.

You said you have music in one of the Disney attractions. Is that in Orlando or in California?

This was in California, Disneyland and that actually came from releasing a trailer album last year of Neoclassical.

Are you allowed?

Yeah. It opened last, January, so two months ago as part of a lot of people don't know this is Disney's 100th anniversary, so I don't know if they're marketing, they had one of the top Superbowl ads but this is the 100th anniversary of Disney.

And in this theater there's a storytelling of Abraham Lincoln. In the music part I scored was the story of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. And then that's as you're waiting to get into the show, and the show is actually an animatronic show, one of the first animatronic shows that was ever created.

Featuring a person. It's actually an old show from the 50's or 60's, and they've updated at least the portion I worked on, they updated for the Disney 100th. So yeah, exciting just,

That's really cool. I like the closest connection I've ever had to Disney before is I got a good friend of mine who used to do the. He was one of the narrators on the Jungle Cruise.

Oh, wow nice.

And you know the people who run the boat and tell the stories when you go around on the Jungle Cruise, he did that.

But have someone who's actually like, scored one of the rides. Cause that's one of the cool experiences about Disney is you walk through and even the lines are exciting and they're fun and like. There's a lot of work that goes into every single aspect of the experience. So.

So it's a different mindset.

Paid by Disney.

Yeah.

Have your name featured in the, what are they called in the post credit scenes or something for, Yeah. That's really cool. It's like I got another friend of mine who's he's the, one of the marketing directors for the United States, for the Pokemon company.

Oh wow.

That's awesome.

Right, and he's got like an actual Pokemon lab in Seattle. I was like, all you need is you need one of those white lab coats like Professor Oak.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I was like,

Two lab coat, though.

Yeah, they all think he's the coolest guy in the world because he's actually a Pokemon professor. They're like, oh, it's so cool.

Anyways, you know, same kind of thing right now. Kids are like, oh, my dad is with Disney.

And, you know of course I won't be upset because I didn't get a Disney trailer last year. But should I be upset? Cause I got a Disneyland theme park, you know, traction?

I mean, that's pretty cool.

Yeah. Yeah.

So are you still in process of trying to land a Disney trailer?

So trailers is the interesting journey because I find it challenging. So my main background was playing in church for over 25 years and then the pandemic hit and decided not to go back to the church side. Enjoyed my weekends with family, you know the pandemic, once that hit, those were the first two years, three years now.

Right. That I was able to spend like all of Mother's Day and all of Father's Day, like with my family because I didn't have to play in church half the day spending birthdays and holidays, you know, if it weren't on the, if it was on the Sunday, I'd be out half the day. Or if the family wanted to do things, I'd be like, oh, I'll catch up after, you know, church or they'd have to delay.

And it was also learning music that I wasn't making. So I spent a lot of time learning great music from artists, you know Donnie McClurkin and Kirk Franklin, a gospel artist, you know, Tye Tribbett , Fred Hammond, the list goes on. And it wasn't,

Like you're talking Disney Sports and they're like Zimmer and,

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So now it's like I was always interested in like orchestral music, but now it's like I can start making music, I can start creating more of my music instead of learning music. Cause it took a lot of time to learn music and also choir parts and assist with you know, helping with the lyrics.

And it was a lot of time and a lot of energy that it was paid, but it wasn't really fully compensated and appreciate it for the work that I was putting in. And there's things that I didn't realize until after the pandemic. And it's like I enjoyed it while I was doing it, but it was all I knew.

Well, what I wanna talk about then is your origin story, how you got into doing this, right? And we've covered a little bit of this, but every, you know, every good comic book hero has an origin story, whether that's, you know it's the thing that made them into the hero they are today. You know, were you bit by a radio actor spider that made you want to get into doing trailer music and theme park music, or, you know I know you said you started working in the church but what made you want to make the shift from being a musician who plays, you know, maybe on Sundays or at church events to being someone who's running a business around music?

So the overall goal. So growing up my mom had all of her kids take piano lessons. And I'm the youngest of five. I have three, yeah, five of us. I have three sisters and a brother. And I stuck with the piano and played piano through high school, took lessons from people at the church.

So I ended up getting some classical lessons in 11th grade, which is really old for someone who wants to go to school for music. Usually people are studying classical music at, you know, out the womb, you know, seven, eight years old, younger. So I'm coming in, you know, with one or two years before going to college.

And the person, the instructor I was working with she was like, I can only show you enough to get through the audition, but once you're into a school you really got to work. So got into a great school, James Madison University, in Virginia music program there is incredible. It's actually way better now than when I was there.

They built out a whole music program. When I was there my first year I was probably the new, you know, as far as learning classical music, I knew a lot of the, you know, playing by ear and jazz and things like that. Site reading and playing classical and sitting down and memorizing. That was not my thing.

And the drum instructor at the time, he was like, I wonder why they're pairing a freshman with a senior. They usually don't do that. I was like you know, I don't know. It's just what happened. And there's a song that we did called Rhapsody Fantasy that was basically like the Roger Rabbit theme or the, yeah, that Roger Rabbit theme.

And it was a song that you know, I learned it, memorized it, and it was like, oh, okay, he's serious. And just, you know, taking that first year to really focus on the classical side. Which is not what I intended to do in life. My goal was always to be in the studio as a producer, you know, working with, you know, the big artists, the Beyonces and Taylor Swifts and Justin Bieber's and Drake's of the world.

And then graduated college and went back to playing in the church because that's, I was playing in the church growing up. And that was pretty much, I think I was gonna retire playing in a church like for as long as life, you know, as long as I lived. And then the pandemic hit church went virtual.

And some things happened there where I decided that it wasn't best for me and my family to go back to playing in a church. And shifted the focus to putting out my own music and as I mentioned earlier, putting out these albums which has been leading to some great opportunities. And also another part of that story is I'm not at the music.

Cause I like sharing this. I'm not making music full-time yet. I'm working slowly to that. I do work full-time and I work at non-profit that some of you might have heard of called National Geographic. And it wasn't until I started working there that. They opened my eyes. Cause I always tell people I make music.

And they needed music for that.

And I was like, can you do it? I was like, yeah, sure. You know, I had no idea anything about making music for like a TV show. And came up with some ideas. It was like a 32nd, you know, less than 32nd idea. So I had like 30 ideas for them. And they chose one.

And that sort of was a spark of like, hey, there's other areas of music other than. You know, working on trying to get a song to an artist, it's actually easier to get it on TV and in a movie than it is to get it to Beyonce. That really was sort of like the spark, but I still didn't really push into it until the pandemic hit.

That's really been the main focus over the last three years.

Yep.

That's where I'm at right now. I'm working on that one skill. Like I can play chords my right hand and I can play chords, my left hand, but playing chords together with both my right hand, that's the thing I'm working on.

Yeah. Another part of that story is my mom and my dad and my brother and myself, we are all left-handed. So learning piano as a left-handed musician the bass is usually, the left-hand is usually the weak link in most pianist. But for me it was one of the, because I was left-handed, it was already more of a I was getting more use out of it.

So it was pretty much not a weak link in playing piano.

And then so, and then it moves into like rhythm. So learning, you know, the piano is, I didn't really know this, but piano a lot of times is a percussion instrument as well as a melody instrument, but actually keeps the rhythm in the music. So like getting through, like learning how to actually keep rhythm and keep time.

And it's like I, maybe I'm on the sixth lesson, but the sixth one where I'm sort of like stuck is like, now that you have rhythm and chord progressions and all that, now it's like you have to put those together with like your left hand and your right hand being able to do the work together.

And so that's where I'm at now. So, you know, that's adult learning skills where I'm at. But certainly not gonna be a career path for me. But it's, I've learned a lot. And I'm realizing that I enjoy music more the more I learn about music. Like enjoy, I enjoy consuming it, if that makes sense.

The more I learn about it,

Not unlike the Hero podcast and just started learning more. So there is you mentioned you're taking like a piano course. I think we're always learning as long as you're alive. There's people that they're learning till the day we die. So I'm taking two courses right now.

One is a trailer music course that basically outlines, you know, some of the basics and key things in Charlie Music. And another one is sort of trailer music related, but it's more sync side, which is putting music into movies and television, but not trailers. Cast trailers is very specific.

During the pandemic, a lot of them were at home. They were answering dms and messages and emails. They were bored after like a few months, and they were like, yeah, let me talk to someone. So it's been great to make these connections over the pandemic. And then now with the world opening back up, going to different conferences and things and seeing these people in person and be like, Hey, you know, I've been talking to you for two years and thanks for that advice you shared on this one thing and great to meet you.

You know, and baby that'll lead to opportunities, but really it's just a networking.

It's like, I know in my business it's been a lot of the same, the more you, like, every time you meet the right people. And as you sort of get in and build relations for those people, it opens doors and creates opportunities to, you know, help grow your business. And I said mine's in the podcast space.

So like the rooms that I'm trying to get in and the people I'm trying to meet are like, you know, business events and other things. And as I get into those and talk to more people, it's growing my business. So you're sort of in the same game, right? But you're doing it for getting music into TV shows and getting, you know, music onto trailers and whatnot.

That's awesome. Congratulations.

Yeah. It's a lot of fun. So and it, something about the pandemic particularly, like it made it networking really hard and then like, coming back into like post pandemic and getting into some of these rooms and some of these events people are just dying to like, make connections and meet new people and, you know, help each other grow their businesses and grow their you know, grow what we're doing.

So anyways, that's exciting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And, even with that, like I've been because of the church thing, I was sort of limited, so I didn't go out as much to different conferences and unless it was a church related thing. So last year I went to one of the biggest music conferences in the world called NAMM in California.

Yeah. Yeah. And as you build all those relationships, that's how, like you said, with a National Geographic, when people know they'll call you up when they've got projects.

Yep. Yep. Exactly.

That's cool. So I wanna talk a little bit then about your superpowers, right? Every iconic kiro has a superpower, whether that's a fancy flying suit made by their genius intellect or their ability to call down thunder from the sky in the real world.

Heroes have what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill or a set of skills that you were born with or you develop over the course of your career that really sets you apart, right? Helps your clients slay their villains, so to speak, and come on top of their journey. And the way I like to frame this for my guests is you probably have a whole bunch of skills that you've developed over the course of your career, and there's a common thread that you notice ties them all together.

And that common thread is generally where you find your superpower. In your area of expertise, what do you think your superpower is?

Fatal flaw,

What is the opposite?

Fatal flaw.

Fatal law, so I create music fast especially when I can like lock in. And when I get to the point where I can make it full-time I've made instrumental albums in a day of like 10 track projects. And my goal is to make one a week right now, but I've done some in a day especially when I lock in, if I get a new, like virtual music or sound library I, you know, if I, usually when I get a library, I try to make a track or a song with it.

And these are just instrumentals. So I'm not like rapping or anything. But and by song, by album, a lot of them are in the marketing, the music marketing space, using music for ads in marketing. Most of the time they're under two and a half minutes a trailer, two and a half minutes average, two and a half minutes.

When I landed it this was I think I got the go ahead on like a Thursday or Friday, and they're like, well, we're gonna do a pre-screening on Monday, like three days later. And they said to me, they're like, we know you're not gonna have the music done. So in my mind, I didn't say this to them cause I didn't wanna say I'll do it and then, you know, not do it.

But in my mind, that was the clock, that was the deadline. When they say, you know, take your time. You know, you have a couple months to work on this, we know you won't have it done. I had it done by Monday. I was up all weekend. But my goal was, and it actually made the rest of the whole thing easier because most of it was done in that weekend, you know several hours.

But they said, you know, we know you won't have it done by Monday. We'll just show them what we have so far. And I had it done by Monday and it was just minor tweaks from there. I think we only got up to version three. And you know, in some projects you get up to version 60, you know, 50. So that was really surprising that they didn't have more edits.

And let's say I work on it. But then they weren't really fully bought into that idea. So it's like, I worked on it, I spent a couple hours, like, Hey, here's something. And they're like, yeah, we thought we wanted that, but now we want something else. Like, ah, okay. But the great thing about music is it can be used in a million places.

So even though I might have spent a couple hours for this one project, it's like, okay maybe they'll come back around with a similar project, you know, in a few months. Or maybe another company's working on a similar project. So the great thing about music that can exist in multiple locations and avenues is that it can be repurposed.

So that's the great thing about it.

Yeah, it's like we usually go superpower and then ask about your fatal flaw. You just covered them both in one, which is kind of cool cause generally speaking your coin, your superpower is one side, and the flip side of that coin is the fatal flaw, right?

Because it's the same thing. It's a blessing and a curse, right? Like I'm really, really, really good with systems and building really cool systems in my business. The problem with that is that it also makes me a bit of a perfectionist. Cause I want my systems to be like ideal, which, you can keep me from like shipping.

I'm like, oh, I can make it a little bit better. I can tweak it a little bit more. I can make it a little bit, I can make it more efficient. I could shave another one half second off of this process if I put in another 45 hours of work. Not worth it. But it's like that, you know, that superpower just wants you to push it through to the next level.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like they say, okay, we're gonna work on this movie about this thing. And then I go ahead and create an idea for it, and then they're like, oh, nevermind. We're gonna shelve that for a while and we're gonna go to this other thing. But that's, you know, people's minds change.

Things change, situations change their musical taste. They might have thought they wanted a sound for something and they really wanted something else. And so it's really making sure that at the end that they're happy. And of course, if they're happy, I'm happy. And if I'm happy, my wife's happy.

So we're all happy.

Random curious question when you're working on something like a theme song for a Disney theme park does that get paid on a royalty basis or is it like a project one and done kind of thing?

So I can't speak specifically

I imagine you have, so you can't tell me exactly, but curious, is it more and done or is it at royalty?.

Fair.

Personally up to date for me, it was the, yeah, highest paid one project, so not like a series of things. Highest paid and then in relation to time versus fee payment it was,

Yeah. Yeah.

I put it and like I said, most of it was just a weekend.

Is it same kinda thing, like you do TV shows? Is it you get paid for the project or, cause I like, I know actors, for instance, on TV shows, they get paid every time it replays. Do the musicians get paid the same way?

So there are what we can say is there are two ways that these TV shows, movies theme parks. There are two sort of ways to get paid. What some of your audience may know. One is the buyout, which is, Hey, we'll give you X amount of dollars up front to make the music for this project.

There's different P.R.Os based on the country you're in. So the other way is every time this thing plays on TV or wherever, you'll get a royalty based on whatever the royalty rate is. And I have a lot of people who I've met actually one of the conferences that I've mentioned, NAMM, I'll be last year I went as an attendee and after that conference I reached out to them and said I would like to be up on stage as a speaker.

And they say, well, what ideas do you have? And I pitch them three or four ideas. And one of them was a panel about seek licensing. So this year, and they accepted it. So this year I'm hosting a panel on sync licensing at NAMM. And I pulled together six or seven of some of the guys who I've been learning from in the seek licensing space for this panel.

But yeah, so the two ways are you get a buyout, which is all we give you X amount of dollars. We own the music and that's that. And the other way is you still might get an upfront fee, like a sync fee or production fee, but you'll also get royalties on the backend every time this thing plays.

Like the friends theme song, they never had to work again.

Exactly. Merv Griffin the guy who did the Jeopardy theme song, that's an easy, you know, couple million a year. So it's you know, you make something that really lands on a show, gets reused and syndicated after a hundred episodes or whatever the episode count is.

And then that content lives forever. So it's like shows that existed 50 years ago, or I don't know the actual, you know, movie production history, but or TV production. But those shows are coming back around to the Netflix's and the Hulus and the Disney pluses and the Paramount pluses.

So it's once you land one and I actually pitched to a great show theme song for a show a couple weeks ago. So fingers crossed, hoping to land that.

Yeah, absolutely. That's cool.

And big property, it's basically, and then you also get to once they start seeing your name and working with you, like, Hey, we really like the sound that we're getting.

And a lot of if you look at credits of films, a lot of movie directors like Ryan Coogler, Hans Zimmer, or not Zimmer Ryan Coogler, Steven Spielberg, like a lot of these movie directors. They use the same people Tyler Perry in their projects. So, because if they work well they're using the same composers, they're using the same set designers, the same, you know, makeup artists the same, you know, camera people, and clips.

Why you see Hans Zimmer's name so often is cause he is got in good with several directors.

And it's just so you can really become at the top of your game without having any formal, you know, letters behind your name or any formal training. Nowadays, like you said, you can go to YouTube or virtual, you know, platforms and learn how to do almost anything within a couple hours.

You can't be a doctor overnight, but there's things that you can learn and pick up just from doing a search on online. So great time to be alive. But yeah, that's so cool.

I've always loved the music space and realized like music is, if I'm not mistaken, it is the largest industry in the world, potentially just second only to real estate. In terms of like revenue driven and it's just a huge world. And there's so much that happens in it, and we're mostly familiar with like, you know, the big stars and the radio stuff, but there's so much.

A lot of it is especially the sync side. Those numbers are increasing because there's more content being made. So as long as there's content being made that needs music. But like I said, there's a lot in the music space. There are people that make music just for YouTube videos.

There are people that still play. There are some great churches around the world that pay their musicians, you know six figures a year. So there's some you go to Vegas, those shows have live musicians, a lot of them. And there's a live band on their , I did cruises. Like I said, we found every Disney cruise lot of cruises have live band, their music acts that, you know, or audio if you're doing audio engineering.

And in the DC area where I'm at, it's big on live entertainment. So there's, you know, performance venues and Kennedy Center and even colleges and universities that, you know, almost every college has some type of theater that performance. So there's a lot of opportunity for musicians and audio engineers.

And my focus is on the trailer and sync space right now, so.

Right. And so every superhero has their arch nemesis, right? It's a thing that they constantly have to fight against in their world. But in the world of business, it takes on a lot of forms. But generally speaking, I like to put it in the context of your clients, right? The people that hire you, your Disney's and your National Geographics, and the people who hire you to do the trailers, right?

It's a mindset or it's a flaw that you have to sort of like fight against so that you can actually get them the result that they want, right? That they come to you for. And what do you think your common enemy is in this world of doing music as a business?

I think one big one right now is experience, because I know especially just taking one aspect that trailer music, I know that when I put in with trailer music in particular there are some companies that if they send you like, Hey, we're working on this trailer. Either you get it or you don't, like you're the person.

And a lot of these people I can go to for advice. So it's one of those where the people helping you know that at some point you could be their competition for a trailer, but there's also a million trailer, not a million, but there's a lot of trailers being made.

You know, a year and a lot of opportunities and even in a trailer space trailer music is not only used in trailers, it's also used in TV shows. It's used in a movie can have five or six different advertising spots. So it could be the theatrical trailer, which could be two or three of those.

And even some of those content pieces uses multiple pieces of music. So you know, there's been some trailers that have five or six musics spliced in and, you know, that could split up between the people that created that and landed it. But, so there's so much opportunity just in the trailer music space.

So for me being new to that space I would say a year, almost a year and a half in. But knowing that I'm learning from and going up against people who've been doing this for 20 years, 30 years, and also in the sync space. Cause I'm fairly new to the sync space, taking it seriously and at the level that I'm taking it now where there's people that have been doing that for, you know, 10, 20, 30 years.

So learning from them, but also knowing that at some point there could be competition from the people they're teaching but they also know that there's so much opportunity there. So that's a little bit of like everything but including the sort of the enemy. Sort of like your enemy is your friend for enemy type deal.

Yep. Exactly.

So the flip side of your common enemy, right? We just talked to, you know, superpower and fatal flaw. The flip side of your common enemy is you're driving force, right? So just like Spider-Man fights to save New York or Batman fights to save Gotham or Google fights index and categorize all the world's information, what is it that you're fighting for?

What's your mission, so to speak with music?

So I always want to like I said, I work at National Geographic, so I feel like at some level at my career has always been in supportive, like changing the world. So supporting the world. I work in technology, AVIT Space. Now when I started working here, it was actually we had a recording studio.

Or Paris probably would be longer than a week, maybe two weeks a month. But I can do that and still cause I can make music anywhere. you know, nowadays laptop, hard drive, keyboard I usually travel with a little portable keyboard if I need to. In some cases I don't bring a keyboard and I just, you know, use a keyboard on the tablet or the computer.

For years I was only traveling with an iPad and making music on an iPad. So we can, I mean, I've made music on the phone, you know, I've literally been on like a bus making music. So at the point, the technology we have now, we can do that anywhere. The driving force for me is, I'm always making music.

It's like impossible for me to fall asleep until I've created something or I've had that musical either output or input. Yeah.

By the way, thank you for the logic thing. I was just on a call earlier today where I was talking to someone and I was like, there's GarageBand and then there's the other one that's better and I can't remember the name. That's the one you mean.

That's the one. And GarageBand is great. I used GarageBand for years. I just started using Logic, so I'm sort of new to all these. I was using Pro Tools forever. I'm Pro Tools certified, which is the industry standard. It was more so industry standard until I'd say 5 years ago, 10 years ago.

But Logic I started using during the pandemic and because I was using GarageBand, I was using the iPad stuff on the iPad and it just was natural for me to go from GarageBand, which was great to logic.

So.

Yep, yep. And of course those for the most part, always work on Apple. So if you're using Apple products, it's like they're optimized, it's gonna work the best. There are other great platforms. I know composers even some of the courses I've taken, they're using Cubase or Pro Tools. But yeah, I sort of, I was using Pro Tools and when the time I stopped using Pro Tools, it was a little too confusing to like to buy it.

I was using it here at work in the studio. And it was just too confusing. Like you had to buy hardware and licensing and everything was a little confusing. Yeah.

This will be a new comment. Right. But I just learned recently that I could plug my computer into my keyboard. With a MIDI controller. And so, you know how the keyboard has, is the different voices. It's got like eight buttons and I can change like eight different voices and they're all right.

Right? They're just the ones that are built in the piano. And then I plugged it into the computer and I opened up GarageBand. And I know GarageBand is like a consumer level product, but there's like a hundred thousand music voices on there. And I'm like, I can play orchestral music and trumpets and like anything that I want.

They do. Yeah.

Like amazing. And like I don't even know how that works cause I'm not really a musician yet working on it, but I'm like, how do they make these sound so good? Like, I'm actually playing a trumpet and yet I'm just pushing a keyboard button on the piano, which is how you guys can compose music for everything without having full orchestra.

Right.

Yeah. And there are companies of course Apple you know, through the wealthiest company in the world if they want to hire an orchestra and sample them for their, they could. Then there are other companies that actually do that. They have, or like orchestral where it's really hard to tell if you don't have like a trained ear between what's a real orchestra and what's not.

And of course, you know, if Hans Zimmer is doing a virtual orchestra, none of us, you know, will be able to tell if it's a virtual orchestra, real orchestra. But there are some great libraries, even ones that sort of use a little bit of AI type things where you can play a chord and it like plays the orchestral thing for that chord.

So that's for good cause. And but the sounds in these libraries and the sounds that I've had to really invest in over the last year and a lot of it is just companies reaching out to companies and saying, Hey, I love your sounds. I'll do a demo for you if you can give me a copy. But I can't afford your a thousand dollars in the library.

It's like a new world. Cause if you go back many years ago, you know, early two thousands, if you wanted to have an orchestra, you hired an orchestra. But you can have an entire orchestra on your tablet.

Yeah. It's incredible. Like right now, what we can do. And I've even played my some trailer stuff for my wife and she just like, you did this, like, this sounds like a whole orchestra. It's like, yeah. And it's all like in a laptop or in some cases in the thing, the size of your hand, and you're like, it's just what you, even 10 years ago, what you needed to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on you can do for, you know, less than a couple grand.

There's like, there's AI tools that are making the human beings on our team into superhumans. Right? And cause you know, people are, they talk a lot about, you know, AI is gonna replace human beings. And I'm like, I don't see it that way and I don't see it happening anytime soon. Because really what's happening is the AI tools that you're giving is, they're, it's like giving a human being access to Mjollnir, right?

Like the super hammer, right? You have superpower tools that you didn't have access. When you're already skilled and you're a rockstar in your space, when you're given access to these tools, you can just like go next level. And yeah, I'm hearing you say sort of the same kind of thing in the music space where you're like, some of these tools are making it just so much more accessible and so much more potent than what you would've had 5, 10 years ago.

So instead of hiring them directly, I just go to their plug-ins and still get the job done. Yeah.

So that actually drives really nicely into my next question for you, which is a practical question. I call it hero's tool belt, right? Just like every superhero has awesome gad, just like batterings or web slingers or laser eyes, or, you know, the big magical hammer they can swing around and fly with.

I'm wanna talk about the top one, maybe two tools that you couldn't live without to do what you do. Could be anything from your notepad, your calendar, marketing tools, something you actually do use to make your music something you think is essential to getting your job done.

Well definitely laptop. I don't know if that's a fair answer, but like everything,

Yeah.

The trailer stuff and the orchestral stuff that takes more CPU power and she was like, what do you need? And I was, you know,

Like last year, that means you probably have a MacBook Pro with like that M1 or M1 Mac processor and they can do something like what, six year 80 music track simultaneously or something like that. It's insane.

Yeah, I'm I think my biggest session is up to a couple hundred. I've known people that have like over a thousand tracks.

It'll run them all without like hiccuping on you.

Yep. I have the 64, like maxed out 64 Ram. I don't even know if they're higher than that now, but yeah, she was just like, what do you want? I said, just top of the line.

And that should last me several years, hopefully longer until I make enough from the music to upgrade. And,

But I'm always like, I'm hoping someone, you know, makes use of that cause I don't.

Those numbers are really for people doing live recordings of like the orchestra where you might,

Oh yeah.

You know you might have like 50 strings and 30 people in the choir and like 10 percussions. So those numbers start to add up. And if you have. In some cases you have one or two mics per instrument, then you have like room mics all around the room.

So the numbers start to add up there. I haven't hit the numbers of a thousand, but I do know some people that have a thousand tracks in their template. They have all kinds of strings and layers and things. I even, I, you know, when I was making, before doing the orchestral trailer stuff, I usually kept mine to under 30 tracks for like hip hop, usually like 10, 20.

And I was done. And like with the, I started building out templates for like my orchestral stuff and it's like, yeah, I can see why the numbers start adding up now, cause you start layering and layering and before you know it, you have, you know, hundreds.

You know, it was like 2017, 2018 machines through the new 2022 machines that are using the M1 silicone or whatever. And it went from like struggling to process a single 4K video file to like the newer machines will run eight 4K video files without even like blinking, right? It doesn't even care.

Yeah. Yeah. It is the point where now we're like we're almost, we expect things like even sooner now. Like my wife had to buy our son loves video games and we have a PlayStation and we had to get another hard drive for it. You know, a couple terabytes. And she told me the price, I think it was maybe a couple hundred for like a four terabyte.

Yeah,

One to $200.

Our workflow is really simple cause most of the time our podcasts are like the the host and the guest like, what we're doing here. And they'll be like, your footage, which will be, you know, like 10, 80 or 4k depending on what your camera is over there. And then mine will be a 10, 80 or 4k, depending on which camera I'm using.

And so it's just like two video feeds. And it's like the computers we were using previously, which were not that old, they were only like, you know, four or five years old would struggle with that. And now they're like, not only can you do two video feeds, you could have four of them simultaneously running for four different episodes and run them all at the same time.

And it's like, it's insane what the where the technology is getting and how quickly it's getting there.

Yeah. Yeah. And I would say four to five is a good. Maybe even three to four upgrade period, if you can swing it. But there are some people that, you know, I know some people that they get a computer, they keep it for 10 years. It's like, it's working, it's not broke.

Yeah,

You obviously are going to run into the end.

And then like no limits. Yeah.

But I was like, I was used to hitting the limits all the time and now I don't have limits for the work that we do which is cool.

Yeah. No, same cause well, I'm always downloading, I do demos for library companies, so some of those libraries are, you know, a couple gigs. So on the last computer I had, I was getting to the point where I had to manage, you know, I would download it to use it for this demo and then I'd have to, you know, save it on external drive or delete it to save space on the computer.

So I think that's gonna be. For someone who's always downloading a lot of software, an inevitability point of you're always gonna need more space, even if you have terabytes, terabyte to space. So really I'm a fan of Samsung.

You're

creating.

I'm creating. So creating and then backing up creating, and then let's say a logic session is one gigabyte.

You mentioned one of them was like version 60 before the project was finished.

Yeah, yeah. This wasn't my project. This was in one of the trailer music groups I'm in. Someone landed a big trailer and they were like, yeah, we got over to version 60. I was like, oh man. That's insane. For me I've gotten up to like version 7, 8, maybe 10 at the most for and that was even working with artists.

But on the video stuff, I don't think I've gotten past five yet. For any like. Version updates everything. So I like that. That's, I consider that so,

Yeah, well.

So good.

It's definitely interesting. It's like, again, because you know, I don't have a lot of people we have on the show who are running the type of business you are. So generally the tools are different kind of things, but to actually have, you know, the laptop is a really important piece of equipment for the type of work that you do.

And yeah, it's definitely cool that they've gotten to the point that they are as powerful as they are cause.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember when it cost like $2-3,000 to get, like, was it a gigabyte or maybe it was a terabyte, but, it might have been a gig. But those days are,

My first computer in high school, I built myself and I paid $400 for half of a gigabyte hard drive. So it's 500 megabytes and cost $400. And I did the math on it the other day because my current computer has a terabyte or something in it, and the cost for that hard drive I think it was 8,000 times less than it was 20 years ago.

It's insane.

Crazy.

Like on a cost per megabyte basis.

I just hope that like our listeners sort of see that and it's like, cause most computer users are the kind of people that you buy a computer and you email, you browse, you use social media, your calendar, you use, it's light use, right? And light use stuff is like your computer can last 5, 10 years.

Right. And when I was doing that, my last laptop lasted 10 years. And, which is great.

Yeah.

You start getting into the power user section, you start to understand, you're like, oh, this is why they're upgrading this crap all the time.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Cause you're the limits of the capabilities of technology.

Yup, daily. Yeah.

Daily, which is really cool.

The hero show will be right back.

You felt the pain of pouring eight to 10 hours of work into just getting one hour of content published and promoted all over the place. You see the drain on your resources, but you do it anyways cause you know how powerful it is. Heck, you've probably even tried some of those automated solutions and ended up with stuff that makes your brand look cheesy and cheap.

That's not helping grow your business. Don't give up though. The struggle ends now. Introducing Push Button Podcasts, a done for you service that will help you get your show out every single week without you lifting a finger. After you've pushed that stop record button, we handle everything else.

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Again, that's PushButtonPodcast.com/hero. See you there.

And now back to the Hero show.

So I wanna shift gears and talk a little about your own personal heroes, right? So every hero has their mentors, just like Frodo had Gandalf, or Luke had Obi-Wan. Robert Kiyosaki had his rich dad, or even, you know, Spider-Man had his uncle Ben. Who were some of your heroes?

Were they real life mentors, speakers, authors, musicians, peers who refuse ahead of you, and how important have they been to what you've accomplished so far in your career?

It's interesting, I actually released a song last year, so I'm not a rapper singer by any means, but I released a song called she's a Superhero, and it was actually for my wife. So not a cop out answer, but certainly my wife who actually I we've been married, we just celebrated last week, 19 years.

And then my mom playing the gospel. And just hearing that and then also playing like that in church and trying to make my version of that. And just having that musical encouragement growing up where it wasn't like they bought me, you know, they have a piano at their house that they bought for me and they bought the keyboard that I still use.

So, parents, family. And then as far as people who I've been inspired by musically Pharrell being in Virginia, being inspired by producers specifically like hip hop, R&B space. So Pharrell, Timbaland, Missy Elliot, Teddy Riley. The Go-Go influence from DC where the percussion is [00:53:00] just you know, it's a different vibe, different feel energy upbeat and also composers.

So the Hans Zimmer, John Williams, Pinar Toprak, Ludwick Ranson is one of my favorite sort of new composers. He's actually been out for a while, but new age composers. And then certainly the African American influence from people like Michael Abels or Terence Blanchard who are composers, out there and seeing to the guys that I'm gonna be having on the panel at NAMM in a few weeks to just be able to see me, when I look at these other spaces, instead of it just being like singers and rappers and I'm looking into sync licensing and I'm seeing like African Americans in this space, or I'm looking into, you know, composers for films and I'm seeing African Americans in this space.

And you can use that. In fact, there's some rappers that I'm working with now on specifically positive hip hop, but it's for trailers. So it's basically trailer music with Fuse, with like rap music. And that's a interesting space, really used a lot in video game marketing. And it's just an interesting space because it's like positive hip hop.

So, inspired by those artists and of certainly, like I will not turn down the opportunity to work with. Get to put this on record to work with like a Beyonce or a Drake or you know, a Jay-Z. And I do have my list of artists that I can go down, SZA, Usher, Alicia Keys. The list can go on forever.

So I certainly won't turn down those opportunities. But knowing that those are in some cases once in a lifetime,

I have an artist for you that I'll introduce you to later who's looking for someone to help produce her music.

Yeah, yeah, please do.

Yeah, definitely let me know. Love to hear her music and hear her story and see what she's,

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, please do.

So I'll make that introduction later. But it's a cool world to be in and yeah, I always love hearing people's stories about who their heroes are. Cause it always reminds me that like, you know, someone is probably looking up to me as a hero and am I acting in accordance with that, right?

Am I acting, am I worthy of being someone else's hero? So I always love hearing who other people are looking up to and seeing who they are. Cause you know, in the same world, like my mom and dad are my heroes and I'm a dad to four little kids. Right? And am I acting in such a way that they're, you know, when someone asked them in 20 years who their heroes are they gonna say that I was one right.

Yeah.

And it always, it struck me cause when I was 17, a mentor of mine said, Hey, someday you're gonna have kids and those kids are gonna have heroes, and if you're not worthy, it won't be you.

I like that.

Hit hard. Right? And I didn't have kids at the time, but it hit hard because I was like, oh, that's true.

Yeah. Yeah.

And so it gives you a way to just sort of think about like, Hey, when I'm making decisions and doing things, am I showing up in the world in a way that someone if asked might say, Hey, Richard's my hero.

Yeah. Oh yeah. I like that.

Me too.

You're in podcast. Yeah.

Yeah

So I got, I got one last question for you. And it's your guiding principles. All right? One of the things that makes heroes heroic that they live by a code. For instance, Batman never kills his enemies. He only ever brings them to Arkham Asylum. So as we wrap up the interview, I wanna talk about the top one, maybe two principles that you live your life by, maybe something you wish you had known when you first started out in your musical business career.

And that project alone has led to other opportunities other than that. But never would I have expected that it would've led to that. There's you know, relationships that people know, you know, I make music. I'm in a lot of communities. I went to Full Sail University, which is a huge network on its own.

Now it's time to, you know, see if he can help me with this. You just never know where relationships will lead to as long as you don't approach those relationships with a give me, you know attitude. It's more like, what can I do for you? I'm always I guess this could be like a second principle.

One is you never know what's happening. The second would be how can you help others? I've literally had conversations with billionaires, millionaires. And I had one with, a couple years ago, I had an opportunity to talk to Daymond John incredible life changing opportunity. And just a conversation alone.

When I talked to him, he was like, you know, this is a $10,000 conversation. And I was like, I know now. I didn't know, but I appreciate the opportunity either way. And I just said towards the end of it, I said, Hey, if you're ever in the area, if we're ever in the same town I'd love to take you for a cup of coffee.

But to offer that to someone is different. To offer that to a millionaire, billionaire is really different. Like breakfast, coffee, dinner, you know I'll take you out to a, you know a fast food restaurant. You know, just have a chat conversation because you're asking for someone's time.

So here's a coffee, let's chat. Give me some advice.

There is exchange value, and that exchange. And that's cool. And I love the first one you talk about too is you never know who's watching. And it speaks really specifically to, like, one of the things that we talk about with our agency and all of our clients is that like, one of the reasons why we help our clients build podcasts is for something that we call the buyer's journey, right?

And when they get to the point where they're like, Hey, I'm actually need to make a buying decision about your area of expertise, the person that they know and they have a relationship with is you. Right. And there's, that's, I call that strategic influence, right? When you are able to build that consistency over time in front of someone that you show up and then they're like, okay, I need to do something about podcasting.

I'm gonna call Richard. I knew something about music. I'm gonna call Marcus. Right? Because they see you regularly, that consistency over time in your space. So I think it's really important for business owners and I'm glad you already have that. Cause I don't like, it's a shift in the market, right?

So when they do get to the point where they wanna make a buyer's decision, they'll choose you. And then all the competition that's around, that's only focusing on that last segment of, you know, let me just advertise that the people who are gonna wanna buy right now, they won't be able to compete with you.

Because you have the relationship, cause you have built the strategic influence.

And with social media if you post anything on a social media platform the range is so wide. Like when I say you don't know who's watching it can be anywhere from zero people see that post to hundreds of millions of people. Literally any post can, for whatever reason, whether you think it's an algorithm or someone boosts your video because they were in a good mood that day and your video came across the time.

Whatever happens, anything you post online can get hundreds of millions of views in a, you know a split second.

Whether or not you had something that could hit a hundred million views because everyone's connected so closely nowadays.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's not to some extent it's really not important to the number of views. I connected with an incredible audio engineer several years ago. His name is Ken Lewis. He has over a hundred, probably close to getting close to one 20 Golden Platinum records to his name as a mixed engineer, producer, songwriter, and connected with him because he found a video I posted on YouTube at the time that probably had like, less than 20 views.

I love that as a guiding principle. You never know who's paying attention. Show up.

Yep,

Show up. Well, that is I think, a great place to wrap on an interview, the idea that we should show up. I do finish every interview with a simple challenge I call the Heroes Challenge. I do this to help get to access the stories I might not otherwise find on my own.

So the question is really simple. Do you have someone in your life or someone in your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they first names are fine, and why do you think they should come share their story with us here on the Hero Show? First person that comes to mind for you.

Let's see. I just mentioned Ken Lewis. So Ken Lewis obviously would be one. There's a lot of people in the audio space. I would say,

So for Ken Lewis, since he was the first one that popped into your mind, why do you think he should come share his story here?

So it's like there are literally millionaires in the industry or in any industry. The world doesn't know half the billionaires that exist. Like we don't know their faces and I think that's by design, obviously. So there are people in this world who are making a decent living, but they also have an interesting short story that people should hear.

And I think Ken came to mind partly because I just mentioned his name. But just knowing, you know, what he's done in the audio industry. And also how some of the advice and things he's helped me with over the years. Even from the outside looking in Yeah. He would be great.

We'll reach out later and see if maybe we can get an introduction. Maybe he'll say yes, maybe he won't. But some of those tend to be some of our coolest interviews where the people who aren't doing the podcast scene come in and tell their stories. And just cause you're in the industry, one of my dreams for The Hero Show is I want to get Taylor Swift on at some point to tell her story.

Yeah, yeah, I don't have her number directly. But yeah just put it out there. So I don't have her number yet. I guess we'll say it that way. But yeah, that would be awesome.

Yeah, I'd love to see if we can get him to come and share his story with us. And yeah, so at this point, in the comic books, there's always the crowd of people at the end who are, you know, cheering and clapping on for the acts of heroism. So as we close, our analogous to that is where can people find you if they want your help, what can they light up the back signal and say, Hey Marcus, I need help with my music and my business, or in my for what I'm doing.

So where can people find you? And then I think more importantly is who are the right types of people to actually reach out and ask for your help? And then this is a tertiary question because I just wanna know selfishly, where can I like, subscribe to your music and listen to some of your albums?

Are you on like Apple Music?

But the website has basically everything the services yep. Services. My wife put that together earlier this year. She's like, we need to upgrade your business. Like, yes, we do.

Tried the beard so it grows really quickly. So I need to keep it at some point it'll stop growing, obviously.

But it keeps growing and. She set the site up earlier this year and literally over the weekend, yeah, Sunday. I had someone purchase, like a virtual production session and got online and just produced a song for her from the website. So people who would use those services corporations, obviously.

If you are a podcast host and you need music for that, or YouTube really anyone who needs music. Right now I'm. Sort of considering, you know, all opportunities until, you know, Hans Zimmer calls and says, Hey, I need to lock you down for, you know, three months for this movie. Then I gotta shut it down.

But until then and I laugh, but, you know, things like that happen, so you never know. And Hans Zimmer is just in general, it doesn't have to be Hans, it can be Steven Spielberg or, you know, whoever.

Whoever, whoever's up there.

Ava DuVernay just putting it out there. You know Tyler Perry but,

I can't remember his name, he did Star Wars and,

John williams is a composer. Yep.

Is he still around?

He just celebrated his 90th birthday. And for his birthday he conducted an orchestra at, was it at the Hollywood Bowl sub orchestra to, I think it was to one of his films or several of his films doing it. Matt Lee. So he's still doing the music.

Yeah. Well, that I think is a great place to end our interview. So thank you so much for coming on, Marcus, and sharing your story. It's been fascinating to just get to peek behind the curtain in the music industry a little bit. So I guess before I hit the stop record button, do you have any final words of wisdom for my audience before I killed the recording.

Just thank you for the opportunity. Look forward to everyone who come does visit the site to DAFINGAZ.com and looking forward to making some great music with you all. And thank you for Richard and The Hero Podcast for this opportunity. So appreciate it.

Yeah. Thank you for coming today.

Thank you.

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