An Interview with Levi McClain

2:32 Luke F. Walton And everybody, welcome back to Love Music More. I am Scoobert Doobert, and I am joined with special guest Levi McClain. Welcome to the show.

2:39 Levi McClain Hey man, what's going on?

2:40 Luke F. Walton Just super excited to dig deep about music and harmony and... like i want to open some people's minds with this episode so just to give them a little bit about what you do and kind of the perspective of your youtube channel which is where i found you could you give like a like a brief overview of like what you've been working on what you've been telling people and maybe how you ended up talking about these concepts

3:05 Levi McClain Yeah, for sure. So I have a music theory YouTube channel. We discuss topics about music theory in general, but specifically what I'm interested in is microtonal harmony. And specifically, what happens if we instead of dividing an octave into 12 equally distant notes, what happens if we divide them into 31 equally distant notes? And how does that bend the fabric of harmony itself?

3:31 Levi McClain And then how does that give us new tools as composers and as musicians and as sound designers to, you know, express ourselves in a deeper way?

3:40 Luke F. Walton Love it. And it's so fun to think about like painting or colors where it's like, OK, you only have 12 colors. It's like, OK, I could do a lot with 12 colors, but now I maybe want to start blending colors and you go, oh, is that the same color? Is that the same green or the same blue? And you're starting to blend them together.

3:55 Luke F. Walton So I like hearing the way that you've been putting these concepts is as a guitarist, I think a lot about this, too, because I'm oftentimes playing slightly out of tune or intentionally bending or doing something in between this.

4:08 Luke F. Walton in the spaces or like a lot of great bassists that play fretless and the ways that they can kind of just distort that sense of time and place by choosing exactly where to place their notes those that are really good at it those that aren't you know

4:22 Levi McClain Right. Yeah, I think there's definitely a lot to that. And I think something in there that you mentioned is really important, which is that we usually think of my personality as being something that's usually distinctly outside of the West.

4:34 Levi McClain West so you know like whether it's like Iraqi maqams or kind of like Indonesian gamelan we expect microtones in that area but we don't really think of microtones being a part of you know kind of like the Western harmonic tradition but it absolutely is like what you mentioned with bends when you're bending you often you're going into some microtonal territory you know and it's it's it's a huge part of our tradition that isn't systematized in the way that we we think about it like we usually

5:01 Levi McClain think about music theory on in terms of like a piano keyboard you know that's one of the easiest ways to visualize it but the truth of the matter is that in all kinds of music we're always hitting kind of the notes in between the notes yeah

5:14 Luke F. Walton absolutely and just as a vocalist you know I'm never perfectly in tune and when I make myself perfectly in tune using technology sounds a little weird to me you know

5:23 Levi McClain yeah absolutely definitely you can play with that with like just intonation as well which is kind of like of like we can kind of instead of pushing it on one end we could push it on the other and get like so perfectly in tune that it almost sounds like uncanny valley you

5:37 Luke F. Walton Yeah, that's

5:38 Levi McClain know that's something that's like I think I usually think of these things in terms of tools like it's not is this something that sounds good is it something that sounds bad is it's more of like what sounds good in the appropriate context and I think you can make anything sound good if given the right context

5:54 Luke F. Walton a beautiful way to put it. I'm also curious, maybe we start with the ox. the octave you know

5:58 Levi McClain Sure.

5:58 Luke F. Walton so people probably know like there's an a note or there's a c note and then it happens again and it happens lower it happens higher and somehow it feels like the same note could you maybe we start there and just explain like

6:11 Luke F. Walton why is a C note a C note and then why are we talking about the divisions between C to C or A to A?

6:18 Levi McClain So you can think of it in terms of frequencies. So you have like A, which is usually described as like, oh, A440. That's going to be your A kind of in the middle of the keyboard. That's what most of music is tuned to is A440. Now, if you go an octave lower, essentially what you're doing is you're dividing that frequency in half.

6:37 Levi McClain So if you have that A note in the middle of the keyboard, and then you go an octave lower, it means you're doing 220, you know, divided by 2. So you get A at 110 hertz, right? And then you can do it the opposite way. If you're going the octave up, you multiply by 2. So that A440 becomes A880. And so that's like kind of like the more scientific physics stuff that's happening is your brain is really, really good.

7:05 Levi McClain but at essentially doing your math, you

7:08 Luke F. Walton Okay.

7:08 Levi McClain know math um to be able to tell the difference between certain frequencies um and and when something sounds like a perfect octave when it locks in that's your brain telling um telling itself and registering that like oh this is the same note at a frequency either double or half of this of its given you know um value essentially so that's what's happening with octave and it happens also not just with octaves but with every interval you know like a fifth

7:37 Levi McClain is going to have a very specific relation, numeric relation back to that fundamental, that first A440, or whatever note you choose to start with. And these relationships exist with every interval, and your brain is just really, really good at being able to identify those.

7:54 Luke F. Walton I love that. And it's so interesting, too, that... like i'm still with you there right i

8:00 Levi McClain Yeah, sure.

8:01 Luke F. Walton though the one to two ratio like i even think there would be alien species that would be using the octave in their music the the part that i think we start that you know people that are into microtonality maybe diverge from the rest is saying oh therefore you know the two to three ratio and then the four to five ratio and then the 16 to nine ratio like

8:23 Luke F. Walton the idea of all of the other intervals somehow being holy or sacrosanct like maybe the fifth maybe the fourth and those are the reason why we call them perfect but then the other ones it's i feel like the math starts to get a little fudgy and it kind of feels like heliocentricity like like trying to be like okay everything revolves around the earth so we're gonna have to fudge the math a lot to make things kind of look like they

8:50 Luke F. Walton You know revolve around the earth and you go actually no it revolves around the Sun and now look the math is elegant

8:56 Levi McClain Right.

8:56 Luke F. Walton You

8:56 Levi McClain Yeah,

8:57 Luke F. Walton know

8:57 Levi McClain yeah, absolutely. And there's, you know, there's a lot of different ways to think about it, you know, and to think of music in terms of like, okay, the best music, the music that sounds the greatest is that that's going to be mathematically simple, right?

9:12 Levi McClain So there's a principle that music theorist called Norman Chasden kind of talked about a lot and he called it the natural law theory, which is that simple harmonic ratios like you're

9:23 Levi McClain you know you're five to four you're three to two you're two to one those are simple mathematically harmonically so they're going to sound good to the ear and what we find is that music that tends to hit those harmonic intervals that are relatively simple we find that that correlates with pleasing sounds what people would describe as pleasing sounds right and then when we do things like a minor seconds got this like a little bit more scraggly kind of number it's like okay that

9:50 Levi McClain Okay, that explains it. But what we find is that that explains Western music very well. That explains

9:54 Luke F. Walton Mm-hmm.

9:55 Levi McClain the practice of 18th century harmony very well. And, you know, this is an idea that you can even trace back to the Greeks, you know, and Pythagoras and then even before that in Mesopotamia. There's this idea that the natural law, so to speak,

10:09 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

10:09 Levi McClain dictates what sounds good.

10:12 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

10:13 Levi McClain But if going back again to the Greeks, we have people like Aristoxenus. guess who came up with this Aristoxinian theory which is that what sounds good is extremely culturally dependent it it's it's more of like what kind of sounds are you used to hearing and then those sounds are going to be the sounds that are rated the most pleasing so if you again if you step outside of the West and you go to like Indonesian gamelan is usually the favorite example it's like those harmonic intervals that they're messing with there I don't don't have not

10:45 Levi McClain have nice math at all um right you know they're they're usually quasi uh pentatonic or or you know quasi seven notes equal but but when you actually like identify harmonic ratios between them it's a little bit scraggly but it doesn't mean that the music's bad so there's this like difference between modeling your how you understand the world of music through math and then there's this aesthetic side of it right and it's like i think a lot of people will

11:14 Levi McClain you know with good intentions be like oh you know the best music is the music that's mathematically perfect perfect

11:19 Luke F. Walton Right.

11:19 Levi McClain that's not necessarily the case all the time right

11:23 Luke F. Walton Yep. And I really like that you went back to the Greeks, but not as a point of, so therefore they're right and everything is right. Pointing out that even in ancient Greek times, there was contention and there was disagreement. There was conversation about this where it says, I feel like a lot of people point to Pythagoras and they go. He figured it out way back then.

11:45 Levi McClain Yeah, yeah. And it's true, like Pythagoras too, and mostly with what like consonant intervals. So octaves, fourths and fifths is what he used.

11:52 Levi McClain And you can you can basically create three limit tuning, three limit just intonation is Pythagorean tuning and you can create all of that using just three intervals. But, you know, there's a lot more theorists than just Pythagoras at the time. You have people like Archytas of Tarentum who is much more of like an ethnomusicologist, what we would consider in.

12:12 Levi McClain in modern day whereas you know he didn't come up with a model and then applied it to music he went out to see what actual musicians were doing on the streets what the lived experience of those musicians were and then went back and tried to create a mathematical model which represented what was happening in lived practice to a high degree so he tuned with what were called diachronic intervals so dissonant intervals which were based off of like the seventh harmonic which it's you know maybe we could play I could

12:40 Levi McClain sounds

12:40 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

12:41 Levi McClain like sound example we

12:42 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

12:42 Levi McClain could kind

12:42 Luke F. Walton very,

12:42 Levi McClain of kind

12:42 Luke F. Walton very, very.

12:43 Levi McClain of play it um but um it's a lot more dissonant so that consequently the scales that he created were full of microtones that were dissonant but you know dissonance isn't bad like

12:53 Luke F. Walton Great. Totally.

12:54 Levi McClain our musical system is based off

12:57 Luke F. Walton I

12:57 Levi McClain of dissonant

12:58 Luke F. Walton like metal.

12:58 Levi McClain consonants right it's it's it's push and pull it's tension and then it's release and so um you know there's even at the time And there was a lot of disagreement about how music should be thought of, how it should be performed, and then how we should model it with music theory.

13:14 Luke F. Walton I love that. And I think that that can expand just that way of thinking, like even zooming out further could expand to all of aesthetics and all of just like the creative arts as like, what are you trying to present? Like there's the Wes Anderson style of movie, you know, with the symmetry, you know, there are all of these different ways that and they can all be.

13:34 Luke F. Walton emotionally impactful and enjoyable um but mandating only one way is so limiting and like imagine if every movie looked like wes anderson you

13:43 Levi McClain Yeah

13:43 Luke F. Walton know that would that would be bizarre but in the same way that i like that you're talking about the greek the greeks because uh one of my favorite things was herodotus's history one of the things that when he went out talking to people he found well uh the ethiopian gods look like ethiopians

13:59 Luke F. Walton And the Greek gods look like Greeks. And he started to piece all this together. And it's kind of undeniable information out there of like comparative cultural practice, reflecting truth more than just trying to do it from like the armchair or the mathematics notebook.

14:19 Levi McClain Yeah, 100%. 100%. Sure.

14:21 Luke F. Walton I like how I like how these these things in music can point to other kind of threads to pull regardless of what you're doing or what if you're just creating I think music is just such a good analog for art

14:34 Levi McClain Yeah.

14:34 Luke F. Walton in books.

14:34 Levi McClain And, you know, for sticking again in music, which is, you know, like this idea that music is part of the key to living an ethical life and kind of having that that mindset,

14:46 Levi McClain which is that like, no, it's not just music and ethics, it's music and ethics and it's politics and it's diet and it's exercise. Everything is interconnected.

14:55 Levi McClain and can be understood through each other you know you have like people looking at the the idea of the harmony of the spheres which is to take the difference uh the distance between different celestial bodies so like uh for the distance from earth to mars represents like a you know my i forget the exact number but i think it's like a three to two um

15:14 Luke F. Walton Cool.

15:14 Levi McClain ratio and then you can kind of you can kind of do this and pretend like there's an imaginary string between the earth and all of the uh the heavenly bodies and then think of the universe verse as a set of concordant and discordant music you know playing

15:29 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

15:30 Levi McClain and winding and it doesn't mean that they you know necessarily literally believe this you know maybe in in some cases that's that's the case but it's it's a good framework of understanding to kind of live your life through is is i think um the thing to pull from there and i think i think it's really interesting for sure i

15:47 Luke F. Walton I do too.

15:48 Levi McClain heard somewhere that uh pythagoras would prescribe melodies as if they were medicine so if you were feeling sad about something you would wake up and sing these melodies to yourself and you know it was it's

16:01 Luke F. Walton That's nice.

16:01 Levi McClain it's an it's an interesting way to to think about and look about you know life I think

16:07 Luke F. Walton I do too. And I also think this is an interesting moment for creatives or really just for humans when we have things like AI and you're trying to figure out like, where do I fit in? Where's my job at the end of all of this? Like, what is it going to do versus what am I going to do? And I think it could provide a really interesting mirror as to what. our value actually is like

16:28 Levi McClain Hmm

16:28 Luke F. Walton is our value sending emails or is our value holding every email we've ever sent in our life in the same brain as memory is fuzzy memory and then you think about like yeah the music that you were listening to on the drive to work influences the creative idea that changes your company you're like without maybe even you knowing it but the embodied self the embodied wisdom the strange

16:52 Luke F. Walton tangents and things that we can inhabit that an artificial intelligence simply couldn't and it never will because it doesn't have a physical body and even if it does have a robotic body it's not going to have the same kind of tactile experience of the world but all those things I think add up to be like okay this is what my creative value actually is it's not that I know how to use Pro Tools it's not even that I know how to play an instrument it's like it's something else and trying to

17:18 Luke F. Walton identify that and like water it and nurture it I think is a really like important practice especially now that we're confronted by this like crazy economic reality of I don't know, whatever we're living in now.

17:32 Levi McClain yeah yeah yeah for sure it's crazy there's um i like that idea that that you hit on first which is like that you know like everything kind of influences everything and it's you know it's something to consider especially like i i don't know i i do a lot of brain rock scrolling i

17:47 Luke F. Walton Yeah, totally.

17:47 Levi McClain just kind of go into it and then it's like to take a step back and it's like what is this doing you know other than the hour i am wasting just sitting there like a potato just going through going through something that doesn't It doesn't positively impact my life in any way.

18:02 Levi McClain Other than that, like what's this doing downstream of, you know, in terms of my creative output when I sit down, you know, later and I grab my bass and, you know, like how inspired am I going to be, you know, versus if I don't know, I went out and gardened, you know what I mean?

18:20 Luke F. Walton yeah

18:21 Levi McClain What's your opinion on like the ethics of AI as musicians?

18:25 Luke F. Walton yeah like usage and

18:26 Levi McClain Yeah,

18:27 Luke F. Walton and

18:27 Levi McClain yeah.

18:27 Luke F. Walton copyrighted work and all that kind of stuff stuff it's this is going to be a cop-out answer i just don't think it's interesting enough for it to really matter like i think it's i think really the ethics is if you're using it in a way that creates ethical concerns the music probably just is irrelevant

18:44 Levi McClain Yeah, yeah, I think that's fair.

18:45 Luke F. Walton It's so derivative if you use it in an interesting way like say for example you have a notebook that you have a thousand different song titles and you want the AI to like pick one today or like combine them in some interesting way or like something that you are putting work into a database or somebody a series of people that you know or you want it to like crawl Reddit and find some interesting topics that you can dive deep on and then you have it research it and then

19:11 Luke F. Walton you comb through it and find some interesting song titles or lyrics or or like maybe um they watch one of your youtube videos and they say hey ai teach me more about this subject and then like let me put it into song or like how should i resolve this weird chord that i really like like all of that i think is perfectly reasonable and not unethical it's just like using it as another tool um but like being like hey write the verse

19:39 Luke F. Walton um it's just gonna suck and it always sucks and it might always suck but like using it in the right way that's that's what changes it from slop to a tool um

19:49 Levi McClain Sure, yeah.

19:50 Luke F. Walton yeah

19:50 Levi McClain I think there's a lot of stigma around using it as a tool in an interesting way. I'll give an example like years, I think, maybe not years, maybe like two years before chat GPT, I'm sure it existed, but before I was aware of it. no one's aware of

20:05 Luke F. Walton All

20:06 Levi McClain it um

20:06 Luke F. Walton of us maybe.

20:06 Levi McClain i have this crazy idea to take a murmuration which is like those you ever see those geometric flock patterns that some birds do

20:15 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

20:15 Levi McClain um

20:15 Luke F. Walton yes.

20:16 Levi McClain so you can model that um pretty effectively using just a few different rules in terms of coding it's called boids algorithm and this has existed for a long time but i thought wouldn't it be cool it's like to take uh kind of like maybe these three different inputs that affect how birds

20:32 Levi McClain fly around and create this this this wonderful geometry and map it to musical parameters and assign different musical parameters to it so if you like um there's you know like a murmuration controlled delay every time a bird turns it activates like a you know some effect that is controlled by delay and so i had this this this crazy you know like um synthesized bird flock pattern which was controlling my delay it was controlling the melody trajectory

20:58 Levi McClain trajectory and all this kind of stuff and i was like oh this is you know make a fun video uh you know maybe one day i throw i turn it into some sort of plug-in or something

21:06 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

21:06 Levi McClain and so i have this idea and i put it out as um as a video and kind of like tied it to the work of um olivia michelle he's a composer who transcribe bird song and then use it in in his uh in his compositions and i was really obsessed with that and i put it out and i i titled the video something like uh you know like

21:24 Levi McClain you know like artificially intelligent birds or i can't remember what it was there something uh doesn't really matter i used the word artificially intelligent in there i kind of just forgot about it for a while and then chat gpt came out and then and then all of the ethical concerns that everyone had like dropped like a ton of bricks and it made me feel so sour about the whole thing and it's like it's i i you know i don't like that uh my fellow musicians myself included are getting our music is being

21:52 Levi McClain you scraped uh you

21:53 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

21:53 Levi McClain know like without our consent and without our pay being

21:56 Luke F. Walton Yep.

21:56 Levi McClain used to generate this stuff like that is is is so wrong on so many levels and because of that i privated that video just because i was so sour about it and like thinking about it's like i think that's like a legitimate okay use uh you know using it using uh you know these kind of tools in a somewhat creative way but i don't want to do that again because because there's so much there's so much stigma on

22:19 Luke F. Walton no yeah

22:20 Levi McClain it where i'm like i'm like i just want to stay as far away from any ai tool as humanly possible this is only humanly

22:27 Luke F. Walton yeah and i i but i worry about that though because so there's like i almost feel like there needs to be the divide between the like suno kind of world of it trained on all of our music versus the like mathematics of machine learning like that is just stochastic gradient descent and really interesting uses of like

22:46 Luke F. Walton some pretty simple math but with a lot of it that could make the next cool synthesizer or instrument or like maybe that turns into like a really sick guitar pedal that everybody wants for their delay and or chorus like i want to talk about your your your

23:00 Levi McClain Of course.

23:00 Luke F. Walton video in in the in the context of all of this but i almost i worry about shutting off like the tributaries of creativity because there is a use case that is like obviously and universally negative yeah

23:13 Levi McClain yeah i i think that requires maybe a lot of folks to give give some more grace and just saying like wait like wait wait wait am i going to just immediately comment ai slop or like take a second and be like wait is this actually ass up yes ai slop or actually this is kind of cool and it's not by unethically scraping people's

23:34 Luke F. Walton yep

23:34 Levi McClain data you know and it's done

23:36 Luke F. Walton yeah

23:36 Levi McClain in in in the right way and you know maybe that can be cool i i unfortunately i feel like i haven't seen too much of that and i've seen everything i see is the suno stuff and i'm like maybe we need a lot of space a lot of grace and 10 years and then and we'll we might get there you know

23:53 Luke F. Walton probably and a lot of courage too i think like it's gonna be hard because that's the prevailing wisdom and it's mostly right

23:59 Levi McClain Mm

23:59 Luke F. Walton to be able to say like hey yeah this is using the same basic idea of the technology but it's not that technology that's really hard to do and i feel like you could probably find it's not exactly coming to my head right now but i bet there are examples of i mean even like bob dylan playing electric guitar for the first time you know like there are probably examples of of technology disrupting or being scary or maybe being implemented really poorly in the beginning that ends up being cool like maybe even autotune

24:26 Luke F. Walton in like the mid 2000s or something like that versus you know hyperpop and the cool applications i

24:32 Levi McClain Hmm

24:32 Luke F. Walton don't know maybe there's something there but it is uh it's a weird it is a weird time and i agree with you that probably the first step is to be introspective and look at the human side and grow that and then you can you can augment it with technology or push it with technology rather than replace it with technology

24:50 Levi McClain Absolutely. Yeah, I'm with you there.

24:52 Luke F. Walton All right, you interrupt this very important broadcast. What I'm asking for is for you to rate it five stars, share it with your friends. This is like the most important thing for this podcast to grow. So if you want to do this, you go into the podcast screen, right? You click on the dot, dot, dot on Spotify.

25:06 Luke F. Walton Under there, it says rate show and you go and you click it five stars. If you could do that for me, that's the best way for the algorithms and all this stuff to share it out with the world. I know that it's a lot to ask, but if you could please, please, please, just please just hit those.

25:19 Luke F. Walton three dots than a five star would really help us out and helps us you know get the get the word out and spread the love of music so thank you if you're listening on YouTube you know what to do like subscribe all that good stuff thank you so much and here's the rest of the episode Yeah. So I want to talk more about microtonality. So we talked

25:33 Levi McClain Sure.

25:34 Luke F. Walton about the octave, we talked about the history, we talked about the discussion. How do you propose slicing and dicing? Why, we say 31, why do you come up with that number? As somebody that is a pretty novice micro, I'm curious,

25:47 Levi McClain Yeah.

25:47 Luke F. Walton but yeah, take me over the mountain.

25:49 Levi McClain Sure.

25:50 Luke F. Walton Invert me.

25:50 Levi McClain So every tuning system on the planet, I mean, any way you slice and dice it is going to be a compromise of some kind, 12 tone equal temper. temperament within itself is a compromise for just intonation you know it allows us to do multiple key changes and still be in tune it avoids an interval called the wolf interval so you might have heard of wolf

26:13 Luke F. Walton I think, yeah, tell me more about the wolf.

26:15 Levi McClain the wolf

26:15 Luke F. Walton Pause

26:15 Levi McClain it's

26:16 Luke F. Walton the wolf.

26:16 Levi McClain just it's essentially a consequence of just intonation so if we go back to Pythagoras we're stacking true genuine perfect fifths you you get something something that sounds absolutely perfect in one key. So like if you're in C major, it sounds great. But what happens is that when you switch to other keys, because of how that harmonic relationships exist, it creates some intervals which sound very, very squirrely.

26:43 Levi McClain And personally, I love the wolf fifth. I love how it sounds. But historically speaking, we've always wanted to temper out the wolf.

26:51 Levi McClain And so tempering essentially fixes the little bit of errors that are created when you make a justly intonated perfect system and I won't bore you with the math but essentially 12-tone equal temperament kind of spreads everything out so it's very equal so that we have the capacity to play in any key whatsoever so that is really good in terms of like practicality is I can sit down with you and be like you know I can call something in G minor and then I can call something in like D flat or whatever and you know we're not gonna have any problems

27:25 Levi McClain So that's great. That's fantastic. But that comes at the expense of having some super really in tune intervals, right? Which is part of what 31 fixes. 31 gives doesn't it doesn't make your intervals justly intonated, but it gets so damn close that you get the feeling of them being justly intonated.

27:43 Levi McClain In addition to that, it gives you new intervals, right? A lot more new intervals.

27:48 Levi McClain And the way I like to explain this and um you know maybe we can put in some examples here is that we have in 12 tone equal temperate we have our minor chords we have our major chords those are you know we have a bunch of other chords but those are our basic but bread and butter uh with 31 we get three new flavors we get sub minor which means that your minor third can be a little bit flat of your minor chord and it gets it's a lot more darker kind of feeling you have your super major chords which mean if you take your major chord you

28:17 Levi McClain chord and you take your third and you bump it up a little bit that's your super major tonality so you have your root super major third fifth that's going to be super major chord and then finally we have our neutral chord so that's going to be perfectly in between a major and a minor so we have three absolutely new chord cool chord qualities to compose with and to create with so it's like different shade i like to think of it as different shadings of uh of the chord so it kind of lets us

28:42 Levi McClain expand and contract the harmonies that we we are are used to hearing so a lot of this stuff in 31 I think of as an extension of 12 because you can actually model 12 within 31 you know I can have a diatonic scale that's going to sound completely familiar to you and it's in 31 and you might not even notice that it's in 31 the really attractive part for me is that like I've been you know spending almost all of my life playing you know in instruments in 20

29:11 Levi McClain and 12 so it's really great way to like kind of dip your toe in the water but not like go head first you can do all this kind of stuff now 31 you might say like why specifically 31 why not like is

29:21 Levi McClain if it's all about having different shadings in between there why not go like to 53 which is a uh you know like the the turkish tuning system is based off of 53 notes or you know like why not go crazy i saw someone doing something in 144 ito the other day and i'm like oh my god your piano would be

29:21 Luke F. Walton Yep.

29:39 Levi McClain be my long before you get to your

29:41 Luke F. Walton playing this on a violin you're like

29:44 Levi McClain Right, right. Yeah. And it's like, it's at that point, you're like at the continuum and it's like, just grab it for Alice, dude, just grab it for Alice. So 31 is, is also a compromise as all tuning systems are. But I believe it's a compromise that gives you more notes to be interesting and expressive in new ways, but not too many notes that it's like, what's the point or that's too scary.

30:04 Luke F. Walton Yep.

30:04 Levi McClain I don't want to learn how to play giant steps and all 144 keys. You know what I mean?

30:09 Luke F. Walton Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very

30:10 Levi McClain So

30:11 Luke F. Walton cool.

30:11 Levi McClain that's basically the reason why 31 is good. And so like once we've established that's what we're going to be working in, then it's time to like really dive into the bread and butter. And that's basically been my mission for the last like two years is there is historical precedent for 31 being used in the Renaissance period.

30:32 Levi McClain There was a composer named Vincentino who actually built an organ. I believe it's called the Archi Sembalo.

30:38 Levi McClain follow probably butchering the pronunciation it's actually a 30 you know a 31 tuned keyboard and right and so he had some madrigals and some other some other pieces written for it so so there's actually historical precedent for it as well as a couple other composers so that's that's neat to kind of like oh we have a canon a very very small canon but a canon nonetheless that we can kind of rest on and stand on to to innovate further beyond that there's not

31:05 Levi McClain a whole lot of innovation in terms of music theory in 31. There's a lot of things that happen which don't have concrete names that everyone agrees on, like we have in 12-step.

31:14 Levi McClain Basically, we have what we have, and it's a consequence of a lot of history and a lot of theorists butting their heads and a lot of common practice and a lot of like, okay, we're here because of everything that happened before, and it's pretty standardized across the board. There's not a whole lot of standardization in 31.

31:32 Levi McClain So that's kind of what I've been working on is to kind of come up with terms which describe some of the things that tends to happen in 31 compositions, which might be a good time to move us into the chorus effect.

31:45 Luke F. Walton Absolutely. Absolutely. I do. I think before we get to the chorus effect, though, I want to throw something at you just to see how you respond. What about the harmonic series as a bass player? You know, you play a low note.

31:57 Luke F. Walton there's a series of different notes that naturally appear above above them how does that integrate or like does it does it justify 31 more does it justify 12 tone more or is it completely irrelevant is how does that factor into this conversation of

32:13 Levi McClain Yeah, so that's, I would say that's like a more higher level meta discussion, generally speaking. I tend to not go too much into that, but if you're talking about the harmonic series, the seventh harmonic series, Seventh harmonic is really where 12 tone kind of breaks and we're not able to really reproduce that sound because it's basically a quarter tone off.

32:33 Levi McClain 31 will be able to approximate that seventh harmonic better. Like we have harmonic seventh chords in 31 that we can't do in 12. And that's the other really cool thing, particularly in the jazz context is like it doesn't we don't just open up with brand new, you know, sub minor super major and neutral chords.

32:51 Levi McClain we also have different seventh extensions that we can do and different ninth extensions different you know all these different things it's like well we've got options you know to kind of subtly move our extensions in one way or the other which is really cool because you can get into some really cool voice leading stuff and micro voice leading with within that so we can in terms of like justifying it through the harmonic series we can get closer in 31 to being able to produce more

33:17 Levi McClain uh like pure sounding um justly intonated harmonic series based chords of course you know as you keep going up it it falls apart a little bit and

33:27 Luke F. Walton Uh-huh.

33:27 Levi McClain uh eventually you get to the point where it's like okay well this can't handle let's go to like 99 you know let's go to um ito by the way is uh equally uh distance octave it's another word for counter tone equal temperament a lot of microtonal musicians i don't know why they base there's a very subtle distinction but they basically mean the same thing

33:45 Levi McClain thing so I always like to use Ido and but a lot of people are like what's Ido I've never heard of that it's just equally dishonest

33:51 Luke F. Walton Yeah, cool. Thanks.

33:53 Levi McClain So you could keep going higher and higher and higher eventually you get to the continuum and it's like well You might as well just use just intonation at that

33:59 Luke F. Walton point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool.

33:59 Levi McClain Yeah

34:00 Luke F. Walton Yep.

34:00 Levi McClain So I don't think about that too much as a composer and as a musician that like never when I sit down in the studio I'm not thinking about that, right? I'm thinking about like oh god, I gotta catch this I mean I gotta catch this figure. I'm usually playing a fretless So it's like be in tune, you know that that's more of my concern when I'm actually going in producing stuff

34:19 Luke F. Walton absolutely i find that really interesting because i i don't think about it much as a player but i do think about it as a recording engineer like mix engineer because i'm constantly working with harmonics and like second order and third order primarily so like mostly in tune but i'm also do some stuff in melodyne where you can go in and you can edit the harmonic series and i do that for like a lot like weird spatial effects and stuff like that where you can carve out and you could do comb frequencies um or like if you wanted that seventh order harmonics uh you could pump that and lower the other harmonics is it like does weird stuff to you

34:47 Luke F. Walton stuff the human voice and stringed instruments and flutes in particular because they have such like a rich weird harmonic series and and those those harmonics are high enough that you can create all sorts of weird things especially if you're just like a transition or whatever that's that's what i reach into that weird bag

35:03 Levi McClain I think it's also like when you realize, you know, everyone goes through their microtonal journey and they realize like, oh, the loudness and the peaks and the valleys of the harmonic series is what is what. what affects and is directly linked to the timbre of a given instrument right

35:18 Luke F. Walton it's Right.

35:18 Levi McClain like each instrument will have their own kind of like um a photograph like sonic photograph of like oh this is this is generally you know we have like a very quiet fundamental here and a very loud second you know order harmonic or whatever here and that defines this instrument so to go in and mess with it it kind of it changes the instrument in some really weird ways and um

35:40 Levi McClain There's a guy named Bill Sifaris who did a lot of study into this area and then he kind of came up with these different ideas of dissonance curves and whatnot.

35:51 Levi McClain He invented this instrument called the hyper piano which the strings are segmented cuts of different strings and you set them together in a way that like maximizes their like harmonic potential basically as a piano and so it's very very interesting sounding really cool. Cool. I didn't know you could do that in Melodyne. I don't have Melodyne.

36:11 Luke F. Walton yeah it's cool it's worth it it's

36:13 Levi McClain Now I'm gonna have to get it. I'm just i'm

36:15 Luke F. Walton development

36:15 Levi McClain interested

36:15 Luke F. Walton yeah

36:15 Levi McClain in that.

36:16 Luke F. Walton i got i got to that point place because i got melodyne for formant shifting which is like the shape of the mouth for like weird monster effects and stuff like that and then i saw this little tab of them i was like what does that do and uh it's so cool to be able to basically turn your voice into a synthesizer without using the normal like voice to midi voice to synth

36:35 Luke F. Walton advanced tools it is purely just manipulating the harmonic series that already exists in your voice and then transforming it into a flute or flute like instrument or some weird special effect um but yeah it's cool definitely recommend that one so let's let's talk about let's talk about that chorus

36:50 Levi McClain yeah for sure so the the idea for the video was essentially i was really interested in the chorus pedal and specifically i was looking at this boss chorus pedal the ce2 which is kind of like where

37:02 Levi McClain they're we're mostly all started i think there's a few different circuits and you know they're based off of leslie's before that but it's you know it's got this really cool iconic sound and i was wondering like since chorus is mostly i know it's it's not all but mostly it's uh just about take like duplicating the signal um and then kind of modulating it with like an lfo or something so that it has been changed slightly so what you're hearing is kind of like a fatter sound

37:28 Levi McClain that's created by taking the original signal and then copying it pasting it and then pitch shifting it slightly right i was thinking like it's pitch shifted subtly enough that like you're not going

37:40 Levi McClain the past 100 cents and 100 cents in 12-tone equal temperament is going to be your semitone it's more like going into the 30 you know 20 cent value and you know that you can obviously change that with with one of the knobs and so because I noticed that I was like wait a minute could I replicate a chorus effect using 31 tone equal temperament

38:02 Levi McClain Right. And this goes back to also gamelan. Balinese gamelan is the term that's usually described to reference their percussive ensemble is shimmer, right?

38:13 Levi McClain And so the traditional word is ombak, which describes a practice where you take two pairings of instruments that they would have and detune one slightly so they get this beating effect where you're tuned just so close but it's kind of got this wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah.

38:30 Levi McClain wobble effect which is really nice if you ask someone who listens to this music regularly so you know like an Indonesian native they'll they'll describe it as kind of like the life force of of the ensemble and

38:43 Luke F. Walton Hmm.

38:43 Levi McClain and tones that don't have this wobble this court of this natural chorus effect are usually considered to be dull and lifeless is usually how they're described so it's really interesting kind of like perspective on something we would

38:56 Levi McClain You would consider in the West to be like, oh that might be a little out of tune It's like oh no it it needs to be like that. Otherwise the music it doesn't sing right and so this is where I got to turn shimmer

39:08 Levi McClain And I used it for shimmer chords to describe replicating what's happening in a chorus pedal with 31 tone equal temperament. So if you take the smallest step of 31, it's called the dices. It's I think it's about 38, 39 cents. It gives you this shimmer effect.

39:24 Levi McClain And so essentially what shimmer chords are is taking a three note triad, whatever it is, and then adding a shimmer tone, this dices either on, you know, on any of your chord tones so you can do it on your root on your third or on your fifth you could shimmer up which would be called the like shimmering or rising diocese you could shimmer down so shimmering or falling diocese and you can do this in any number of patterns and ways so essentially what happens is you you get six different fundamental ways to shimmer a chord so right there just just by trying to model something that we see in real life taking

40:00 Levi McClain and a fact which you know might exist to model something like Domilon and then we're trying to model technology itself through acoustic synthesis and through acoustic means so that's that's the basic idea of what we're doing with shimmer chord in the chorus video

40:17 Luke F. Walton That's so cool. I love that idea too. And for the listeners that might be like, whoa, that's out of my depth. I feel like you could just picture blur or like Gaussian blur or something like that, like blurring the edges.

40:27 Luke F. Walton is because that's that's what it like feels like to me just when I'm when you're describing and watch the video as well as like that feeling of like chorus chorus kind of gives you like a double image sort of sense to the to the music i use it a ton on my guitar and it's really it's a great tool for headphones because you're able to determine how separate each ear feels like the width of a signal using pitch is really impactful i was in the studio with alan parsons once like my coolest session and he had me play my guitar sharp 10 cents in one ear and flat 10 cents in the other and he said in the middle it'll sound like

41:04 Luke F. Walton sound like it's in tune and it was like i was thinking of that of so you could because that was his version of like you know 60s 70s chorus you could do the same thing though in some really interesting ways if you were

41:16 Luke F. Walton not only thinking about those shimmer tones in terms of like being within an individual bundle of instruments but in terms of like stereo picture placement i could even see like a weird weird uh sensation because like you're saying these are tools where if you put those shimmer tones on one part of your head and it led into another section or something like that maybe it could create a really dynamic headphone listening experience just through pitch without like effects just pitch itself

41:42 Levi McClain Absolutely. And it's worth mentioning that I feel like it's a distinct effect separate from chorus because most

41:49 Luke F. Walton Well, yeah.

41:49 Levi McClain choruses do other things, right? It's because you're also delaying the time in which the note is being delivered, which shimmer doesn't do. So the cool thing I think about shimmer in this whole concept is that, you know, a chorus kind of applies an effect indiscriminately to an object. So if you're playing your guitar.

42:10 Levi McClain or you hit the chorus pedal no matter what you play every bit of the chord is going to be shimmered in the same way through that chorus

42:16 Luke F. Walton effect Yes.

42:16 Levi McClain so by approaching it from like the music theory lens of like let's see if we can model this with within a 31 tone equal temperament with microtonality what happens is you embed the effect within the composition tool itself treat the shimmer tone

42:33 Levi McClain as its own independent voice which can move in various ways and then i can i can affect just part of the object if i want to or the whole thing and then i can like you say you can you can move it around if you want to do that

42:47 Luke F. Walton Yes.

42:47 Levi McClain there was part of the uh the composition of that video um which i didn't talk about but it's something i was i was messing with umbrella which is you know umbrellas in reference to shadow which is

42:59 Levi McClain uh in a similar way that we do this we can kind of you can play a a series of notes you know you can have like a quarter note thing and then apply the shimmer tone offset which is like an eighth note or something or another quarter note what kind of does is it creates a almost like a pitch reverb delay if you do it right and so you know it's all it's all about just taking these these tools and then like creatively using them in in ways that like are unfamiliar but also are familiar just

43:28 Levi McClain just found through different means and you can find a lot of I think a lot of beauty in doing that certainly a lot of curiosity for sure

43:35 Luke F. Walton absolutely no it's fun you're opening doors and because like music is fundamentally not a lot of things it's like you have frequency you have time dynamics how loud you're playing it is like do stuff with that and luckily there's a lot you can do with that but opening up more on the frequency side because we got a lot of like effects we got a lot of time-based effects we got a lot of dynamic instruments and microphone

43:56 Luke F. Walton microphones that can pick up dynamics in really great ways now it's nice to be thinking about like hey maybe there are innovations left maybe there are new doors to open that's fun

44:06 Levi McClain Yeah, definitely. Like I said, there's really not a lot of continuity when it comes to certain ones theory.

44:13 Levi McClain It's not something that's been set in stone. It's something that people a lot of folks are actively working on. And you know, 31 is just a very small subset in the vast landscape of different microtonal tunings, you know, like maybe maybe you could be the person who figures out 85 tone equal temperament or something.

44:31 Luke F. Walton Totally.

44:32 Levi McClain And I genuinely feel like each one has its own, you know, personality, has its own sound and its own, you know, utility for people to mess around with.

44:43 Luke F. Walton yeah this is really exciting i want to turn now to implementation and like how to actually compose with this this is exciting for me i'm a pop musician who loves like super symmetric scales and still in 12 tone but like the octatonic like stack diminish but the reason why i like it so much is i don't compose entirely in it but i can use that as a like weird bag or like i'm in space now kind of trick or like the same thing with the harmonic series and melodyne like all of those are like just a lever that i can pull when i want it

45:11 Luke F. Walton want to throw in like a dash of cayenne and

45:14 Levi McClain Yeah

45:14 Luke F. Walton so now i'm starting to think of like okay 31 that could be a really interesting way that maybe the entire piece isn't quote-unquote microtonal but it can borrow from some of these techniques to like have a final chorus that makes it go like wow why did that last chorus hit so hard or feel so different or like or if you have a turn in a second verse that has got a really personal emotional feel maybe you do some of those falling tones or what was what was the one

45:39 Luke F. Walton one called where the um the super minor sub

45:41 Levi McClain Sub-minor. Sub-minor, yeah.

45:43 Luke F. Walton minor like maybe maybe maybe minor's not enough you need to you know this one goes to 11 kind of energy um how do you actually go about doing this you have to have specialized instruments are you doing this with certain uh synthesizer tools a different type of like midi piano roll like how are you going about actually making compositions

46:00 Levi McClain Yeah, so this is, I would say like the biggest barrier to entry into microtonality is actually not to fear anything it's it's a it's a physical implementation right

46:10 Luke F. Walton That's why

46:10 Levi McClain right it

46:10 Luke F. Walton I think it's

46:11 Levi McClain you know

46:11 Luke F. Walton scary.

46:11 Levi McClain you know like like instrument manufacturers have been making stuff in 12 for you know so long that at first it seems a little daunting to to get into and to actually implement in a way that's practical and i'm all about like there's no point in doing anything um any of this music theory if you can't actually practically implement it right

46:28 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

46:28 Levi McClain you know

46:28 Luke F. Walton exactly.

46:28 Levi McClain i'm a big believer in in music theory is a lot of things but first and foremost i think it's It's a way to describe actual practice, right? It's descriptive. It's not prescriptive. So we hear a cool sound. We need a cool way to actually like describe it. But the playing must come first,

46:44 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

46:44 Levi McClain right? A couple different things. I play mostly a fretless bass. A fretless instrument is going to help you a lot. If you're a guitarist, they also have, let me see if I have it here. It's called fretlets. So you can get these little things and they're tiny little baby frets. perhaps

47:00 Luke F. Walton Oh, I see. Yeah.

47:01 Levi McClain yeah yeah and

47:02 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

47:02 Levi McClain so you can just tape this onto your bass or

47:05 Luke F. Walton Cool.

47:05 Levi McClain onto your yeah give

47:06 Luke F. Walton Yeah?

47:06 Levi McClain me one second

47:07 Luke F. Walton Sweet.

47:07 Levi McClain so this is this will be a bass that has some of those on there

47:12 Luke F. Walton Yes.

47:12 Levi McClain i don't know if you can see it

47:12 Luke F. Walton Uh

47:13 Levi McClain yeah

47:13 Luke F. Walton -huh. I see.

47:13 Levi McClain so that so those are just glued on there because i know they're going to be permanent and this is kind of just a cheap little acoustic ukulele bass this is also an option this is a fully super tonal micro

47:28 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

47:28 Levi McClain fret bass that you can i can move all of these in each direction uh to get any kind of tuning i want i can pop them out there's uh you can get some that to to pop in there that are straight metal bars which are turn it fretless for just a small period of the of the actual bass and it's just like something that's just it's just the neck fully installable

47:52 Luke F. Walton Just

47:52 Levi McClain on

47:53 Luke F. Walton the neck, yeah. That's

47:54 Levi McClain well absolutely

47:54 Luke F. Walton great because bolt

47:55 Levi McClain absolutely

47:55 Luke F. Walton -on neck is like a perfect use case for that.

47:57 Levi McClain and then of course like good old this is what I'm using most of the time

48:02 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

48:02 Levi McClain you

48:03 Luke F. Walton cool.

48:03 Levi McClain know it's just a frontless bass and it's funny because like most people uh most people will sit there practicing with a with a metronome I should be as well but in honesty I practice with a tuner so

48:15 Luke F. Walton Yes, that's so cool.

48:16 Levi McClain that that's so you can get in terms of basis uh

48:20 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

48:20 Levi McClain in terms of pianos piano you know you can you can fully micro tune piano as well if you know how to do that i'm a trained piano tuner that for for a lot of years so i maybe i say this you know like you can you can do it but maybe you want to call your piano technician to actually get it done to do it right uh so you do uh fretless instruments uh like this guy over here this is you know it can be a violin but this is a artist who they've healed

48:46 Levi McClain It's an old Renaissance instrument.

48:47 Luke F. Walton Cool. I love period renaissance performances. That is like one of my like.

48:52 Levi McClain Yeah, yeah. And they're not going to be in, if they're done right, they're not done in 12, I'll tell you that. So, you know, you have those options, most other instruments are going to be able to micro-tune in some way, shape or form. Vocals, obviously, you can micro-tune. In terms of like DAWs, I use Logic.

49:13 Levi McClain I've heard that Reaper gives you a fully editable piano roll, so you can actually construct a like a microtonal piano roll in in reaper i

49:23 Luke F. Walton Oh, yeah.

49:24 Levi McClain haven't tried it so i'm not i'm not i've been told that i'm not 100 sure how it works or how good it is um but i find that you know just using a piano roll on logic just one to stop to 12 it works pretty pretty okay it could definitely be a be a lot more streamlined but once you kind of get used to it and kind of get used to working with it it seems to do all right for me

49:46 Luke F. Walton so like are you doing the piano roll and then you're like clicking on a note and making it sharp or flat or something is that like basically how okay

49:52 Levi McClain Yeah, I'll load in microtonal tunings. So you think there's some like contact players,

49:57 Luke F. Walton got it cool

49:57 Levi McClain almost every contact instrument is going to have like an editable tab. You can either input a script for whatever tuning system you want, or it'll allow you to kind of change the tuning on like a micro tuning page. There's some, I use a lot of...

50:15 Levi McClain plugins which accept Scala files so Scala is going to be your tuning files and you can create those you know like with a free web player I think it's called Scala Workshop you just can you know punch in the set values or the harmonic ratios you want export it and just drop it in and then boom your synth is in you know whatever microtonal tuning system you want I

50:37 Luke F. Walton Cool.

50:37 Levi McClain use a lot of subsects so for 31 it can it can still be a lot to deal with you know that for that 31 and then and then then you have another octave so

50:47 Luke F. Walton Right.

50:47 Levi McClain what I do is is subsets which is just selecting different notes from the larger tuning system putting them into its own file and then using them kind of like a diatonic approach so I would say like all of those things kind of coalesce

51:02 Luke F. Walton I

51:02 Levi McClain to how I make music

51:04 Luke F. Walton love it. I love it. It's just, it sounds like it definitely makes music more of an organizational problem. of you have so much more putty it's like yeah thinking thinking the way that you do and then also being able to apply that technologically definitely seems like kind of like two very separate challenges but both

51:23 Levi McClain requirements yes For sure. It's definitely like I like to get a good blend of working in the DAW, working on a piano role, and then also like having something physical in my hands that I can actually play and then I can actually engage with the music in a more deep and meaningful way.

51:42 Levi McClain You know, I'd love to have just like a whole band at my beck and call that like, all right, guys, we're going to play this tuning system, but it's like takes a while, especially if you're on front list, it takes a while to.

51:51 Levi McClain to get used to a 31 note tuning system and to you know like the you're not like this you're like you're a lot you're a lot closer together with a lot of the notes so it takes time to internalize that and to really be able to to play effectively in that tuning system and because of that the barrier of entry is a little bit you know it's it's harder to get for a physical instrument but once you get over that hump it is it is as smooth as playing in 12.

52:15 Luke F. Walton Cool. How does that work in terms of ensemble work? Like, are you having to make more decisions off of it? Like how I'm trying to picture like a jazz instrument, like, you know, improvisational setup.

52:28 Levi McClain uh yeah

52:28 Luke F. Walton 31 yeah

52:29 Levi McClain so um for the most part i just i've been doing everything myself when it comes yeah to when it comes to 31 i genuinely don't have a lot of experience because again you know i kind of live out in the middle of nowhere there's no it's not it's not if i want to play with someone in 31 i'm gonna have to spend a while teaching them how to play in 31 you know um

52:47 Luke F. Walton totally i'm just curious like conceptually what do you how do you think that would work i i totally understand that it makes sense as as a solo composer performer that makes total sense of like you can you can go rabbit hole as far as you want to go yeah i'm curious even if it was just with one other player yeah

53:04 Levi McClain Yeah,

53:04 Luke F. Walton cool

53:04 Levi McClain yeah. So I do occasionally bring in singers for

53:07 Luke F. Walton yeah okay

53:07 Levi McClain my videos and stuff. And I find that singers can adapt extremely quickly, you know, because

53:14 Levi McClain I'd say like when I'm singing I'm not thinking you know I'm not looking down at a piano when I play piano I'm sitting down and I'm playing and by looking down at the keys I'm reinforcing this idea of 12 same thing when I'm playing a fretted guitar or a fretted bass I'm kind of reinforcing this idea of 12 I don't have that conception at all when I'm singing right and I'm not very great singer but I don't I don't really think about that I'm using I'm going purely off ear purely off muscle memory and so when I bring in singers I

53:42 Levi McClain I tend to find that they can latch onto the micro tonal sounds a lot quicker than other instruments and that that might might be because of that I'm not exactly sure but usually what it involves is before they get into the studio I send them a track of like what this what it's supposed to sound like so like a guide track of like of you know like some sort of MIDI or something doing the singing part and be like this is it's some very interesting intonation

54:08 Levi McClain passion um my personality scares a lot of people so sometimes i won't even mention that it's an it's microtonal it's just like hey we're doing a cool project and these are the notes you need to sing and then people are like oh okay and then suddenly they can sing it really well but i find a lot of times you're going to you bring them in we're going to be like okay we're working in orwell nine um you're i'm going to need you to hit this you know super sub minor whatever the heck and they're like uh and then they can't do it

54:35 Levi McClain It's like it's like you you got you also have to step back and be like, okay I'm I'm a producer in this role So

54:40 Luke F. Walton Mm-hmm.

54:41 Levi McClain it's my job to make them feel comfortable enough so that they can give their best performance And so that's a lot of like the how it works in studio is like I'm not theory heavy at all I kind of throw it under and then it's more of like oh Can you hit this but just a little bit sharper, you know that kind of stuff So it's a lot more like that with singers

55:03 Levi McClain I haven't really collaborated with too many people who play fretless instruments. I've collaborated with a couple of people who play Lumatone, done virtual collaborations, which is like this huge hexagonal microtonal

55:17 Luke F. Walton Yeah, yeah

55:18 Levi McClain keyboard. But often when I'm playing with people, you know, like who do Lumatone stuff, I'm the one who's like lacking on the theory. I'm like, they understand this way better than I do. So, you know, they take up that burden.

55:31 Luke F. Walton I love it.

55:31 Levi McClain Yeah.

55:31 Luke F. Walton So I've got one last question for you. It's the same question I ask every guest. Why do you love music?

55:38 Levi McClain you know you ask a musician like oh like what what are you what are your hobbies outside of work and it's always like what are you talking about it's just music you know it's like i feel like a lot of musicians maybe more than any other craft um we live it we breathe it we are music so it's like why do i love music it's you know i just love being alive you know it's it's really there's not that much of a difference between who levi is and

56:05 Levi McClain you know what what the music I produce is

56:09 Luke F. Walton Beautifully said. I really like them. I've heard a lot of people answer. I haven't heard that one before.

56:15 Luke F. Walton But that is one of the reasons why I like asking it is because it is so difficult because it is really like trying to disconnect two fully enmeshed things, the musician and the music.

56:26 Levi McClain Has anyone asked you why you love music?

56:28 Luke F. Walton Oh yeah, all the time.

56:29 Levi McClain Okay,

56:29 Luke F. Walton I

56:30 Levi McClain gotcha.

56:30 Luke F. Walton change my answer every time.

56:32 Levi McClain Maybe that's the answer. It's fluid. It's fluid.

56:36 Luke F. Walton Very much. It's

56:36 Levi McClain You

56:36 Luke F. Walton just killing

56:36 Levi McClain know, there's so many different aspects to everything is, you know, like if you asked me that a different day, I would have probably had a different answer, right? Because the way we engage with music every day changes a little bit.

56:49 Levi McClain It changes a little bit based off of, you know, like what I ate for breakfast, how I treated the cashier at, you know, when I went to the gas station to, you know, grab a drink or whatever. And just going back to the, you know, the Greeks and Pythagoras, everything is genuinely connected. And yeah, I think it's really beautiful and great and important necessary to acknowledge that.

57:14 Luke F. Walton Can't step in the same river twice. you know for sure yeah it's it's a it's a crazy thing and it is a wonderful thing and you know maybe maybe my answer today would be the reason why i love music is i get to talk to such cool people it just connects it is such an instant like oh we're both into this let's go

57:33 Levi McClain right right yeah yeah it it opens it up so that like we can have a you know there's no pretense there's we can just we can just jump into it and you know have something that's real

57:45 Luke F. Walton So where can people get in touch,

57:47 Levi McClain watch your videos, listen to your music? You can look up Levi McClain music theory on YouTube. I should know my YouTube handle. I think it's either Levi McClain or Levi McClain music.

57:58 Levi McClain I'll put the link in the bio too. Yeah, yeah, click on the link. You can find me there. You can find me on Instagram. I just put up a song for the first time ever. It's a song from that video.

58:11 Levi McClain Yeah, yeah, yeah. uh the the it's it's just a little one minute uh music theory example that like i got like

58:19 Levi McClain a Yeah. thousand comments saying to put it up on spotify because i never put up anything because i'm just like i'm so busy teaching i'm like i know i know i'm communicating this stuff so you guys can make really cool music with it but um uh i was i was beaten down enough to where i'm like okay fine released it on spotify so i guess i have some music on spotify now

58:36 Levi McClain Fantastic. I will put it in my playlist. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for all the time. I loved love chatting

58:44 Levi McClain Yeah, it was great meeting you.