The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 181 Sam Reti: The Future of Music Education

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

In this episode, I have a fascinating conversation with Sam Reti, founder CEO of Muzie, a platform that's transforming music education. We explore the development of Muzie and its innovative features designed to support both music teachers and students, sharing insights on music education technology, practice tips, the impact of AI on music education and creativity, and the number one quality that helped Sam create a career he loves.  Book your free consultation with Renée HERE Download the summary and transcript from this episode HERE   MORE ABOUT SAM AND MUZIE Website:  https://www.muzie.live/ YouTube channel:  https://www.youtube.com/@muzielive Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/muzie.live LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samreti/ Blog: https://www.muzie.live/blog   Muzie Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/160125006017857   Mind Over Finger Click www.mindoverfinger.com/coaching to book your free consultation with me. Visit MindOverFinger.com for my online courses as well as free resources on peak performance. Connect: https://www.youtube.com/@MindOverFinger https://www.facebook.com/mindoverfinger/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/mindoverfinger https://www.instagram.com/mindoverfinger/     THANK YOU: Most sincere thank you to composer Jim Stephenson who graciously provided the show's musical theme:  Concerto #1 for Trumpet and Chamber Orchestra – Movement 2: Allegro con Brio, performed by Jeffrey Work, trumpet, and the Lake Forest Symphony, conducted by Jim Stephenson.

You're listening to The Mind Over Finger Podcast, episode number 181. Welcome to The Mind Over Finger Podcast, where we dive into the world of mindful music making, peak performance, and crafting a purpose-driven life and career. I'm your host, violinist, certified performance and life coach for musicians, and your guide unlocking your full potential, Dr. René-Paul Gaultier. Hi everyone, I hope you're feeling fantastic. I have an episode that will spark a lot of ideas for you today. I speak with Sam Reddy, professional guitarist and the founder and CEO of Musi.live, a platform developed specifically for online, in-person, and hybrid music lessons. Sam is a guitar instructor with over 15 years of

experience in music performance. And with Musi, he has personally worked with over 1,500 music studios and teachers to help improve their teaching methods and workflows by utilizing technology. And this has ultimately led these studios to increase their retention and student engagement. As you're going to see, Sam is amazing. He's extremely creative, dynamic, and very innovative. He thinks outside the box, for sure. We covered a lot of topics during our conversation, including the ways Musi is transforming music education by supporting both the teachers and the students. We shared insights on music education, on technology. We shared some practice tips. And we talked about the impact of AI on music education and creativity. And one of my

favorite things about this conversation was hearing Sam's story and seeing how his insatiable curiosity and enthusiasm for learning have allowed him to be so creative and innovative. And as a result, he not only created a career he loves, but also a tool that helps thousands experience success in their career and musical endeavors. This is a super inspiring conversation and I know you're going to walk away filled with new ideas. And no need to take notes, click the link in the show notes to grab the summary and transcript of this episode. All right, let's go to the show. Sam Reddy, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Sam, I'm really excited to speak with you because you have a very unique journey, both as a musician and an entrepreneur. So I would love for the listeners to hear more about this in your own words. So please share with us everything about Slam Ready. Yeah, absolutely. So I guess really it starts back when I was a little kid. My dad was a professional drummer way back in the 80s. So music was around the house. There was a drum set in the bass with my whole life um and when I was probably about 13 I got my first guitar and from that day forward it was pretty much written in stone it was every day I would come home pick up the guitar

my dad played drums so we would just jam together and so and he worked from home so every day after school for an hour or two would just band practice basically um and then I would go on to practice for a couple more hours myself. And so I was that kid that I was five, six hours a day. I was the kid that brought my guitar to school. So I would take my guitar to school every single day, had it around my neck, walking through the hallways. I'd be practicing in between classes. I'd be practicing at lunch. I'd be playing. Um, I was really funny once I actually was walking down the hall and I was between classes. So nobody else was like in the, in the hallways. And, um, I was playing my guitar and I was walking like a piece of paper from one class to another for a

teacher. And I was just strumming, walking down the hall and the principal rounded the corner. And I was like, Oh crap. And she walked up to me and she goes, um, she's like, I don't know if you know this, but she's like, we're actually really proud of this. And I was like, proud of what? And she's like, she's like, you probably don't understand, but like this, you doing you and just not really caring you know and just taking your guitar and playing and practicing if you haven't noticed other kids are doing this now and that we really don't mind like we're okay with that and by the end and to be fair wasn't me who started it there was a kid at two years older than me who was kind of obsessed too and he used to sit in the hall too and play his guitar so

our school was very open to that kind of stuff so through high school i recorded a bunch of bands i played in a bunch of bands. Um, you know, I really got into the music thing and I figured I was just going to go to Berkeley and be in a band and, or be a record producer or something. Um, and so I went off to Berkeley after high school. Um, and for the first two years I did join a band, you know, I started my own band and we started playing shows and touring and things were going really well. But that fell apart really quickly as most bands do. And I needed to pivot and really come up with something. And so for the last two, two and a half years of college, I was working on this idea for a practice app for college students. And it was a complete shift away from all the

producing. I switched majors. So I stopped doing the production and I stopped doing all the guitar playing. And I basically put the instrument down for a little bit and started working on this app that would help people practice. And so kind of ironic that I stopped practicing is pretty much as I started building the app. But once we built that out, it was my senior project to college and Berkeley was actually the first sort of customer

to take it on. So the Berkeley-based department were the first users of the software. So they really gave it the trial run and sort of helped us flesh out all the ideas and everything like that. And then that just kind of kept rolling. And for probably two or three years, we just ran that business. It was just my dad and I at the time. So we had been playing music together. He had been doing software after being a drummer. So when I came up with this idea, it just sort of felt natural.

So I suggested the idea of building this little app, and he sort of whipped up a prototype. And then when Berkeley took it on, I think that's when we both sort of realized that there was actually something there. So the two of us have been running this now since 2014, 2015. So it's eight, nine years. Yeah, and we still are both in charge. So I still run the company with my dad, which is pretty cool. But with Musi, basically what happened is we've been building software, building products

over the years, and none of them really stuck quite the way we wanted to. Really, the first products we built sort of became too much of everything and didn't really have a solid direction. And then our next app was really just too complicated. we were trying to build basically a essentially an ai that would listen to you play and then it would give you feedback in real time about how you were playing um the technology was not there for that in 2016 2017 um so lo and behold right i know just waited a few years we would have been fine but um and then in 2019 we started building music and it was actually intended to be a

marketplace. The idea was actually for college students to be able to get tutoring help or any student really, but we had been sort of focusing in that college area still. And so the idea was that if you needed help on your proficiencies or a test or homework or something that you just really weren't grasping or just a little bit of extra help on anything, you could basically phone a tutor and the music teachers were online in real time. So we had hundreds of teachers on the platform and then students would phone in and they'd get paired with a live teacher. So it's kind of like a marketplace, but it was instant. So there was no waiting around and booking a lesson and then having it three days later. It was, I want a lesson right now, log in, join, and then

you would have been connected to a teacher. Amazing thing. It was, it was paid by the minute. So students have full control. So they would pay like 75 cents a minute for the lessons. teachers would get most of that cut and then the idea was teachers could use this as like a filling in gaps in your schedule or whenever you had like a student just no show you could hop online and maybe fill that half an hour or 20 minutes or something um yeah so it's a pretty cool idea we launched it january 10th 2020 wow yeah so it lasted all of about a week um it was pretty cool we did actually have people on there. Like there were a couple of hundred teachers and there were students coming through. And the concept did work. It was pretty neat, but almost overnight,

it was every teacher on the platform came to us and was like, hey, this is cool, but it looks like we're going to have to be doing online lessons for the foreseeable future. Can we bring our own students here instead of just meeting up with these random tutoring students? And so that was a pretty quick conversation. It was really one afternoon. We just sat down and we're like, it was kind of funny because as a business, I had just spent basically a year convincing everybody that this tutoring thing was a brilliant idea and that we should invest all our resources into building this and going for it. And then literally the week after it launched, I had to sit down and basically tell everyone that the idea we had just spent a year working on was cool, but we were going to go in a different direction. And fortunately, it wasn't too big of a change that we still got to keep basically the core

fundamentals of what we were doing. And then that was the pandemic just sort of took it from there. And, you know, unfortunately, we benefited from the pandemic, I guess, but it was, you know, a necessary thing to have. So we really ended up just being in the right place at the right time. Yeah. And you had the support that people needed when they did. I love so many things about this story. I love how this passion was a family thing, both the passion for music and that now Musi is a family business. I love this endorsement from your principal as well. And it really shows how when we are ourselves and we allow ourselves to be ourselves, we can really

impact the community around us in a significant way. I think that's fabulous. And it sounds to me like you are such an amazing idea guy. And I love how you're sharing with us that it wasn't just this one idea and it was instant success where you just tried things and built different concepts and transform them and adapted to the needs. So that shows such versatility and a lot of adaptability. Tell us a little bit more about Musi because you call this the future of music education. And to me, it looks like the future is upon us right now. And I feel that it's so wonderful, the features that you're using. I'm going to invite all of the listeners to go. There's a lot of studio teachers here, but also probably a lot of people that might be looking for

teachers and the support that the platform offers to all of these teachers that at time might feel like they are isolated in their own little island without any community and any help is so, so incredible. So tell us a little bit more about those features on the platform. Yeah, absolutely. And really, for me, I think what really kind of pulled this all together was as the pandemic took off and as everyone was sort of scrambling to figure out what to do, we sort of had the benefit of we had already built all the audio technology. We already built the streaming. So, you know, basically really high fidelity Zoom essentially was what we had.

And then over the year, basically, of the pandemic sort of first year, all the teachers flooding in were like, okay, we need this, we need this, we need this. And that's really what got us sort of in the right space. Because like I said, at the time, my head was in this sort of tutoring world where we're building like, and the cool thing is a lot of these tools are useful in both. but the teachers were fundamental in making sure that we were actually providing tools that weren't just bloatware and that's a big risk you run with these kinds of things and that's basically what happened to our first product was it just became too many things and even i was like i don't even know how to use this thing anymore and so you know and so when you get there it's like how could you even sell it. So with Musi, we focused on two things and we stick to those two things very,

very strictly. They are helping a teacher teach and they are helping a student learn. If those two things, because to me, those are really just two sides of the same coin. I feel that a lot of things will focus on only one of those things. And I actually think that's the misstep that most products are making and that it's not combining both sides of the education spectrum. It is providing that resource center, not only with tools, but with literal resources for teachers and connecting with other teachers and connecting with our team and things like that. So in Musi as a teacher, I mean, you have a lot of tools. That's the one thing that I don't think we can be sort of called out on not having enough. But you have your high fidelity audio and video.

you've got your whiteboard so you can write and annotate you have a thing called clips which basically allows you to do either recording the lesson as you want or doing simulated duets which basically means you can record your performance and then it will immediately transfer that recording to the other person they can then hit record and play along with what you've just done and then you can just sit there and listen to them and then that will actually save the recording and merge them together. So you have a final like track that you can listen back to, which is both parts. So we have a lot of tools. We have MIDI instruments. You can play, you know, like a piano on screen. It will light up. All the notes will highlight. It can even transcribe what you're

playing. So you can have like sheet music being written up while you play. There's some simple scheduling tools. There's a huge assignment tool. And this is really where it bridges the gap between teachers and students. With the assignment feature, basically what we've done is created a platform so teachers can upload all the content, all the resources, lesson materials, video, songs, anything that you use to teach, organize it into assignments, and then share those assignments to the students. So if your students are in-person, online, hybrid, doesn't matter, they can get access to these assignments, log into their account, and then we have tons of practice tracking. So you'll see things like their practice streak, you know, how many days in a row,

which days of the week you're practicing. There's tons of graphs and visualizations for that sort of stuff. With the assignments, you can get awards for completing your assignments. There's a leaderboard. So the more you practice, you go on the leaderboard and you can compete against other students in the studio. So it's got a little bit of gamification. You can have sort of stickers and awards and badges. So we've really tried to encompass, like I said, both sides of the educational spectrum. For Musi, if it helps you teach or it helps you learn, then that's something we're interested in. And then we, of course, have our whole suite of AI tools now as well, which is a whole nother bag of worms, but it's pretty cool too. Yeah. I want to come back

to the AI in a minute because I feel like this can be a tremendous tool for all of the musicians. All of these features are so great. I love what you said about listening to the feedback from the teachers. And this way you ensure that the platform is really offering what they need. And I love that it supports also the in-person students in this hybrid format as well, as you mentioned. This is fantastic. Yeah, absolutely. I think in about 2021, about halfway through the year, we started realizing that online was here to stay. That was not going to go away. But there was a very strong pull to get back in person and get kind of back to the normal, so to speak. And as we've all seen, we have this new normal, which fortunately, I think we predicted correctly in early 2021, which would be basically everybody doing hybrid, which I think was a pretty clear indication. But with Muzy, we just decided that the product needed to fit that mold. Otherwise, we would end up like others in the market that just stuck too much to one

thing, and then you sort of fall to the wayside. And that's what I was saying about having both sides of the spectrum, because with music, if you teach music lessons, it doesn't matter if you're in person, online, if you're doing everything hybrid, your students have access to the same quality of resources. And so that sort of, you know, ubiquitizer, I don't know, decentralizes the information. So everything is just unified. So everything is equal. And the student learning process isn't impacted by being online or isn't impacted by not being able to get to your lesson or something. Where with Musi, if you can't make your lesson, the teacher can just hop online, record something for you, send your assignment over with the recording and all the instructions, and you can just grab it in your free time. So, you know, those kinds of things not only streamline the process as a teacher, so you're not doing makeup lessons and things like that. But as a student, it keeps the flow going and you're not having those two-week breaks, three-week breaks that sort of completely mess up the normal flow of your lessons. Right.

Yeah, that's all from the teachers. They just tell us what we need and we build it. And it's so important, especially now I feel with the disappearance of music education in the schools. I think it's a crisis mode right now. So any way that we can make music education more easily accessible to anyone, whether it's in person, hybrid format, or completely online, I think it's necessary. Completely agree. I mean, and that's a big part of the mission with Musi is we're in, I don't know, 100 countries or something. And to me, the coolest thing is seeing Musi used in countries that do need to take online.

like where online lessons isn't a choice it's the only choice is like that is what you get and if you don't have a high quality system to conduct that then you just get the quality of whatever platform or thing you're using right so our mission is that the technology should never get in the way it should be the thing that pushes you up and and helps so you know seeing music used and utilized by students and teachers all over the world i mean that to me is sort of the like we've already made it in that sense which is pretty cool um but yeah i mean there's still a lot to do but also in that conversation that you and i were having outside of this interview it appears like that the community is so active and dynamic and you were talking about some games that you were

exchanging with students. You just talked about how your first project was a practicing app. I'd love to hear from you. What are some of either your favorite practice tips or some of the practice tips you see really as being popular in the music community with the teachers and students? Yeah, I think the big thing is consistency. And obviously, you know, this is sort of an obvious thing, but I think it's, it's not obvious to new students. And it's one of those things I think we're all guilty of is like, I take piano lessons. And so I'm guilty of 10 minutes before the lesson trying to cram a week's worth of stuff. Like I absolutely do that still. But I also at the same time, try to utilize music and things like this so that I can break my practice into 15 minutes a

day. And that I have, you know, the ability to sort of keep track of what's going on. And, you know, I think really, that is the truth of it is if I can get my student to practice 10 minutes a day, that's the win. If I can, if they're practicing an hour on Saturday, that's fine. But 10 minutes a day is really what I'm trying to shoot for with everyone. And so, you know, with the software, we try to build tools that sort of enhance that and sort of encourage it. But at the end of the day, you just got to come in, sit down and open your stuff and get to work. Um, but I do think that, you know, that consistency is really the thing that I think is changes, whether or not you're going to actually continuously stick with it. And even if it's not every day, if it's three

days a week with our very first product, I want to practice that was literally the name of it. Um, so, um, right. So right on the nose, the way that worked, um, was actually really cool. What you would do is you would, you would self-assess categories. So you'd say, okay, I want to do site reading. I want to do some composition and you could get as detailed as you want and maybe be like, I need to learn the a flat major scale, or you might be vague and be like, I just need to learn major scales. And so up to you, you know, you write it out basically a list and you'd rate how well you understood each of those categories. And then the software would build a practice routine

around that. But basically what the algorithm was doing was saying, simply, if you're good at something, we're not gonna give you that as much. If you're not as good at something, we're gonna give you that more often. So it created this really cool routine where basically you would say,

I'm good at scales, but I'm bad at arpeggios. And so in your practice routine, you might have scales for five minutes, but arpeggios for 15 minutes. And then the next day it would shuffle it a little bit. So it wasn't identical every day. You might have seven minutes of scales and 12 minutes of arpeggios, something like that. And so that kind of practicing, I still sort of do myself anyway of take sort of self-assess and say, where do I feel that I'm at? And I actually just wrote this blog about smart goals,

which is basically the same idea where you you're saying to yourself, okay, this is the thing I want to do. So I want to play this song. I want to set a reasonable expectation for when I should be able to do this. So it's not going to be tomorrow. It's going to be three months from now. I'm going to dedicate 15 minutes a day. So that's sort of my commitment to the thing. And the reason I'm doing the thing is because I want to learn this song because I love the song or I need to learn it for a gig or, you know, I'm learning it for a student, for a lesson, whatever it is. And when you write out your goals like that, then you don't just have a, I want to learn a song. You have the sort of the action steps and the reasons why that goal

is something you actually want to move forward with. So that sort of self-assessment on your goals, I think is really crucial. So for me, that sort of self-assessment and then consistency, If you can merge those two things, then I mean, you're pretty golden. I love that too. It's such a great level of awareness and mindfulness in the approach. Yeah, it's hard. I'm only really getting better. You get better at it as you go.

It's not something that on day one, you're going to jump in, you're going to write these killer goals and you're going to immediately practice 20 minutes every single day. There's going to be days and weeks where you flounder and you mess up. but it's that get back to it and keep self-assessing, keep looking, keep reviewing your goals, keep making sure the things you're working on are actually the thing you want to work on. I think it's okay to abandon goals. I think people sort of misunderstand. Like if you set a goal for yourself, you don't have to achieve that goal. As long as when you make the pivot, you're pivoting to another goal that is going to continue to push you forward. So if you're, if you're not doing the

thing just because you're lazy and you don't do it then that's one thing but if you're not doing it because you're say your goal was to learn this song you're now two months in and you kind of hate the song and you're maybe don't have that gig anymore or something it's okay to abandon that project and move on to something else that fulfills that need because if you don't have the sort of desire and passion to continue working on the thing then it's like why are you dragging yourself through the mud. It doesn't make any sense to me. Yeah. Got to have that sense of purpose and engagement. And that's what I love about what you're sharing is that it is such a great way to stay engaged and interested in what we're doing. I was just started reading a book where

they were talking about how curiosity is actually one of the best emotion we can have because it really pushes us forward. And, um, I would agree that, you know, curiosity has been the spark for so many wonderful things that exist. I love that. That, that to me, I think as a kid, I was always the kid with the million questions. You know, I was, I was always that kid that didn't shut up and just wanted to know how every single thing worked. And I, I feel like I've carried that into my whole life. It just, I'm always interested in how something works. Like as soon as the AI stuff bubbled up, I was digging into it immediately to be like, okay, well, how could this be utilized for education? Is this something that can be beneficial or is this just fluff? It's like

crypto and NFT, same thing. I'll dig into all of it and go, is this something that can be utilized in a way that is going to be beneficial? Sometimes the answer is no. With crypto, no, I don't think so. I don't think there's a valid use of crypto in the education space. I just think it's too much complications for the time. Even NFTs, I think, a bit much, too complicated give it five years give it 10 years maybe but not yet ai on the other hand was the one that popped up or even vr when vr popped on the scene i was doing vr music lessons with my students three or four of them have those oculus headsets so we get into a room together we have a whiteboard we could draw on we were doing music theory classes wow basically then it was

actually kind of cool we do them in the music office so there's like we have this virtual office for a while where, so it's kind of a sidetrack, but it, for a little bit, everyone at Musi in the company had a VR headset because we don't work together. We're all remote. So we built an office in VR and everyone would meet up in this skyscraper on the beach. And so we would be like, and we had this like scenery around and decorations and like our logo was like on the wall and everything. And we'd sit around the table and we could talk to each other and like write notes and things and it was pretty pretty immersive and students same thing i had students that were doing that we're doing theory lessons and so for me i'm happy to take a shot at anything that might

help out that's if it doesn't i'm learning quicker and quicker to abandon and just be like okay like the vr is a good one worked really well for a couple months but the commitment that you need to make to actually make it work is too large right now and most people don't want to make it and it's so therefore it's just not ubiquitous technology so therefore it's not really practical so you know sometimes it doesn't work but for me i just am happy to look at anything at least once yeah i i was i wrote this down take a shot at anything and and i kind of want to invite the listeners to pull out a post-it note write that down take a shot at anything and put this somewhere where you can see it let's talk about ai for a minute because i know that you are very well

versed on the topic and that question like how can we utilize this is such a great one and i think a lot of people are afraid of it uh some uh some people are afraid that it's maybe a little bit complicated and some people are afraid of the ramifications in the end of what that could mean But the thing is, I'm sure people had similar reservations with cars and telephone and, you know, computers and Internet. Exactly. And those are technologies that are here to stay. So then, yes, how can we utilize them? And I know you have so many great ideas about this. Let's hear about it a little bit.

Yeah. AI is the thing of the year, you know, and it will be the thing of the century. You know, it'll be it'll be the most important technology since the Internet. um and you and i were gonna be later telling our grandkids like i remember you will literally be like i remember the day i mean my dad tells me he remembers the first time he logged onto the internet like he remembers firing up the computers or the room that had the you know the gear in it and plugging the cables into different mode you know like that's where it was back then and and telling people that you were going to buy things on the internet. They were laughed out of every meeting through the nineties because it's like, yeah, we're going to, my dad was doing healthcare

software at the time. Basically his idea was that you'd take this like Palm pilot type device and you'd go to someone's house and you'd give them like a checkup and you'd write all the notes digitally into this little Palm pilot. And then when you got back to the hospital, you'd plug it in and it would download that information into the hospital's database. That didn't, you know, that kind of technology didn't exist. And at first people were like, ludicrous, we're not putting our information, our private information on this digital service. Now it's laughable if you think like that. It's like people who get bugged out about security. I'm like, every single thing you've ever done is digital. I mean, so, you know, that I think is just the

way it is. And that technology is everywhere and nobody thinks twice about it anymore. AI will be the next generation of that. Where AI is a little different is that we don't actually have a full understanding of what it is and how it really works. And this is where people have the right to be a little concerned because even the best experts in the world will tell you there's a little bit of mystery in the machine going on basically what an ai is is a huge set of basically it scrubs the internet for all articles and information and then it it sort of categorizes information into like subjects so like cat and dog would be close together and like walk and run would be close together um but dog and cat walk and run might be kind of far apart then what it

does is it goes through this basically a matrix of words. And really simply, if you ask it a question, it looks for what is the most likely next word in the sentence that it should respond with. So that's why I can give completely nonsense answers because it is basically just looking at the next most likely word. Now, the thing is because it scrubbed so much data that it's quite good at understanding the context of a question and then producing the right next word. And when it does that over and over again, you get something that sort of assembles this consciousness almost. And that's where the experts are a little confused because there's no reason it should be getting the right next word so often, basically. There's no reason it should be so good. That's really the

problem it's like someone built a plane that could fly across the world in five minutes accidentally you know actually someone did a really interesting analogy of this gpt3 was released at the beginning or gpt2 was released at the very beginning or late last year the equivalent so let's say that's a modern plane okay gpt4 which just came out would be it is, I think it was 150,000 times smarter. So it would be like if you had an airplane that could go 600 miles an hour. And in two years, we developed a plane that could go 900,000 miles an hour. So the scale in growth of these AIs is just boggling people's minds. And that's also part of where people are like, what the heck's going on here? Because they're getting exponentially

smarter because it's like a feedback loop. Now, where this actually becomes useful is that it's very good at understanding context. So with our AI and Musi, well, here, let's start with what they don't do. So what they don't do, and there's no AI that does this anywhere that I'm aware of, is they don't do things like listen to you practicing and then give you feedback on your practice. That, like I said earlier, that level of technology just isn't there yet. They don't do things like listening to your music and then ripping it off and writing their own songs with your ideas. That's not happening either. So I think the fear should be in just the general, we don't really understand it, but I don't think it should be fear. It should just be more like

mild curiosity because it's not a dangerous thing. I mean, you can use any technology for nefarious purposes. You can drive a car into a crowd of people if you want, or you can drive it to the grocery store. So that argument will be true for everything. So I think with AI, really, it's the same thing. If you want to use it as a beneficial technology, I think it will blow your mind if you've never used it before. If you want to use it as a nefarious thing and cause trouble, you will. You absolutely can. But you can with anything. So I wouldn't be too worried about that. Now, where this actually benefits people, like for us in the education space, with Musi, we have this AI built in where you hit record and it will listen to everything

you say back and forth between you and your students through the entire lesson. That is all transcribed basically into a little notepad. You can, if you want, you can copy that transcription and do whatever you feel with it. But we also have built in is the AI's ability to turn that transcription into useful content. So the main thing it does is it writes assignments. So if you go through your lesson and you're telling your student, oh, don't forget your body posture, or don't forget this technique, and next week we're going to work on this, and oh, I want you to do these three pages, all the kind of typical things that you say throughout a lesson, it contextually understands that you're a music teacher, this is a music lesson, that you're telling a student

things to do throughout that class. And so basically the AI will write up the assignment for the student based on everything that you said throughout that lesson. And then it will also write the meeting notes for you as a teacher. So it can write things like remember to bring the book next week, or don't forget to send that YouTube link or check on the file or send those recital tickets or whatever it is, you know, all those other things that you say throughout the lesson, it can basically like extract all the useful information and cut out all the fluff. So if you're talking about your cat for five minutes, it'll just not include anything about your cat. It understands that it's, you know, a music lesson. That's amazing because one,

I shouldn't, I mean, our most important resources are time. I mean, our health, of course, But time is another one. And music teachers usually are, in many cases, underpaid. We're constantly running out of time. We need support. We're tired. And this is basically like having an assistant supporting you. So once again, you know, since we started talking about music, how it supports, how it helps teachers teach, that is a huge way to save time because writing lesson notes is something that I used to do, you know, while you're teaching. Yeah, right. And then what do you do? Do you ask the students to stop playing so you can write or you have them playing and you're listening, sure, but you're also writing and you can't write as much as you want. now you can be completely focused in the moment and you have your little assistant writing the notes and it, I'm sure it does so much more than that, but that alone, the amount of time it can save someone is so important in, you know, adding to, um, the quality of presence that we can have,

but also quality of life ultimately. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you nailed that. All of that's exactly everything you said there is the reasons for what we're doing is it's supposed, like I said, technology is not supposed to get in your way. It's supposed to be the thing that helps and bolsters you up. So, you know, I feel a lot of teachers at pandemic sort of pushed everyone in the deep end and a lot of people sank and they're like, I don't want anything to do with this anymore. I don't want any technology. I don't, I just want to teach. Well, that's what we're doing. You know, we're, we're, we're pulling the technology in, in a different direction so that you can just teach it because like you said in even in my in-person lessons and you know

historically I've had a notepad and a pencil and I've been writing notes down as the students are doing things and then I rip that piece of paper out and I hand it to them as they walk out the door and then I like spin around and make some notes for myself put some things in the computer and then the next student comes in so then by the end of the day I'm already backlogged multiple students deep. And then I haven't emailed everybody the files yet. I haven't sent the parents all the notes. If this basically just does that half of your job and your job becomes just teaching 30 minutes or one hour, not teaching 20 minutes with five minutes of fluff and five minutes of fluff, but actually teaching for a full 30 minutes, the engagement goes up,

your retention rate goes up, you literally make more money. I mean, it's not a gimmick. It's just the natural progress of how business works. The higher quality you produce, the happier your client is, the more likely they are to come back. It is that simple. There is no secret. It's just use the tech to help you out. And I remember going in my lesson, I won't say which year, but I showed up with my little cassette tape and would hand it to my teacher because he had a recording set up. And that is one of the best ways to maximize the learning experience, to save time in the practice room.

And that's one that we underutilize, which is to listen back to lessons and take notes. We're just in the rush to practice, practice, practice, practice. But really sitting down, going through an hour long lesson, for example, or half hour and take notes from the lesson will save so much time in the practice room and help internalize the notions from the lesson so much better. So this way, when it's recorded, whether it's in person or remotely and getting those notes, that saves times at both end of the spectrum, both for the teacher and the student can access those resources anytime it's needed. It's just added value. Yeah, that's, and to me, that's sort of the two sides of that coin, right, is that if the teacher gets all these benefits, well, that's cool, you know, that's nice and all, but if the student doesn't get to utilize the benefits, then I feel like you're sort of missing the whole, whole point of, you know, making it a cohesive experience. So, you know, with Musi, that's the idea is that that, you know, now a well-written assignment with a recording, with lesson notes, with a whiteboard attached, with a game, with all the content that you need to work on is sent straight over to your student. They can access it anytime from any device.

They can download it all, print it all off, do whatever they need, you know. So, you know, we tried to make it as, like I said, it's the technology shouldn't get in the way. It should be there to push you forward. So if you hate using your screen when you're practicing, cool, print it off and then stick it on your stand and go to town and practice. If you love using your screen, awesome. Open the app, pull it up digitally and have fun. It's like, you know, I'm a digital person. I'm much more likely to grab an iPad and pull it up on there and write with the Apple Pencil than I am to use a piece of paper. You know, I've got piles of pieces of paper that I have no idea what to do with. like you know but i i can at least organize my notes when they're digital so you know that's

just me personally and we are living in the digital age it just is what it is so you know things like reusability as we're saying about saving time i scammed every single file i own like music notes music books all that stuff into music and now when i want to share a file with someone i just click the share button i don't need to go into the closet rifle through things for 10 minutes i don't need to photocopy it and email it like there's so many unnecessary extra steps to get taken um you can cut those out again it just gets back to the streamlined process of teaching that's the whole point of what we do like that's and at the end of the day that's what we've all trained in none of us trained in education software technology like even i

hardly i think i might be one of the only people in the world with a degree that actually has that kind of focus and it's because I made up the degree myself at college as I mentioned like when I moved through degrees one thing that was nice about Berkeley is you make up a degree basically and so I came up with this idea to do education technology and I had to align enough credits that fit the mold so I took a bunch of education classes took a bunch of entrepreneurship classes bunch of business classes and molded all together and essentially created the degree that I wanted to do. But that's not a resource that most people have.

You know, so I feel like it's our job to provide as much of that backbone as we possibly can. And like we were just saying with general resources, like once you leave college, that's it. Your network breaks down immediately. It just, it does. It's just, your friends are not there to help you. The thing I think people misunderstand about college too

is you're always like, oh, I'm going to go to the best school is like a network the networking i think people misunderstand is not networking with your peers which you should do you need to do that will benefit you in about 10 years what you need to do is network with your professors and the people that can actually get you a job so you know that's for me the one thing i did do well at school was i came really close with a couple of professors and then I still had my pool of friends right out of school. My friends had no, nothing to do. They couldn't help me. They were all trying to find their own jobs. They were all trying to make

their own livings there. You know, they had no resources to help, but those professors could connect me to the people that, you know, had ideas or had resources. And then eventually I started finding places like the Facebook groups and like the entrepreneurship groups and things like that where i started realizing it's it's on us to go out there and create that network so you know with music we try to provide that as much as possible as well and that's so valuable in itself yes i just think that you know education i like i said if it helps you teach or helps your students learn that helps you teach part isn't necessarily just tools like whiteboards it could be listening like resources like podcasts it could be resources like courses coaching things you know so in our

facebook group we try to promote as much you know other material as possible so that there is a community when teachers have a question about how are you doing this with your groups or how are you doing this with your one-on-ones they can just ask and there are literally other teachers that are experiencing the same thing that can chime in and help absolutely yeah yeah i'm going to put all these links in the show notes and you mentioned your blog earlier and everyone listening you should absolutely read sam's blog because you are so full of information and inspiration and as people can hear you're kind of on the forefront of what's happening and you're in my opinion a true visionary so absolutely uh read sam's blog and go check out all of the links i'll put in the

show notes. Sam, I want to be respectful of your time, but I would love your ideas on a couple questions that I ask my guests at the end. One thing I'd love to ask you is a habit that you have that you think contributed to your success. It's got to be that curiosity, I think. It's that never, like I said, just my mom says this to me all the time. This is her like, the catchphrase is do something and something will happen that's that's it it's so stupidly simple but it's most of the time we just don't we just we just don't for whatever reason we make up reasons we make up a million reasons why not to you only need one good reason to do something so if you have one good reason to do it do it and then something will happen even if the thing

that happens is not the thing you wanted or expected. That's at least something. It's better than just standing in an empty room waiting because nothing's going to happen that way. That's another post-it right there. Yeah. I mean, do something. Yeah. I mean, do anything. Really. That's really it. It's just do anything and something will happen. I love that. Yes. Finally, the one question I ask all of my guests, do you have a quick actionable tip that the listeners could implement today in their musical lives? Yeah, I think it is a little bit on that. What I was saying there is that if you do have something that's been on your list forever, there's always been that big project that you'll

get to, or you'll think about or whatever it is. Like I said, if you have one good reason to do it, do it today. There's no reason between the time you listen to this podcast and the end of the day, you can make some progress on that project. So whether it's opening up a Word document and writing a title and that's all you do, cool. That's progress. Do something. Doesn't matter. Just something. That's fabulous. Fabulous. And you and I are going to get to see if I was successful with my AI experiment trying this new feature here on Zoom. So if I have some nice extended show notes. We'll see that I was successful. Save me some time. Exactly. And that's the thing. This kind of tech is popping up everywhere now. You know,

Musi is not unique in the sense we just like it, so we implement it. But, you know, like I was telling you earlier, I use a lot of different tools in my workflow day to day. You know, tell us about this a little bit. Okay. So real quick. So the main things are chat GPT. I mean, that writes all my emails, basically. And so if I have an email, I put it in, ask for a response. And I've basically trained it to know me. So I have this one thread I've told you about. I call it Bob. And it's one thread that's been going for months now. And it's my personal assistant. And I just told it on day one, you will be my personal assistant. And I will tell you everything you need to know about me. Please ask me questions so that you can learn about me. And then the AI just asks

me questions and I just keep answering them and then it gets better. And then when I do need help with something, it can fire out some pretty high quality results that sound very much like me. But even things like I was making some videos the other day and in the workflow I was doing, I record the video, just screen recording. Then I take the video and I take the audio and put it into the Adobe podcast audio enhancer, which is a new AI tool, which cuts out all background noise and just beefs up the sound quality of the voice. And so it sounds like an announcer voice almost without messing with the actual quality

or tone of your voice, which is pretty cool. And then I put the video through an AI enhancer so it goes up to 4K instead of 1080p. Then I merge those back together. Then I run them through Whisper Web, which will transcribe everything said in the video. So it will just write, kind of like we were just talking about,

write basically the meeting notes of the whole video, but it'll do it like five seconds instead of in real time. And then I take the transcription and I put it back into chat GPT. And then I ask it to write the description for the video or, you know, the meeting notes or the summary or whatever it is. And then I can even ask it to write an ad, the promo material for the podcast post or, you know, whatever the thing is that I'm sharing. And all within that one thread, basically can produce more you know pretty high quality content stuff that i would usually use a person or a team to get done um i can do it all now in five minutes maybe and so and like literally five minutes like like you don't have to even wait for videos like stuff renders now

so fast if it's a 20 minute video it takes a minute for it to be put into high quality The audio transcribes in 30 seconds. GPT writes the description in less than a minute. Like all of that combined, maybe five minutes of work. And then you're just copying and pasting stuff, basically. Which I'm sure we'll build an AI to do that next. But yeah, you know, I think there's some really cool stuff there. So like I said, don't be afraid to just explore and go try stuff.

Go do something. It'll show you something cool. Yes. And you know, to the people who might think, but oh, this is taking work away from people. I think that it takes away some of the menial work away. So let's think about the possibilities for increased creativity from the freed up time that everyone gets from this. I think it's not, it might take away some work right now while people are figuring out how to work around it. But human beings are so creative that we're going to see new types of businesses, new types of support, new, like exploding creativity from human beings. Absolutely. The way I equate this is very simply horses to engines. There was a period in the early 1900s where both horses and cars were legally allowed on the road.

Now, for the first half of that 10 years, it was the people on horses who were really mad that they were allowing cars on the road. In the second half of that decade, it was the people in the cars who were really mad that they were still allowing horses on the road so the people who have jobs in the horse world like farriers mucking the stalls taking care of the horses the feed all of that within a decade the horse industry died all of it what happened is those people became mechanics those people became engineers those people re-assimilated into different jobs now it's not the whole like oh just go learn and you'll figure something out but that like you that humans are adaptable. Like we do figure it out. So I really wouldn't be ever worried about

AI taking away jobs or AI coming in, doing your job for you or something. The world when a music teacher is an AI is very, very, very far away. That's not coming anytime soon. And humans like human stuff. So like AI written music, it won't be popular for the simple being that people like art created by humans? Because we do. There's no good reason. There are people like, I see AI art made and I like it. And I go, that's really cool, but I'm not going to hang it on my wall. When I see someone paint something really awesome, it might be a fraction of the quality of the AI piece, but I want to hang the one that the person painted on the wall because there's something about art that just is human. And so I wouldn't be worried about AI coming in and doing those

kinds of things and being like the top 10 artists all AI generated or something. I think the way I see it is like, how cool would it be if you have no musical ability and you really wanted to hear Elvis and Rage Against the Machine do a collaboration? How awesome would it be to just type that into a computer and just hear it for yourself? Like, you know, not going to go sell it and make commercial success, but for your own enjoyment, I don't see any problem with that kind of stuff i think it's cool but i wouldn't be so worried um like anything it just adapts yeah yes it's a transforming world yeah never ends sam ready thank you so much for this conversation so interesting and as you say you know music is the future of music education and i'm so grateful

that you took this time to share all of these thoughts with us absolutely thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. There you have it. Thank you for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Sam Reddy of Musi. You can find information about Sam and Musi by going to musi.live. And you can also find them on all socials. And I'm going to have those links for you in the show notes. If you found our discussion valuable, share this episode with friends and fellow musicians. Grab a screenshot of the episode, share on social and with everyone you think might benefit from this conversation. All right, that's what I have for you this week. Until next time, much love going your way and à bientôt!

Thank you.