Embedded - 230: What the Hell Is Wrong with Unicorns? (Repeat)

Episode Date: September 9, 2021

Sunshine Jones spoke with us about synthesizers, electronics, and philosophy. Find him on twitter @Sunshine_Jones and instagram at sunshine_jones_ Sunshine’s music is most easily found at TheUrgencyOfChange.com. His writing is at Sunshine-Jones.com. We talked about Sunshine’s User’s Guide to the Roland SE-02. That includes Ahmed, a track produced using only the SE-02. Sunshine also wrote about building a polysynth. The intro music is an excerpt from LELEK, released on Air Texture Vol. V. The exit music is Fall In Love Not In Line, released this year on vinyl only, TUOC01. See TheUrgencyOfChange.com for more. Sunshine was the host of SundaySoul.com, a live podcast about music and life.

Hello, you are listening to Embedded. Our intro this week was written and recorded by our guest, Sunshine Jones. I am Elysia White alongside Christopher White, and we've been talking about someone's synth addiction on this show. And I hope you like that, because this week we are going to go into more detail about creating electronic music. Hi, Sunshine. I'm excited to talk to you today. Hi there. Could you tell us just a little about yourself? I can.

My name is Sunshine Jones. I'm an electronic musician. I'm a native San Franciscan, a native Californian. And I grew up in the world of Love Boat and Captain and Tennille. And I was so bored. I really liked jumping up and down on the bed, singing into my mom's hairbrush. And then one day, a friend of mine passed me a cream magazine, and it had the damned at the back covered in pie or whipped cream or whatever that was. And I'd never even heard punk rock, but I thought, that's me. That is how I want to live my life. And so I cut my long, beautiful John Travolta feathered back hair with the pinking shears. And I dyed my favorite pants bright yellow with some Rit dye. And I wrote with a stencil for boys only down the side. And I was punk rock. very quickly realized that that was not necessarily the best set of choices to make. And that almost redoubled my resolve because I found something in punk rock that felt like it was mine. And my favorite band was a band called The Screamers. And The Screamers weren't a traditional band. They didn't have guitar-based drums.

They had mostly a keyboard in it. And somebody said, if you like that, you'll really like this. And they turned me on to Kraftwerk. And I listened to Kraftwerk. And then I found all sorts of music, like Manuel Gottsching, Klaus Schultz, even some of David Bowie and Brianne, you know, stuff. And it became what was private, secret music for me. I didn't admit that I liked it,

but it really had a way of sort of seeping into the floorboards of who I really was. And after punk rock sort of became an athletic enterprise from the suburbs in the early 80s, I just didn't know who I was anymore. And so I jumped headfirst into electronic music and jazz. And I started bands. I had bands. And I thought, oh, boy, I'm in a band. And it was never any fun. And the best I could do is to assemble like 12 people to do whatever I said.

And you're rehearsing all the time, and you never play any shows, and nobody comes when you do. And I just got so discouraged that I gave up completely and thought music is maybe just how I feel. Maybe it isn't something I'm supposed to do. And I went to Europe to sort of get my head together because I'd finished art school and I'd done an internship at an ad agency in San Francisco. And I thought, ew, I don't want to work in advertising. So who am I and what do I want to do? And so I went to Europe and spent the summer on Ibiza. It was 1989. And for the first time in my life, I saw people drumming to sort of what sounded like club records slowed down and singing. And there were all sorts of people, like people in their 70s, young kids, weird British and German teenagers, like all kinds of people just together. And it wasn't fancy and it wasn't expensive and it wasn't pretty and the music wasn't anything I'd ever heard before. What it was was this collaboration.

And this interesting collaboration of hand drums and dancing and singing and just being together, it was beautiful. I'd never seen anything like that before. You've heard about the summer of love growing up in San Francisco, but you have this cynical attitude about it and you don't want to talk about it. I'd been at early days punk rock shows that felt very real and very mine, but I'd never been in a situation where it felt positive, where it felt loving, where it felt like this euphoric feeling is durable and it's something that's not based on drugs or something from far away.

It's like happening right now and it's real. And I carried that feeling with me for the rest of the summer and all through my second degree. And I made a decision when I finished college the second time that I wanted that feeling all the time. I wanted that to be the world that I lived in. And so I put together a little group. I wrote a three-hour set of music, and I said, we're going to do this. And no one believed in me. We were terrible.

But I literally quit my job and drove across the country and played for anyone that would let me do it. And I started to make records. And lo and behold, I found that all over the world, there are people that are looking to connect. They're fascinated by synthesizers and drum machines. And they want to sing and they want to dance and they want to be together. And that changed me fundamentally as a person, as a thinker. It changed the books I read. It changed my approach to everything. It stopped being, when I get this big keyboard, then I'll be able to make the sounds I love.

It stopped being, when I get a record contract, well, then I'll be a real musician. And it started being, let's just do it right now. The best synthesizer in the world became the one that was in front of me instead of the one that I could never afford. And I devoted the last 25 years to doing nothing but that. So I realize that's a lot big answer. sorry, but that's ultimately who I am. No apology needed, not at all. But I do want to ask you, what was your second degree in? Literature with a minor in psychology.

I'm only kind of making the point that we're going to talk about some technical stuff, and you don't necessarily have a technical background. This is what you've learned through years of study, but not through formal study. It's true. I did not study music formally. In fact, I came to music from the 45 record into, I got a guitar, I took three lessons and then I started a band. Wasn't the music part. Oh.

It was the technical part. You're talking about technical stuff and engineering and computers and synthesizers and circuitry, right? Weirdly, that's what this show is about. That's all self-taught, too. All right. I wanted to ask more questions about this, but I should also announce that the lightning round, I don't know if you listeners have heard about the flu that's going around, but the lightning round called in sick this week. So we're not going to do it.

We're going to skip straight to the Roland SEO2. Really? Okay. Hey, I just learned that this was a thing. I mean, I knew that we had such things in the house, but I didn't. Could someone explain for the non-musicians what the Roland SE-02 is? I'll let our guest do it. Roland SEO2 is a boutique format synthesizer, and it's a collaboration between Roland, who are a premier musical instrument manufacturer. They together start with electronic music, organs and synthesizers, but now they make everything. And Studio Electronics, which are a pair of fellas who used to be San Franciscans that now live in Southern California.

And they began making music. And then they started to modify MIDI retrofitting mini Moogs so that this vintage Moog synthesizer could be controlled in a modern way. And then they went on to sort of duplicate that circuitry and expand on it. And so the SEO2 is a really interesting synthesizer because it has the basic architecture of the SEO1, which is kind of the culmination of the engineering that went into all of Studio Electronics' work. And it's in a boutique format, it's very small and it's very small it's but it's affordable and so what's really really thrilling is that it's actually analog and it is democratic in the sense that it is within reach of people relatively speaking i mean a mini moog is a as a nine to nine thousand dollar synthesizer and so the idea that some kid just getting into electronic music um they're not going to throw down 10 grand

for their first synthesizer and we're in a situation now where four or five hundred bucks and you can have something that's pretty world-class and absolutely adept and capable and that's amazing yeah okay so did i even really answer your question do you know what an seo2 is now well i i know it's a synthesizer and i've seen it so i know there's a keyboard part of it and i've seen it plugged into other things so i know that it deals with midi uh and then i read i read you know i i read the w the Wikipedia page about it. But one of the things that it is sort of known for or the way that I heard about it was when Chris

brought in this picture of a manual. It wasn't a manual, it was a poster. Yeah, the manual's a poster. The manual looked useless. Not entirely useless, but you better know what you're doing before you read it. It looks like you already had to speak the language. It was one of those manuals where you already had to understand it before you could understand the manual, which is just backwards and annoying to me. Right. It's a leaflet.

I like to think of it as a leaflet. Yeah. And so you looked at this and said, you know what, this thing needs a manual. I mean, you wrote tens, is it 60, 75 pages? Okay, I admit, I only read about the first half. But you wrote a manual for this. 37 pages. This synthesizer. And it's like a normal manual. It goes through and it explains things.

Well, I tried to. And I did this because the leaflet is insufficient. Yes. I have to say that, criticism aside, I think that I understand where Roland and the Boutique line are coming from. Because the best way to get to know a synthesizer is to touch it. Sure. Turn it on, plug it in, put in some headphones, whatever, and start making sound. And then you wonder, how did I do that? How do I do that again? What was that thing I was doing?

And so the leaflet becomes sort of a reference point. And to Roland's credit, they are beginning to improve. But really, it's true. I mean, a manual should welcome you to the device, congratulate you on your purchase, and then give you a quick start guide. How do you get going to make sounds right away? For those of us that aren't ever going to read the manual, then there should be a reference

document, a textbook, some way to know what does VCO even mean? And why would there be three of them? And what can I do with that? And what is this thing in front of me? And I think that that information is important, not just for beginners. I think it's, I'm going to go into my own water here and say that for years I did things without really knowing what it was I was doing. I grabbed knobs and really loved those knobs, but I didn't really understand what a voltage

control filter was or what a VCA did or how it connected or how it worked. And, you know, you don't necessarily need to know because if it sounds good, then you're on to something and go with it. But I think that that information is something that is empowering and it removes limitations, artistic limitations because if you i mean in our society you buy something and it does something and then you think oh i want to do this other thing and immediately the next thought is i need to get something else that's a real shame because it it what it does is it it stops us it limits us from exploring what the device in front of us is actually capable of. I mean, consumerism, capitalism, success, it's all good, I suppose. But really, something like the SCO2 has three oscillators that can create a chord and three oscillators that can operate in unison.

Two oscillators in unison with a third one that can pulse with modulate. There's so many things that are happening in the synthesizer that you could spend a year just exploring the relationships of tones and electricity, frequency, voltage, and have so much fun and make such beautiful sounds. And it's worth it because like a cello, you know, that's like grabbing a cello and running the bow across it. You've never played a cello before. You go, well, that sounds terrible. That sounds like a dead cat. And like without understanding technique, without understanding how to hold the bow, how to hold the neck, how to finger the strings, and then all the different techniques and different possibilities and scales, you have no idea what a cello is.

And so I think that it's worth challenging people to at least consider, look at this more closely, look at this a little deeper, get with this and understand it and like, love it, enjoy it. And you're never going to do that with this terrible leaflet. Never. I'm laughing a bit because several times I've come down to my office and said, okay, I'm going to work on music. I'm going to spend a couple hours. I got some phrase running around my head. I'm going to put that down and get a little song done. I sit down with the damn synth and two hours have passed and all I've done is turned one or two knobs and just sat there making noise and go, wow, that sounds so cool. And then realize, well, I've actually done no music. I've bonded with the synth a little bit more and made

some cool noises, but it just draws you in because it's a real physical thing you're interacting with. It's not a screen with a drop-down menu of presets. And, you know, it's got some knobs, they've got labels that don't even tell you what they really mean, and you turn them. And sometimes they do different things on different times of the day, just because you don't notice that a different knob is... It's just, it's very, I don't know, very analog. It's engaging. I said, well, digital synthesizers work in the same way. The interface is different.

And working with pages and menus and dropdowns and computers, I think emotionally it's something really different than actually turning a knob. And I think that the thing that I've recently come to profoundly is that music that happens off the screen has a different resonance. Something else is happening when the visual element of music is missing. And I have come to see that element as priceless. I don't think, I mean, my records recently have all claimed proudly at the bottom that this recording was produced, no computer was harmed during the production of this record. And I'm actually trying very, very hard not to use a computer at all under any circumstances for anything. That gets tricky these days. It does. Computers are great tape decks and um

that's a great use for a computer i i wouldn't balk at that okay that kind of eliminates my questions next that were about how the synths are fundamentally different from computers i think you guys have convinced me that you're now we should talk about that i mean it's worth talking about because i think that the computers are terrific tools And I think I've met people. Like, in 2016, I did a tour. It was supposed to last three months. It lasted 17 months. Oh, my God. And I went- Did you get lost? I just continued to add places to go and people to see and things to do. And it was just fantastic. But one of the things I did on the tour was I stopped in every town that would have me and went to the local pawn shop or record store or music store.

And I set up my equipment and I gave what I call a play live seminar. And I set up everything so that people could walk around it and be near it and look at it. And we talked about making music without a computer, playing live improvisational electronic music. And then I demonstrated that that didn't have to be some sort of brainiac drone music. It could actually be music that made you dance, music that sounded like music you really liked. Because that's what I do some of the time. And people were just blown away. But the coolest thing was people were really hostile. Like kids that only have an iPad were really mad that I had all this stuff. And

they only have an iPad. And so I think a sort of a sophomoric response to that would be, you know, look at you, big stupid. You think you're so smart with all your stuff. I can do all that with my iPad. And my answer is yes, do it with your iPad. Just do it. Like the best synthesizer in front of you is the one that's in front of you. It's not the thing you're going to buy that's going to make you somebody else or something else. It's the thing in your hands. And so if what's in your hands is your phone, make music with your phone. I don't think that choosing your instrument is always the first thing that we do. I think very often it's circumstantial or it's accidental. A friend brings over a keyboard

for some sort of an award ceremony and then they leave it there. And then you think, I wonder what that does. And they're not there. Nobody's there. You turn on, you make some sound and you're like, wow, this is really cool. And that was your introduction. That was your choice. You didn't go to the store and learn everything first. You just grabbed something and you made some sound and that's beautiful. And so these days that's going to happen on your iPad, but it's going to happen on your computer. And there's nothing wrong with that. And I think that this idea that, I mean, there's so much negativity and there's so much elitism in electronic music, and I don't really understand why. Like, I think that somebody saying the SEO2 sucks and the mini Moog is the truth.

I can really appreciate somebody feeling that way. I can really understand why devotion to a beautiful instrument like the Minimoog might become feral and rabid and defensive because it really is a really lovely, amazing instrument. It really is. And so to love the SEO too, if you're thinking that way, I think it takes something away from the value of your beautiful, expensive, vintage, amazing piece of equipment. And again, I think that's somewhat immature. I think that, in truth, both instruments are instruments, and both tools are valid in their own right. And if you strip away the price tag and you strip away the history and just listen, there's not a whole lot of difference. And so I think that, I mean, there is a difference, but there's not a whole lot of difference. I think what's important

is to embrace what you have. And then when you grow, when you deepen, when you broaden, let that be informed by what you're trying to accomplish musically. I don't think the novelty of having all vintage equipment is really interestingically. I don't think the novelty of having all vintage equipment is really interesting. And I don't think the novelty of having done everything on your iPad is interesting. That's just kind of marketing. What's really important is what has it sound. And how do you feel when you're performing? That's what matters.

And can people hear you? Do they understand you? So you might be the best writer in the world, but if people get a headache, you know, two paragraphs into it, you should stop writing, you know, or go back to school or something. You know what I mean? It's like, this is a dialogue. It's about relationships. And that doesn't just stop with, you know, me and my drum machine. It continues to the people that are around me and the people that are around

them. I'm sitting here thinking, well, maybe I should cancel my SparkFun order because I just ordered a bunch of gear and I don't necessarily need it. It's not at all musically related, but truthfully, I have a lot of gear in the garage. I could just use it. I could build what I wanted. Your words are resonating even in different fields. No, it's a trap that everybody gets into because partially there's always new stuff happening and coming out. And they become very good at saying, oh, well, this new stuff is better for this reason or it does this and the old stuff doesn't do that.

And, oh, it's complementary to your old stuff. So if you have both of them, then, well, it's much, much better to have both. And you're right. People don't, we don't engage with things at a depth anymore because we don't have time, especially, you know, in our field too with, you know, developing electronics. I don't think there's been, it isn't like the 80s where there was one processor for six years or 10 years and everybody wrenched out everything it could do uh and figured it out now it's oh there's a new one every six months and by the time you figured one you know one out at a very shallow level you've tossed it and moved on to the next one so i love that message consider this is that is that all the the growth and exponential expansion that's happening now, these are very exciting times for electronics.

But this kind of blossoming isn't going to continue. No bubble or period of abundance lasts for long in the historic sense of things. And so consider how we will have extrapolated the processes we're talking about now in 30 years. Imagine squeezing every last little tidbit that you can get out of the most advanced sort of processor we have now. So maybe those deeper relationships are yet to come. Or our robot overlords will be bored of us by then. I hope our robot overlords like music. Yes, Yes. Okay. Let's get back to this,

this role and, and, and your manual. So you mentioned that there's, there's a place for a getting started guide and a reference manual, and then that, uh, quick guide that you look on. And so the leaflet they gave, they gave was the quick guide for the expert. Is yours more of a getting started or is it more of a reference manual? I tried very hard to do both. I wrote, I tried to write to SMART without coming off as being an expert. And what I wanted to do was humanize the experience. So rather than that just being a list or a table of reference, I wanted to include education. So this is what the section is and what's for.

Let's look at it. Here's the challenge. Do this and listen to it. See how it feels. I just tried to do it with love. Okay, I'm going to read part of the manual here, and then we're going to define some of these words. Okay.

The SCO2's monophonic synthesizer engine features three voltage-controlled oscillators, a voltage-controlled 24-decibel low-pass filter, and a dual-gain stage amplifier. The oscillators have six different kinds of waveforms with the warmth and complex character associated with true analog VCOs. What's more, these VCOs are temperature stabilized with automatic tuning, so you get all of the benefits and none of the downsides. Yeah, okay, so monophonic? Let's start with like the third word and go on from there. Well, so a monophonic synthesizer makes one sound at a time. If you sit down at a piano and you put your fingers down, you make a chord. I mean, even if you just slap your hand on the keys, you're making a dissonant chord.

It's playing more than one string at once. A monophonic synthesizer is only capable of making one. And so if you slapped your hand down, it would choose one of those keys that you hit, and it would make that sound. Sometimes if you did it sort of just aggressively enough, it might jump between a few sounds, but at any given time, it's only making one. Okay. So it's not the opposite of stereo. It's the fact that it's only playing one key at a time. Pressing multiple keys doesn't get you multiple sounds like a piano does. That's excellent. So the opposite of monophonic is polyphonic, which means it makes many.

Cool. And it's not stereo. Stereo is different. Different, yes. Okay, oscillators. I know what an oscillator is. I use them to make chips go. An oscillator counts up gigahertz, megahertz, all of those things. It doesn't count up. It goes back and forth like a sine wave or like a square wave. It could go up and down like a triangle. Indeed. So that's the different waveforms. But what do you mean by voltage-controlled oscillator? Well, there are many different types of oscillators.

And in an analog oscillator that's truly analog, it's not digitally controlled, you have a voltage that's set, and it's just droning along. And you can control the pitch, which is the rate at which it oscillates, externally via voltage. And across a keyboard, we've decided that one volt per octave is the standard, and the voltage that you assign to the oscillator at any given key stage becomes a division of the keys, which predicts the tuning. So you are controlling the tuning of the oscillator by the voltage of the key depressed. It doesn't necessarily have to be keys. It could be an

attenuator. It could be an envelope. It could be all sorts of things, but just in a basic rudimentary way, voltage-controlled oscillators means that the voltage you put into it controls the tuning and the rate at which it comes out. Okay. So voltage controls frequency. Yeah. Okay. And no, that's cool. And then there are three of them. There are three of them. Okay, so I understand frequency modulation, where you have a pure tone, a sine wave, and then you have another tone, you multiply them so that you end up with something that sounds more like a

ringing is why do you need three well actually having a three oscillator analog mono synth is interesting for reasons and not just frequency modulation i think that what I'm saying about the oscillators are that with one oscillator, you can get a waveform and a tone, and you can frequency modulate that waveform and get ringing and create bell sounds and interesting sort of attacks on the bass. And frequency modulation is wonderful. But add a second oscillator,

and you can produce unison. So two things tuned to the same pitch at the same frequency, slightly, just ever so slightly detune the second one. Out of phase? Change the phase? Not really phase. Change the frequency? Yeah. And observe that even on a um on an oscilloscope and you'll

see that when you take two waveforms and put them together you can do a couple of things you can double the size or you can cancel them out and changing the frequency starts to change what you hear and what's actually happening in the waveform and it's very powerful. Further, take that waveform and instead of having it tuned the same, tune it up to a perfect fifth, which you can do in the SEO2. Now you have a major power chord and that is a beautiful sound. Furthermore, take the third one and go up a seventh or go down a third. And suddenly you have this lush, beautiful wave of sound coming from just pressing one finger on one key. And it opens up an entire world of music just by playing with tuning.

Yeah, and that's just the start. You could do all sorts of other things too. That's just rudimentary, the beginning of that idea, but it's just a fantastic place to begin. I mean, when I perform, I don't use any presets. I don't save anything. I just show up with the SEO2 and a couple of other synthesizers and I program the patches in front of you. And that becomes a part of the performance. And it's really beautiful. I started doing this because I had a problem with an analog synthesizer in a show and I was like, oh, what am I going to do? I can't

mute it and put the headphones on and fix it. So I just kind of bit the bullet and I broke the song down to a kick drum and I started to fix it. And people were dancing. They started to cheer. Like every sort of mistake I made, every mark i overshot to try to get back to where i wanted to be people went bananas just bananas and i was like this sounds terrible they were going bananas because i had included them in the process i'd shown my i'd shown my humanity i'd shown imperfection i'd shown that there's a human being here actually doing this instead of replaying something. This isn't canned. This is now.

And it blew people away. And the wave of that exuberance and enthusiasm was contagious and infectious. And I was tempted, of course, to make mistakes on purpose. But I didn't do that. I mean, if I make a mistake, it's real. And it's happening now. And so people feel my terror and my panic. And then they're like, do it. Come on. Yeah. You know, and they're rooting for me. It's like, have you ever been into a sort of a DJ situation? And one of the

opening DJs isn't quite as good as they'd like to be. And they're kind of starting to screw up. Like people turn to the DJ and they go come on like they really believe that get that record in the mix now maybe this is a vinyl thing not a digital DJ thing I don't know but I love that sort of I'm rooting for you like pull it in like get it together it's great sometimes the crowd wants you to succeed and that that is a fantastic feeling a A really, really nice feeling. Okay, so we have three oscillators, and we have a voltage-controlled low-pass filter. Does that mean the voltage controls the cutoff frequency of the low-pass filter? A voltage-controlled filter is actually a filter based on the voltage it's receiving.

So as you turn the knob, the frequency knob, the sound is changed. So it is actually voltage that is controlling the frequency. Okay. So if I have a ringing sound and I add a low-pass filter, how does that change it or suggest a different sound? I don't know if that's a good one. Well, you have a nice ringing bell sound. And you're saying middle C, so it's not a very high sound. It's not a very low sound. If you take the 24 dB low-pass filter and reduce the frequency, just knock yourself out and take it all the way down to where you can't hear it anymore

now slowly start to bring it up until you can just hear the sort of boom boom of your bell now connect an envelope to that so that the envelope is affecting the voltage of filter now the shape of the envelope indicates what else will happen to the filter. You can get some of the most complex metallic percussion sounds, some of the most dulcet, beautiful resonant ringing chime and gong sounds. So rather than just listening to some sort of shrill kind of meh, you can really get something glorious and otherworldly coming out of it by using a voltage control filter. That sounds really neat.

This whole show would have been better if we'd had one of you playing the whole time. Well, I don't know if it's valid, but if you go to my site where I've released this manual that we're talking about, I put a song up there that's actually composed and recorded using nothing but the SEO2. So I made the drums, I made the pad, I made the melody, I made it all. Every single sound that you hear comes from the SEO2. And so you can get a real sense of the complexity and the breadth of what's capable. And also, I gave away a set of the sounds. So all the sounds that you hear me playing in the song,

you can actually download and put in your synthesizer. What is the name of the song? Pause while Google. I really do have to go look. Isn't that sad? No. If you ask me who was on episode number 22, I have no idea. Who was on episode number 22? He said Stalling for a time.

No, it's because I changed the name. I named the song after someone. It's called Ahmed. Oh, okay. And what I did was I named it after Leroy Bland. And you can read all about why I named it that and what I was thinking about on the page. Cool. There will be a link in the show notes to a lot of this stuff, but that too. Okay, so we have

low-pass filter, a dual gain stage amplifier. I know what a guitar amplifier is and I know what an op amp is. Yeah. I'm lost on the dual gain stage amplifier. Well, you're pretty, you're pretty close to home there. The idea is that once you've produced a sound, you need to amplify it. And so having an amplifier is very important. And an analog amplifier has a little forgiveness and a little generosity that a digital one doesn't have. And so there you go. But the second stage actually allows for all sorts of fun. You can feed back into the first stage, so you can get a really big, beautiful sound. And you could also overdrive it to get a little distortion. And there's a lot of fun to be had when you're using analog amplifiers. But an op-amp and an

amplifier are basically the same idea. It's just how you've connected them together. Okay, good. That makes me confident. Probably not correctly, but good. Well, if you send something into an op-amp, right, in theory what you're doing is you're amplifying it. So you're taking a little tiny signal and you're making it bigger so that you can see it or bigger so that you can hear it or bigger so that other components can receive it.

But if you have a dual stage, you can actually turn the second stage down and the first stage up and really distort it like crazy. Yeah. And you might not want that in one circumstance, but in another that might be just exactly right. Okay, so different waveforms. Six different waveforms with the warmth and complex caricature associated with true analog VCOs. So is that like square waves and triangle waves and signs and sawtooths? Yes.

Oh, good. I know what those do with electronics and on my oscilloscope, but what do those do with music? Well, on a synthesizer, you'll find that your oscillator is going to be triangle core, it's going to be saw core. And that is the basic fundamental extrapolation of the sine wave that the oscillator makes. And so to add different voltages or other waveforms to it will change the shape of it. It's really fun to do on an oscilloscope is to combine waves together and look at the product, but they sound like something. When they're very, very slow, they are what I would call voltage control modulation, an LFO, a low frequency oscillator. These things have a voltage that's moving in a predictable pattern and you can affect other things with it. But when you speed it up to what

we call audio rate, what happens is it has a sound. So if you take a saw wave or a ramp wave or a skewed triangle wave, if you will, And you speed it up until it starts to become sort of mid-pitched. And then apply this voltage, one volt per octave theory to it. You could actually play it like a piano. So any sort of noise that you make can become a musical reference point. If you tune it to a correct tuning so like you if zero volts is actually c then you can actually spread it out correctly over a keyboard and play it and that's just radically wild i mean because we all know that even something that's ungrounded makes a wonderful

growl like you screw up some electronics and you plug it in and it goes like if you put a filter on that and an adsSR envelope on that, maybe even a little bit of reverb, you might have a kind of a life-changing sound that's really desirable that you might really want to keep and be able to do again. And so being able to influence the core of an oscillator with other sort of influences can create different textures and different shapes and different sounds because like let's face it like a bass sound you know sounds very different say than that waxy sort of sort of taut sort of sound of a cello string right and so if you want if you want to create a pad and you're making it with a bass sound it's not ever going to get a whole lot more

than sort of under the covers or with a pillow on it. And if you take your oscillator and influence it with another wave shape, get it sounding a little more aggressive, and then filter it back, you can very easily get that kind of lovely throaty feeling. Or as you said, with frequency modulation, you can get a bell, a more metallic sound.

Lots of cool things can start to happen once you start to interrelate the wave shapes. How did you learn about these electronics? Well, first it was, I want to make that sound. It was like I saw Depeche Mode's first performance ever in America. They played in San Francisco at the Kabuki Theater. And I didn't understand what was happening. I loved it. It made me really, really sad and really, really excited all at the same time. And to a little runaway punk rock kid, that was kind of life-changing. And it looked like they were dumb young people, and I could do that too, and I wanted to.

So I got a hold of a keyboard, and the keyboard I got a hold of sucked. It was just terrible. It went, you know, dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun. It was like something, I don't know, like the family would gather around and sing with. It was just not at all like the sounds that these people were making. And so how did they make those sounds? And what's funny about that is we go to someone and say, I saw this band, and they made these sounds.

And I have this, and it makes these sounds. How can I make this make those sounds? People don't tell you the answer. They want to tell you how much they think the band that you were really impressed with sucks. Yeah. And they want to tell you how much that this keyboard that you have is terrible and you should never have touched it or looked at it or ever even mentioned it. And then they want to tell you about their band.

It's very familiar, yes. So it becomes really, really hard to learn anything. And so I feel like it's interesting because there's like two kinds of people, right? There's people that complain. They whine. You know, everything's too expensive. You guys are terrible. You guys suck.

And then there's people that just do stuff. And so usually the people that do stuff aren't spending much of their time complaining because they're very busy. They've got a bunch of PCBs on their desk and they need to build them. And people that whine and complain don't get much done because they're very busy monitoring all the comments they're getting on Facebook. And so I feel like you just have to decide at a certain point which one of those people are you and embrace it. If you're a whiner, that doesn't make you like a shabby idiot person. What it does is it means you should be writing a blog. You should be criticizing.

You should be getting into provoking your community with your opinions. Then get strong because you're going to get backlash. Go for it. Then if you're a doer, do it. Do it and tell everybody all about what you're doing and just do it.

These things meet in the living rooms and the basements and garages of people that want to do that too. That they're not there yet and they need to get there. And so the idea is that I was there and I didn't get any help. People that knew the answer wouldn't tell me because they were afraid. If they tell me that it's a mini Korg, I'll get a mini Korg. And then somehow we're back to the guy with the mini Moog that thinks the SEO2 is stupid because somehow it threatens the validity of what he has. It's very primal, very tribal. And so the whole idea is I just went to junk stores and pawn shops and music stores and I talked to every tedious idiot. I talked to every overly helpful guy that was trying to tell me something that I never was

going to want. And I just learned and I found people. There was a man named Eric Sakaguchi that worked at Guitar Center in San Francisco who was, I don't know what was wrong with him. He's funny, smart, gifted, talented, wonderful, and cynical and sarcastic and perpetually on a cigarette break. But that guy was just like, oh, you want to see? And then he would break this thing out and show it to me and teach me about it. I learned about how to program a drum machine. I learned about what a filter was. We had a stack of TB-303s, and he was throwing them against the wall and smashing them. They were giving them away with purchase because nobody wanted them. I thought that guy was just the coolest guy. He was like a mentor to me.

He just did it through cynicism and rejection because I really wanted to learn. Finally, I got a hold of something, and I started to make music with it, and then I had a whole bunch of other questions. And so it's really back to this idea that you could appoint yourself with a basement full of every Eurorack module made, and that doesn't guarantee that you'll ever make any music. I mean, it's about what is inside of you and what's in the way. How can you best express it? If you need to speak Swahili in order to say what it is that's

really in your heart, get a book and start learning. Do it instead of sitting around mad at people that speak other languages because somehow it seems easier for them. I think that it's growing up. It's maturing through this idea that compare and contrast is only so interesting. At a certain point, you've got to really do it. You've got to make mistakes and screw it up and then learn. So now you have a soldering iron and you have an oscilloscope and you know how to use these tools. How did you get from, I don't know what's inside this box? How do you get the skills?

Well, it begins with desperation. It begins with this wonderful thing that doesn't work, and it would be so cool if it worked. And so I opened them up and looked at what was inside, and I broke them and made them worse. And then after doing that a few times and feeling like I was really stupid, I started to consult repair people. So I would go to like somebody that said they could fix my 909 and that guy was like, oh yeah, it's totally, it's got to be one of these, it's going to be this, and I didn't know what he was talking about. So I just said, how much is it going to cost? And he was like, well, you know, he couldn't give me a straight answer about anything.

So I left it with him in his shop. And a year later, you know, after calling him like once a week for a year, I went back and was like, is it fixed? I'm here. And it was exactly on the floor where he put it a year ago. And I was just like, I'm just going to take this home. And he's like, okay, cool. And so I opened it up and I broke the side panels, taking it apart. And then I looked, I called Roland and said,

I broke the side panels of my drum machine. Do you still have those parts? And they said, let me check. You have a part number? I'm like, no. And so they looked and the guy found the side panels and he sent them to me. So this is stupid, but I just re-snapped on the side panels of my drum machine. And what that did for me was it gave me this sense of like, I fixed it.

Look at that. I did it. And it looked great. It still didn't work, but it looked great. And in truth, when I took them off again to actually try to repair it, I broke one of the side panels again. And then learned that buying something, like going to a store and getting a synthesizer, is really different than learning to actually build something. Because soldering is an art. It takes time. You have to learn. So when people say, don't start building with this, get this piece of, you know, fiber board and just solder onto it a lot and practice and like learn

what you're doing so that you can get some sort of control over what you're doing. I didn't listen to that. I'm like, oh, you know what you're talking about? Like, I'm just going to stick the hot soldering iron right into the, you know, burn it up. I needed to screw up so that I figured out that much of what was being said to me as a cautionary tale was very wise. And so it became a choice. Like, do I want to keep burning my fingers and ruining everything I try to make? Or do I want to actually fix things? And over time, not giving up, just continuing to try, I managed to build things that actually worked.

And nobody was more surprised than I was that the thing I was trying to build actually worked when I finished. And then actual people, like I built a Raging Bull filter, which is a clone of a Moog Taurus, and it didn't quite work. And so I took it to my sort of mentor, if you will, a San Francisco synthesizer repair guy that I really like. And I said, you know, I built this like three times and I've refloated and I've cooked it and I've replaced all the stuff. I got a second circuit board and I built it again. It still doesn't work. And I don't understand what I'm doing wrong. Because as you can see, the virtue, the real learning of this process is not in,

can I find out where to put the resistor? Do I know how to put solder on a leg and then trim off the leg? The real virtue is in, once you've built it and it doesn't work where did you screw up right and where did you screw up tracing your steps and finding your errors and common errors you know is amazing and so you know that's the key ultimately to getting robust durable things that you want to build yourself and i think that i took it it to Kevin and he looked at it and we went over it piece by piece and he couldn't figure out any reason in the world why it didn't work. And he said something to me, he said, you did this? And I said, yeah, like four times. And he

said, this is really beautiful work. I'm really surprised your work is really good. And I grew like three feet in that conversation and my confidence level just went through the roof. And I felt like, oh my God, this guy who I've watched take apart even-tied harmonizers and put them back together has just told me that my work looks really good. And I needed that. No one had ever said anything like that to me about my soldering before. I was a source of shame. I felt like I was just the worst.

And this guy really liked my work. And he didn't stop there. He went on to tell me, you've got a really light touch. I really like I was just the worst. And this guy really liked my work. And he didn't stop there. He went on to tell me, you've got a really light touch. I really like the way you work. I love the way you trimmed these things. And you could do this a little better. You could do that a little better. And suddenly, I'm in. And you know what it turned out to be, this filter that I built four times? The socket that I bought to put the IC chip into was defective. It didn't have anything to do with me. I just bought a cheap part and it got cheap results.

And he said, don't ever buy those again. Buy these. And he showed me these really, really pretty sockets. And I was like, aren't those expensive? And then he looked at me and was like, are know, are you, are you really angry about the difference between 17 cents and 22 cents? And I was just like, no, no, I'm not, you know? So I only buy those sockets now and I've never had that problem again. You have, okay. You've been telling us about this Roland synthesizer, but you've mentioned you have others, and now we're talking about building your own.

I mean, the way the Roland, it sounded like you could get anything, if you were willing to spend the time, you could get any sound you wanted. Oh, yeah. Why do you have so many? Why are you building them? What are you still searching for? Well, as I said, it's all about relationships. And there is a school of thought that says if you get an Oberheim synthesizer and sit down at it cello, solo saxophone, they're all wonderful. But really what makes music magic are the relationships. And so the way violin and cello work together, the way each drum and a drum set works together, is what creates something way bigger than any one of those pieces. And as an electronic musician, I get completely lost in oscillators and filters, and I love each one of my synthesizers, but I also really, really, really love

and am devoted to the relationship between them. So in a performance, for me, everything that can be sequenced is sequenced. I've decentralized my process as completely as possible. And I find such inspiration in the sort of living and breathing synchronization of those devices. slightly move it out of phase with another one and you have a whole different sound and that's also true between synthesizers and it's also true between modules in a in a euro rack or a modular synthesizer and it's about um building for me i'm building i call it a spaceship i build a spaceship every time i perform and i curate the elements of that spaceship and I try things, I experiment, I wonder how well, you know, this synthesizer and that synthesizer will get along. And I explore that relationship in a performance and it becomes very meaningful and very poetic to me.

And I think it's kind of what I'm doing here. And so having one is a great place to begin and can be a fully engaging world but um forging and developing relationships between them can be even more fulfilling speaking of fulfilling sort of more like making enough money to eat. What? You make your living as a musician. Is that right? I do. Okay, so I'm an engineer. I'm a day worker. What is it like as a musician?

Well, I think that at the sort of base level, the difference is that you get to phone it in. You can feel a little blue or be vexed with your partner and show up at work and just kind of stare at the wall and hang around the water cooler. And at the end of the week, you still get your paycheck. If you do that a lot, you're out of a job. The idea is that you're afforded a sort of amount of leniency, a little slack, if you will. Anyone that works for themselves knows that unless you're selling very popular widgets, you can't phone it in because if I don't do anything for a month, I don't make any money and then I can't pay my rent. And so that means that instead of being a day worker, I'm a day and night worker. And lucky for me, I'm passionate about what I do. I love what I do. And there's so many things that I want to do and so many things that have captivated my attention and my interest and

my imagination that I'm not sure if I'm going to get out of here getting it all done. I have so much I want to say and so much I want to do and so many places I want to go and so many things I want to build and try and learn and explore that it becomes a process by which I have to curate and make decisions about what it is I'm going to do. Now, I've only made any money in my life when I make music. When I don't make music, I don't make any money. I mean, I've given up music and said, I'll fuck this. I'm going to – sorry, you're going to bleep that.

But I've given up music and said, I'm going to go back to school or I'm going to do this or I'm going to do that. And I've literally tried to thrive in a more sort of traditional way. I just failed. And I never made, I went and painted houses and did construction with a really dear friend of mine who was also a sort of a dispirited DJ at the end of the nineties. And we went and we painted and we built and we cut wood and we hammered. And now we work like dogs and you get up at the crack of dawn and you go and

you just work, work, work. It's hard, serious, serious real respectable work and at the end of two weeks i got my paycheck it was like 340 dollars and i was just like i thought it was a joke like i was i was like is this literally is it like something taken out of this like is there gonna be another check later like and they're just looking at me like what and i thought i'm never doing this again like like if i'm gonna build something it's gonna be built out of love. It's going to be built out of need. It's going to be built for you. I'll do it as a favor. I'd much rather do this for free than like try to live this way because it's too hard. I can't do this. And so my hat is like all the way off and in my hands to people that are able to be of service, that are able to construct and to build and to work.

I mean, I think we need to pay garbage men way more than we pay bankers, because people that get up and actually put their back into what they do are not being remunerated for what they do. And I'm not willing to do that. I would rather starve. And so I have. I have starved. I mean, the whole idea is that I don't think this is what I was designed to do. And it's the only thing I've ever been good at. And I've tried to do so many things. And so I'm just devoted to what I do. And so when I make music, I go and perform. I'm grateful for my fee.

I'm grateful that I get paid. I'm grateful for the relationships that I forge. I'm grateful for those moments because when they're good, they're better than anything. And when they're anything less than good, I'm so mercilessly hard on myself that what I'm trying to do is actually build a middle ground. And part of that has been to become more transparent and to share the information and share the inspiration and share the exploration with people freely. My new endeavor, I'm trying to actually live in the real world. And so I'm making records, vinyl records. I'm making CDs. I made an ambient CD. And I thought, I bet there's one person on earth that wants to buy an audio CD. And I sold them all in like two days.

All of them. They're gone. It's sold out. It was an experiment that sold out. I can't believe it. And so, like, this is what I'm doing. The next thing I did, I made a film. I made a documentary film of my 2016 live ground tour, which was done on such a spit and a handshake and a bunch of

praying. And that was the tour that was supposed to last three months, but ended up lasting 17. Like, it's just incredible. The response that people have been having to this idea of like actually being present in the real world, touching synthesizers, connecting cables, playing. Here's a record. Like, I'm here. It's me. Hug me. What is your question? And answer the question. This whole idea of authentic, actual experience, rather than staring at a phone, staring at Google, I'm done. That's just so almost depression making. I'm not interested. Everywhere I go me embarrassed to be a San Franciscan. It makes me embarrassed to be,

this isn't the vision of the future we were thinking of. Like, let's get together, man. Take like, kick out, kick your shoes off and let's go nuts. Like,

I don't want to live in a lonely, isolated world of staring down. And I don't think Google Glass is in any way a compromise. I mean, And I don't think Google Glass is in any way a compromise. I mean, I really feel like the only... Luckily, that's already failed. Like, electronics are beautiful. I mean, software is amazing. This is great.

But it's hijacked and commandeered everything that's good about the world. And so I'm finished. Like, throw yourself on away. I don't care. And that's ironic, right? Because here we are on the good side of this, where a podcast is being distributed through iTunes and people that are interested in this get to listen to it on probably their iPhone or their iPad or their laptop. And so the way I see it is not, these are bad things. The way I see it is not these are bad things.

The way I see it is these are early days that we're green and we're mannerless and we haven't yet learned boundaries. We're like four-year-olds that need to be told no. And so this is to be expected in anything that's as riveting and exciting and compulsive and addictive as a phone, which is funny when you say it that way. I think that really your laptop has replaced your television, that much of what we're doing digitally these days has replaced infrastructure that used to take miles and miles and miles of cable and useless repair people that never showed up. So we really are improving infrastructure in a lot of awesome, inspiring ways.

But as a tool for art, as a tool for connecting people, I think that we've come as far as we're going to go. I don't think that paying for a service to virtually attend a performance by a band you like is going to do anything but make more people that stay home. And I don't want people to stay home anymore. I think we've absorbed about all we can and it's time to speak up and get up and go out and start living, being proud of who we are and grateful to be together. Let me ask you a very open question that I like to ask other musicians I meet just to inspire myself and

find out how people approach things. What is your approach to songwriting? Because you kind of have a non-traditional musical educational background where you just fell into it and explored these different things. And I'm curious how that affects how you sit down to write a song. Or is it, I guess you do a lot of performances too. So how much is improvisational and how much is, you know, kind of methodically planned out? I think that that's a great question. It's funny, like anybody would apologize for that question because like, you know, what's your approach to songwriting? But I mean, there's so many answers to that question. I mean, it's different.

I mean, sometimes I wake up, you know, at six o'clock in the morning and I can hear a symphony. And I spend the next six months trying to live up to that sort of hallucination and trying to find effective ways to chart it and write it down so that I can hold it and perform it and other people can play it. And sometimes it's just an accident. I mean, like I wrote a song called Love Song for My Angry Son, and it was a complete accident. There's this simple chord progression I'd been playing with, and I was learning about detuning oscillators to create a chord. And I detuned it into the initial chord of the progression

and then I thought, well, what would happen if I sequentially changed the frequency? Could we actually play this phrase? And I actually successfully played the phrase, but then the phrase began to degrade. And so the whole thing just died in front of me and I recorded it. And so this song is a degrading voltage that doesn't ever repeat as plodding and repetitive as it sounds, but it never happens twice. And it's beautiful. And so then the question is how the hell do you chart that?

So that like a sort of, when cello could play it, but because the notes are degrading and changing, it can be charted it's just tedious and took a month but so that was like sort of accident followed by how do i account for this and uh i think everything in between i mean it's just i think that you know there's nothing quite like having sort of rational ideas about what it is I would trying to do that the result then becomes something that I can look at as something in and of itself.

And the fire or the impetus, the inspiration lives on. And so I've made whole albums with a single idea that I failed at capturing. And so the record then is a document of all my failure. And people are like, oh, I love that record. And you're like, oh, God. But the point is that it's just theory and practice, right? And so what we take out into the world then has a relationship. And so improvisation is performance to me. Yeah. And so there are moments in any recording or any composition

where I just leave room. Like, in this area, I'm going to improvise. But what I love about performance is the entire thing is an improvisation. I've seen very capable musicians show up with a laptop or some sort of a sequencer and press play. And their whole show comes out. Jeez. And, you know, sometimes they play an instrument sort of along with that, and sometimes they don't. And I just look at that and just think, if that were me,

I would be so humiliated, just standing there while my music plays without me. I have a hard time being in the same room when somebody puts on one of my records like i get so i don't know um self-deprecating i split i don't that makes me really uncomfortable nobody ever means it as an insult but i always feel like oh my god i gotta go like i just don't want to be there while they're playing my record you know like there's something i want you to play my record i really really do just without me yeah yeah no no i made the record so that you could play it when i wasn't around you know like i don't know there's something there's something just kind of embarrassing about it even at a record release party like the the a and r guy is always like let's play the record and you're just like no let's not play the record but he he always he always gets his way and they play your

record and you're just standing there like a doofus while they're playing your record and everyone's like i really like your record and you're just like oh my god i hate it but that's just because this i don't know what that is i i didn't get into music to get attention i got into music because i don't really have another choice it's it's what i am all right i have one more question before we wrap up. And this one's sort of weird. Maybe it's six questions. We'll see. But we talked about the Roland SEO2 manual and some of the things you wrote in it. And I completely left out the questions about the Commodore VIC-20, which is sort of sad, but that just encourages people to go look at it. But it's not the only manual on your blog. Is it really a blog or is it a website? I mean, I clicked on all the buttons. I'd like to think of it as a website.

Okay, on your website. You have reviews of different synthesizers. You have some posts about building synthesizers. You have examples. This is not, but you don't have ads. No. So you're just giving all this away? Yes.

Why? Because I love it. And I really feel that attraction is much more powerful than any kind of marketing or promotion. And what the return from that is, is camaraderie and friendship and truth. And those things last and they stay, they're durable. They're the most important thing in the world. I mean, if I came to your town and I played a badass show for 1,500 people in that town, it'd be a nice memory for people. I don't know how that translates or if it's even valuable that that might translate

into sales of some kind. But what's really important to me are the people that I got to meet, the people that I got to help and answer their questions or that answered questions for me. Because those become durable, portable, expandable, really limitless relationships. And that's important. You know, people on their dying bed never say, I should have advertised more. You know? Sorry. They say things like, I should have told Richard that I was in love with him.

They say things like, you know, I never thanked those wonderful people that really helped me. And like, I mean, we are what we do. That's really all we are. And so if you just sit still and stare at a screen all day, that's what you are. And that's not a judgment. I think it's a fact. And so for me, I believe that we're are wonderful, good, loving, beautiful, amazing animals. And we're capable of so much more. And I don't think I'm a person to prescribe what more that is. And I don't think I'm a person that is even in a position to judge anyone making an effort. But I'd like to see us make an effort. And that means we're going to have to fail.

That means we're going to have to say, I mean, look, in your industry, it's built on heroic failure, just mountains and mountains and mountains of failure. And then somebody told you, I call that debugging. Yeah. And so we're going to have to be stronger. We're going to have to be braver. And we're going to have to have a lot more love than we've been exhibiting recently. And so I want to do that rather than shame people into doing that or tell people that somebody else ought to do that. I'm going to do that. I'm doing that.

That's what I'm doing. And that's the only thing that matters to me in the whole world. Because I think it's the only thing real. Like everything else is just a hallucination. You walk in a room and you're scared because you're going to make a presentation. What are you really scared of? You know, do you think that what you have to say is invalid or stupid? Are you really just a hustler trying to get some money?

Like what's the truth? You take refuge in the truth and bring love to that truth, and it's on. I know that sounds like hippie crap, and I'm sorry. I'm a San Franciscan, and so I can't really help it, but it's not hippie crap. Hippies aren't what you think they are. Hippies are scary people who live in the hills, you know? And they like music that we don't like.

And so it's not what you think. It's not the hearts and flowers, unique snowflake unicorns thing that gets a bad name. What the hell is wrong with unicorns? They're magical, rare, fantastic, singular things that inspire children. There's nothing wrong with unicorns. So like put a little love in your step and in the next thing that you do and see if it pays off. See what happens. I mean, don't take my word for it.

What do I know? Try it. I think this next question may be entirely redundant. Sunshine, do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? Well, you know, honestly, I feel like I've said quite enough, and I haven't actually allowed you guys to say enough. I really like your show, and I really like listening to you guys talk. Oh, thank you.

We appreciate it very much. And we really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today. Yeah, this has been inspiring. I'm going to go mess with oscillators. Yeah, and don't be hard on yourself when you sit down in front of your synth and start learning and playing and experimenting. And the next thing you know, the sun is coming up. Everybody's mad at you. Don't be hard on yourself. That means that you teleported to the moment.

That's not a waste of time. That's actually the best possible use of time, is to be in it. I don't know, Christopher. You can come down and work on the synth, and I'll just hook up the oscilloscope and play with it. We'll visualize it. It'll be cool. Okay. I love it. That's great. Our guest has been Sunshine Jones, electronic musician. You can find his latest music on the urgency of change.com. That's the urgency of change.com with no spaces at all. And you can find his technical writing and other music writing on

sunshine-jones.com. I want to say thank you to Christopher for producing producing and co-hosting thank you very much to our patreon supporters for making it easy for me to send mics and to dentaku web for asking us to start talking about the tech of sense instead of just having me tease christopher about his sense i don't have a quote to leave you with this week. Well, I have lots of quotes and they're amazing. But the thing I want you to listen to is a song recorded and produced by and composed all of it. All the stuff. All the stuffs by Sunshine.

It's called Fall in Love, Not in Line. Fall in Love, Not in Line. Thank you. Fall in love, fall in love Fall in love, fall in love Fall in love, fall in love Fall in love, fall in love Bye. Fall in love, fall in love, fall in love, fall in love. Fall in love, fall in love, fall in love, fall in love. Fall in love, fall in love, fall in love, fall in love. Fall in love, fall in love, fall in love, fall in love. Bye. Fall in love, fall in love, fall in love Falling in line means cutting your hair after all these years

falling in line means giving up on your dreams cause it's time to face reality Falling in line Means hiding but you're surely all the way down inside Putting something else forward for the benefit of people you don't know People you never know Falling in line benefit people you don't know, people you never know.

Falling in line means changing the direction of your life to satisfy the fear and anxiety of others. Falling in line means betraying your dream, abandoning who you really are. Thank you. Never fall in line Don't never fall in line Fall in love. All in love. Open up Open up Thank you. Thank you. Open world. Fall in love, fall in love. Fall in love, fall in love. Open world. Thank you.