If you're just joining, my name is Rocio Ortega and I'm the ProPublica Events Associate. Welcome to today's session, Clean Energy Loans Backfired in Missouri, Will Ohio Be Different? Today's event is brought to you by the generous support of McKinsey and Company. For those new to us, ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to investigative journalism with moral force. This fall, local governments across Ohio are considering expanding a residential Clean Energy Loan Program, known as Property Assessed Clean Energy, or PACE, which is intended to help homeowners make energy related improvements and lower their utility bills. A pilot of the program recently won praise in Toledo, but a recent ProPublica investigation found that a similar program in Missouri left some homeowners who participated in the program at risk of losing their houses and a flawed loans disproportionately affected homeowners in majority black neighborhoods. Through a comprehensive analysis, ProPublica found that more than 100 homes with PACE loans in metropolitan Kansas City and St. Louis were at risk of being sold at public auctions after their owners fell at least two years behind on repaying their loans. What were the differences in these two approaches? And what can Ohio learn from Missouri's experience? These are the questions our panelists will help us navigate through today. For our conversation, we're joined by two panelists. Jeremy Kohler is a St. Louis based reporter covering issues in Missouri and the Midwest. He came to ProPublica in January 2021 from the St. Louis Post Dispatch, where he worked for more than 20 years. Peru Corrine is a data reporter for ProPublica based in Chicago. He covers issues related to housing, business, and economic development in the Midwest. You can go ahead and turn on your videos now, panelists. Thank you to our panel so much for joining today. Our moderator today is ProPublica Deputy Midwest Editor Steve Mills. Steve is a Deputy Midwest Editor of ProPublica. He came to ProPublica from the Chicago Tribune, where for 23 years he was an investigative reporter and editor. You can go ahead and turn on your camera now, Steve. An additional note, this session is being recorded and a link to the video will be emailed tomorrow to everyone who registered. Thank you all so much for being here today and I hope you enjoy the session. I'll let Steve take it from here. Thanks, Rocio. I'd like to welcome everybody as well. And let's get started since we have sort of a minimal amount of time. I'd like to start with a question to Jeremy. You were fairly new when you came up with this idea. What was it that that prompted it? What did you see happening in Missouri that led you to tackle this story? Right. As Rocio mentioned, I came from the St. Louis Post Dispatch where I worked as an investigative reporter. And sometime in the last couple of years, starting in 2018, 2019, I saw a bill appear and disappear and reappear on the county council agenda that would give this group of finance years that run a PACE company access to a greater amount of St. Louis County customers. And PACE was not something that I'd heard of. You know, you don't see a lot of commercials for it. But I just kind of did a typical reporter scratch and sniff test and looked and found that a lot of the companies that were involved with Missouri's programs were the same companies that had more established programs in California and in Florida. And there was a lot of controversy with those programs, lawsuits, class action lawsuits in California, Attorney General investigation in investigation in Florida. So it struck me as interesting in the beginning. And I was able to obtain some documents from the Department of Energy in the state. Luckily, they had left some of their material unredacted so I was able to see some of the loans that were made only in St. Louis County and just pulled a few of them and it was struck by the high cost in the long, the long terms of these loans and just how much interest someone would pay over the life of them. And again, this wasn't comprehensive at this point, but just compared it to existing tax records. And I could see that particularly in neighborhoods where there were some, there were some low value properties that there were some property owners who were failing to make their payments on their taxes, which include their payments, even though before they had taken out their paste loan, they had been up to date on their taxes so clearly this was taking on this paste loan was a burden that some people were having a hard time adjusting to, and that it could be a systemic problem. So how did you go about sort of understanding the system, how it worked in the state, and reporting out the story, where did you find, you know, some of the people that gave the story, you know it's human element, and the data that sort of gave it its backbone. So, I can take this to start out with, I think one of the biggest challenges in tackling the story was understanding the kind of scope of the program and knowing how many people were enrolled in it, how many people were affected by it, and trying to get a sense of the kind of troubling anecdotes that Jeremy had discovered in his early reporting how widespread that phenomenon was, and I was not familiar with pace until Jeremy brought it to us and started asking questions about it. But I do have a background as a real estate reporter and was pretty familiar with with property records. And since this is a home loan program. These were these documents related to these loans were accessible through county recorders of deeds. So the first things that we did in order to kind of just like measure the scope of this program was to take these documents that Jeremy had sunshine from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources for these annual reports that get that are statutorily required to be filed every year. And these reports were in some respects, not very helpful they were redacted in large, in large quantities, and in some of the largest pace programs in Missouri they didn't even provide very detailed information about specific homes for example that had these loans or that kind of thing they only had general total numbers of the people who were involved. But that those documents those annual reports basically gave us a kind of roadmap to where in the state we could start digging for more specific records. And so what we found, sorry go ahead. And I wouldn't just go back for one second, and when you say you sunshine them or the Jeremy sunshine them, you mean use the Freedom of Information Act to get those to get those documents I'm not sure all of our viewers would know it. Missouri it's called the sunshine law. So sunshine becomes the verb. Which is a word that I also learned from Jeremy. But yeah so using those reports, we were able to identify basically five counties or county level governments where pace was most active, and they were all in unsurprisingly metropolitan St. Louis and Kansas City. The city of St. Louis, St. Louis County, St. Charles County, and then Jackson and Clay counties. And each in each of these counties, I basically set out to try and obtain the actual liens, the documents that recorded the terms of the loan for each person who who had participated in this program. And so once we obtained all of those documents from each of these five counties, we were able to kind of extract some information from from the records, and build a database around them that allowed us to do some analysis. And then from that point, I kind of, that was kind of like the data end of the work, and I was able to kind of kick kick things back to Jeremy once we had this database, and he went knocking on doors. And I spent several weeks, just, just driving door to door in St. Louis and in Kansas City. And, you know, it was, it was during COVID so I a lot of times I couldn't enter the house, but you know I'd be talking to a property owner, and it just just ask what how did you know what led up to you. I didn't hear about pace why did you why did you do this instead of something else. And the answer that I heard over and over was, I had no choice. It was January 1. It was zero degrees outside. My kids were cold, or it was the middle of summer. My kids have asthma when you did air conditioning.  There was no other access to cash. They didn't have money in the bank. They didn't have good credit. In fact, bad credit is a almost a cornerstone of this. And it was so it was a loan of last resort. It was this or suffer. And then I, you know, I'd be standing outside a house, a lot of them in North St. Louis, North St. Louis County in the east side of Kansas City. And you're looking at a house that's got multiple maintenance issues that the, you know, the pace loan that they're taking out doesn't really begin to address. And so even though they're improving some part of the house, there's the house just needs so much work. And, you know, and looking at some of the property records, you know, we're looking at some houses in some cases where people did $15,000 worth of work on a house that was worth $10,000 to begin with. The, the, the loan to value ratios were way out of whack in some areas. And so what, you know, if you were coming to conclusions about how the program was working, what were those conclusions, what did you see how, you know, were they, were they helping people were they hurting people or, and what was the state doing to sort of provide oversight for the program. Well, as Rosia mentioned earlier, we found that there's a massive amount of delinquency on these loans in certain areas. And so people are very likely to fall behind in their taxes and then be at risk of losing their homes. And really, we asked what the state said about it. There was, there was no, almost no government of this over this that there was very the state does not oversee it. St. Louis City, St. Louis County, each at least those areas had their own pace board, which was supposed to regulate it with local people in charge. But those boards had turned over the, the administration of the program to the lenders to the administrator that they had hired to run to run the company in those areas which was why Green Energy Fund. And, and actually, and when we asked them about, you know, questions about the program, first they were very dismissive of it but they really didn't have the detail oriented answers that we were looking for. They turned all those questions over to why green, you know, they didn't know about the delinquency they didn't know about the high loan to value ratios that we found. And really on a case by case basis didn't know about some of the kind of the stories of desperation that we that we had run into. But at least like I said St. Louis and St. Louis County had their own pace boards. Jackson County, which is most of Kansas City, St. Charles County, which is the far west suburbs of St. Louis are part of the Missouri energy district which is run by another company. And those areas didn't have any local representation. There was this pro there was this system where they were supposed to have a delegate to elect a board. But when we asked the county council of the county executive's office in those counties, who was your representative. They didn't know anything about it had never been done before. So it's just kind of going on an obscurity in these places without kind of any, any oversight at all. I'd be remiss if I didn't go ahead. Oh, just one thing I wanted to add was just another principle finding of this which Rocio also mentioned at the beginning was that, you know, that this is a program where if you want to understand the harm of it you have to put it kind of in terms of inequality, specifically racial inequality. And what one thing that we were able to do once we kind of built this database of loans was we were able to kind of map them out. And specifically map out the outcomes of these loans and how, how often in some parts of the state, you would see extremely high delinquency rates, and extremely high delinquency rates and really high loan to value ratios. And that was another principle finding of this was that if you kind of looked at where the harm was concentrated in terms of what parts of the state where people were most likely to be foreclosed on. And most likely to be saddled with a debt that was way out of proportion to the actual value of their home. It was almost exclusively in black majority black census tracts. And I think a really like revealing anecdote here is something that we talked about in the story is that there was a person in the suburbs of Jackson, excuse me of Kansas City, who took out alone for you know maybe about $10,000 using pace, and was able to clear it within a couple of years when they sold their house without even really breaking a sweat. Another person in North St. Louis who took out a very similar size loan had virtually no chance of selling that house and clearing the debt for a similar amount, because their home was worth so much less. And so, in terms of the unequal impact that was kind of an example of how in certain parts of the state, because of this severe housing inequality that kind of undergirds the market there. Lots of people were basically being sad or what that's they couldn't afford as a result of this program. I know we worked hard to capture the point of view of the companies that were involved. Jeremy you want to talk to that issue. What did why green say what was their point of view about how the program works. Yeah, again, why green energy fund is the company that is the the administrator for St. Louis, St. Louis City and St. Louis County which are two different entities, and then also have begun to try to spread out statewide they have been trying to get into Jackson County. They have started making some residential loans in St. Charles County, which is a very populated area. And why greens also it's a national company. They have made loans in California and Florida. Their position is that they are providing access to capital to communities that are cut off from that, you know, traditional lending that that has been the big selling point for why green. And that there. It's almost like an egalitarian system in that it's not, you know, the interest rate that you pay is not tied to how rich rich you are how you know valuable your property is but everyone is paying more or less the same. And that is true. However, we found that the interest rates that people are paying combined with the fees and interest, the median APR annual percentage rate on these loans was about 10%. And so everyone is paying the same high rate of interest and fees for these loans. And they, you know, they, they also talk about their ability to run these programs on a large scale. They, they're a bit of their company, they can run these things, you know, a much larger program than let's just say if a city city of St. Louis or the suburb of St. Louis wanted to run it on its own. This company has got a bigger capacity, a better capacity to run it, you know, on an overall large system. So, we often talk about accountability at ProPublica, who or what was held accountable in this what institutions or individuals. Okay, I think what kind of change did this bring about the story bring about. And really, you know, this was a program that, if you want to get into like the kind of original intentions of pace was designed to provide affordable access to capital so that people could improve their homes, cut their rentals and do something good for the environment. And that each kind of step of that requires some degree of kind of close observation and regulation from government. And that did not happen in this case. So I would say that principally the local county and state officials who were tasked with overseeing this program and making sure that it actually fulfilled its intentions. Frankly, we're not doing so. And so that's one of the first aspects of the accountability. Jeremy mentioned that in a lot of cases when we went to these people and asked them detailed questions about the program. They repeatedly deferred us to to their private partner. And I think he can talk a little bit more about about the lending companies. And, and I think the lending companies also have been held accountable. Why green is now, as we reported, as a matter of fact a press release came out today that they are launching their Ohio program in more than two dozen communities in Ohio. And now I think our story provides those communities with the ability to ask questions about to why green about what this program is, how much is it going to cost is this something we want to get, you know, to our, the people who live in our community to to participate in. And so the companies themselves. You jumped a little bit ahead there to Ohio. Maybe let's step back for a moment and explain the one of the next stories that you did which looked at a pilot program in Ohio, in Toledo, Ohio, and how that worked and what was happening there. The city of Toledo, Ohio, about five years ago started its own small pace program. There was a need in the in the community for some low cost lending to people to fix up their homes. Toledo was hit hard by the recession and there were people who may have, you know, lost some property value, but they still had income they still had the ability to pay back loans. And so the Toledo Port Authority went in and made about 66 loans, PACE loans, working with a nonprofit Toledo land bank, and the loans we were able to pull from the recorder of deeds office the loans were made at 4%, 4.25%. So only one of the 66 property owners is delinquent to date, and they're on a payment plan. And so it was regarded as a very successful program. Talk to people who were some of the borrowers, you know, they were happy that they were able to access this money, and I talked to one landowner in Toledo. She was looking forward to paying off her loan because she wanted to take out a new one to do a new project in her house. Now, the Toledo Port Authority wants to take this program and have the Toledo Port Authority run a program statewide in partnership with Port authorities all over the state. And so we're talking about scalability. The Port Authority believes that it needs to have a partnership with a private company like Wiger and Energy Fund to be able to make these loans. It's too big a program for they say for, you know, the city of Toledo or the individual governments to run. And so the Toledo Port Authority has apparently today started a statewide program in more than two dozen communities. And, you know, what our story has said is that these loans and we compared the loans that the Toledo Port Authority made through its pilot program to a typical loan that was made in Missouri under why green to show the difference in cost of those loans. And so, in a lot of cases, the loan in Missouri, the borrower is paying three times as much in fees and interest as the borrower, the same borrower for the same type of project in Toledo. And are there differences in the Missouri program and the Ohio program, did why green make any changes from how it operated in Missouri to how it operates in Ohio? We don't know yet exactly how much, you know, how many fees and how much the interest will be for the loans that why green intends to make in Ohio. They have told the Toledo Port Authority that their rates are about 8%, which is generally what the simple interest rate was in Missouri before you include the fees. There were, there are some key differences in Ohio. Under one provision, a loan cannot exceed 10% of a borrower's annual household income. And so that actually has the potential to really restrict how many loans can be made. The median household income in Ohio is 56,000. So that means that, you know, that a homeowner with the median income would be restricted to a $5,600 loan. That's, comparatively, that's much smaller than the typical loan that we saw made in Missouri. And then in Ohio, a loan cannot exceed 20% of the property's fair market value, which includes the pace loan and the outstanding mortgage debt. It's unclear how much that is going to protect homeowners because as we saw in Missouri, the lenders tended to value the homes at a much higher rate than the local governments themselves value them. And so we might, you know, there might be a loan made on a property in St. Louis that the local tax assessor said was worth $15,000. And in some cases, the lenders are saying that those houses are much more valuable and that they should be able to make a much bigger loan there. Interesting. At this point, I think we should move to audience questions. So I'm going to turn things back over to Rocio. Thank you very much. Thank you so much Steve for moderating that discussion and overview of the reporting. Like Steve said, now we're going to move over to our audience Q&A. If you'd like to ask a question, just click on the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen to submit it to us and we'll go ahead and review. So our first audience submitted question is another energy efficiency and solar financing tool, the PACE model that's P-A-Y-S likewise promises savings without a guarantee while adding a charge to the utility bills of customers who often have little or no discretionary income. The key for the lender is disconnection of utility service if customers fall behind on their bill. While acknowledging the difference between PACE and PACE, can you talk a bit about the dangers of adding surcharges to customers' bills when other programs offer energy efficiency and solar investments at no cost? I'll take this one. There are lots of ways that governments can help people borrow money to fix up their home or make energy efficient improvements. You mentioned PACE, PACE P-A-Y-S stands for pay as you save and it's a tool that utilities, particularly in the South, have used. And it's similar to PACE, except you pay it back on your utility bill instead of your property taxes. There's advantages there. PACE is much cheaper than PACE. The typical PACE loan is 4%, while we found that PACE was about 10%. But there are other governments that make agreements with credit unions and banks to make low interest loans. And the governments will set aside a loan loss reserve fund to take on some of the risk in case some of those loans aren't paid back. And when you look at the cost of those loans, they're all less expensive than PACE.  Jeremy, do any of those other models also carry a risk of foreclosure?  No, you can.  Yeah, PACE is the only mechanism where you put your house on the line. And so it carries the most risk for the power. None of these other programs do. Gotcha. Thank you, Jeremy. And I think a question for both of you now. So were the homeowners informed of the financial and legal ramifications if they were to fall behind on payments? Were they given warnings of this possibility where they informed nonpayment could result and the loss of the homes that you keep on talking about? So we don't have any evidence that PACE lenders or the contractors that they worked through failed to disclose any of the things that they were required to. And in many instances, we spoke to borrowers and anecdotally they would show us the records that they signed. And we could see, for example, that they had initialed every page of the loan agreement and that included things like the APR and things like that. So again, we don't have any evidence that PACE lenders didn't disclose what lenders generally speaking are required to disclose in terms of fees and things like that. What we do know from, again, talking to borrowers is that many really didn't understand what they were getting into. Like they didn't understand how much it would cost. In a lot of instances, they didn't understand how rapidly their tax bills would go up. That, for example, if you put a PACE lien against your home and you're in one of these really devalued neighborhoods, your tax bill is going to jump from, you know, I don't want to make up numbers, but it's going to increase at a very high rate if you were, let's say, only paying like $100 a year before the lien, now all of a sudden you're paying $500,000 in annual taxes. So that kind of sticker shock was really disruptive to people. In other instances there were people who fully understood what they were getting into, but did it anyway because, as Jeremy said, they were in desperate straits and didn't really feel like they had a choice. Thanks, Jeremy. Anything else you'd like to add to that? There were people that I talked to in both Kansas City and St. Louis, particularly elderly people who did not even know that they were involved in the PACE program. And part of this is this program a lot of times initiates with a call to a contractor. And so the contractor at the scene signs the borrower up to the entire program.  And the borrower said that they noticed that their taxes had gone up, but they didn't realize that they were making repayments on a loan. There was a case that we focused on in St. Louis County, a homeowner that had obtained a home from a property from a family member. The property needed a lot of work. He hired a contractor to come put in a furnace and the contractor came, put the furnace in the basement, but the house had no utilities, had no electricity, had no hot water. And the borrower assumed that the contractor was going to do all of the connections and hadn't. And so the man had been camping in the house for a couple years waiting for, you know, trying to save enough money to fix it up further to be able to use the furnace that he had purchased through PACE. So, you know, there were there were a lot of borrowers that we found that just really did not understand what they had gotten into. So now our next question I believe should be helpful for folks looking for some resources, right? So one of our audience submitted questions is PACE can work very well for some consumers. In your view, one, what are the most important consumer protection rules to have in place for PACE financing to work? And two, which free online financial calculator, do you like to help people calculate the total cost for a project based on interest rate and time? So, you know, I can't speak specifically to what like exact regulations would make this better, but I will say that, you know, fundamentally, what makes this program, what resulted in a lot of the harm that we uncovered in our investigation was a lack of alignment between how much these loans cost in terms of their interest in fees and the size of the loan and what the borrower fundamentally was able to pay. So any kind of consumer protection metric or, excuse me, mechanism needs to be oriented around making sure that you only lend to someone who can afford that bill, making sure that someone who can afford 10, 15, 20 years of payments that within a few years might even in some instances end up exceeding the sticker price of the boiler or the solar panel that you're even buying. But in some instances even the value of the house. So again, making sure that you are only lending to people who can actually afford it seems like a kind of baseline protection. But of course, we'll see also that like, you know, even if you can afford it, that doesn't mean that it's not disproportionately expensive for you as well. A, as far as like a specific calculator that you could use I'm going to put something in the chat right now. The FFI EC, which is a federal, see if I can get this acronym right the Federal Financial Institution Examination Council, they have a tool out there that's for calculating your annual percentage rate, which again your APR is is the true cost of the loan it's not just the interest rate. And you can use this tool to verify the cost of any loan you might get whether it's a, you know, it's solicitation for a credit card that you get in the mail, or a bank loan that you want to get for your local branch. But again, like financial literacy is not really the problem here but if you want to understand how much alone costs, understanding the APR is an essential first step. And this is one tool that can help you. Thank you so much for sharing that that'll be very useful for folks and sure. So if the equipment is purchased via credit. Do the purchasers grant the second mortgage or any form of lean on their homes. Yeah, if, if, if paces use to borrow money for the improvement, then what happens is it's similar to a mortgage a lean is filed in the county courthouse that requires the money to be paid back. And, but the pace lean actually takes precedence over the mortgage so in the event of foreclosure, the, the pace lean gets paid first. And so the, the banks generally don't like that. One of the advantages that paces proponents tout the fact that pace runs with the property, you can transfer a pace lean to the next home. In other words, you can sell the home with the lean and then the next homeowner can can take it over. But the reality is, a lot of banks don't allow that required that require that pace lean to be repaid at the time of the house sale. And so there are homeowners can be surprised by, you know, having that extra cost at the time of their home sale. And that's something because, you know, they, the next homeowner is going to have to realize that they're purchase purchasing a home with this extra obligation. And, and, you know, that that could make it more difficult to sell the home. Thanks Jeremy, we have another question from the audience how has by being responded to your data mapping showing how racially concentrated pace hardship is. Jeremy just read to this earlier and I mean one of the, one of the main defenses, or that the company has offered, as far as the racial disparity and outcomes is concerned is that, you know, they're the only game in town in some of these neighborhoods and that they are providing a service that nobody else is, you know, they point out accurately that traditional banks foreclose on houses, foreclose on mortgages all day long, and that they're not unique in having low home loans that people end up defaulting on. You know, so that's that's kind of the primary response that they've given another response that they've given is specifically in the weeds of like how much the loans actually cost. So, you know, if you look at like a traditional mortgage right now. You know the going interest rate is something like two or 3%, which is much lower than a pace loan. Why greens are committed other pace lenders have made this to is that that's not really apples and apples. These are different types of loans marketed to different types of people, and you can't really, you know, make that comparison. I do think it's telling that when we talked about the high cost of these loans, one of the things that they said was that that they charge lower interest rates than payday lenders, which I think says kind of something about who they consider to be their peers. As far as the service that they're providing and the markets in which they do business. Thank you and we will end on this question, which I know you touched on a bit earlier but wonder if you have any additional thoughts on what kind of oversight if any does the legislation have and if this is a case of state government passing off is the responsibility of actually helping and serving people by outsourcing to a for profit business, a part of a larger transformation wide of that attitude, especially when it seems complex and time consuming and expensive. Well the legislation that was passed this year in Missouri requires that programs be reviewed by the state division of finance at least every other year which has never happened before. We've had the PACE programs have had to report make annual reports to the state, but we don't know what we found that there was very little oversight, very little state oversight, and the bill also requires PACE programs to provide residential borrowers with complete information about the potential impact of the loan including a notice that the home could be sold in a tax sale if they fail to repay the loan. And it also, frankly prevents some of the lopsided loan to value ratios that we found, because it requires the PACE programs to use the property value that signed by the local government instead of, you know, a third party property value which some of the lenders have used. And so that would actually make a lot some of the loans that we looked at, they would not be possible today under that under that law. Any last thought you want to add her. Nope, that's, that's all I'm sorry I was I was deep in the in the great questions that are coming in so I would love to follow up with some of these people. Any questions, we will try to follow up so that is our time for today I want to thank our panelists Jeremy Kohler and her Korean for this excellent conversation and our moderator Steve Mills I'd like to give a special thank you to McKinsey and company for its support. And thank you to our audience again for your excellent questions and joining us today. Again this event has been reported so you'll receive an email tomorrow with the full video of today's event to everyone who's registered. We also post this recording to our YouTube channel. And from all of us at Republic. Thank you so much for joining us. Have a great rest of your evening. See you next time.


I'm Sergeant Tim Jeffery Beard Jr. My MOS is a 31 Bravo military police officer. I chose that MOS because I have a college degree in criminal justice and it was just a passion through the civilian sector. So I figured I could do it in the Army as well. There's so many opportunities in being a military police officer. You can go overseas. I mean, I'm from Columbia, Kentucky. No one knows where that is, but I'm over here in Israel. I've got to travel all over the world and do a lot of really cool things. This job has offered me the satisfaction of taking care of people. I've got to help a lot of people in my career. I've got to be with a lot of good leaders and got to mentor a lot of good soldiers. My favorite part about this job is definitely helping people, the select mission sets that we get to do, the special assignments that we get to go on, a lot of different jobs being an MP.


Welcome to Featured Artists Live, a weekly show to discuss and listen to your music. With help from my other YouTuber buddies, we hope to give you words of encouragement, guidance or simply just enjoy your wonderful creations. I'd like to thank our sponsor DistroKid, all of the wonderful artists and all of you for watching. Now, let's get on with the show. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you are. That's a fancy new intro, wasn't it? I'm pretty excited about it. It makes me look a little bit professional. Welcome, welcome, welcome to all the people who are already here in the chat. Lovely to see you here. Don't forget, if you aren't in the chat watching live and I can see a few of you there, hit the like button for me right away. I know we're always asking you to do that. Just go and hit it. Apparently it lets the algorithm know that other people should come and watch the show as well and the more the merrier I say. And also, if you are live in the chat, don't forget to give us your opinion on the music that we're going to be listening to this evening or this evening for me anyway. It may be morning for you, maybe lunchtime, just let us know where you are by the way as well. I'd like to thank DistroKid, the sponsor, which is up there. Thank you so much, DistroKid, for sponsoring this show. I am a DistroKid user as most of my guests, I think, are on the show as well. Great platform to release your music to. We're going to be talking about DistroKid as the show goes on as normal. And if you would like to submit your music to this show to be featured, you can follow the link in the description down below for that. And I'll also say that if you are a Cakewalk user and you're a member of my new Cakewalk group on Facebook, you can also sort of post your music there and it may catch my attention. And I've been messaging some people and getting some music from there as well, which is all very good. I want to move on right away and bring my two wonderful guests in, gentlemen who I'm always interested to hear their opinion, both talented in what they do. And as I say, very valued their opinion, one of them is already covered. His his camera up. I can see in the background here, which is no real surprise because like you would if you had a face like that. There he is. Hi, Ed. Hi, Mike. I'm Ed and I hope you will. And I am very well. Thank you very much. Nice to see you here, Ed. We were discussing a little bit off of camera a moment ago. Are you going to Croatia or have you been to Croatia? I have been to Croatia. Yeah, lovely place. Yeah, it's quite like Switzerland in terms of its very mountainous, which I hadn't thought of. But yeah, beautiful country. Most people speak English, which is useful. But I went with someone who speaks Slavic, which is also very useful. And isn't it because most of us native English speakers and especially those who hail from the island of Great Britain itself are probably the laziest people in the world for learning foreign languages. So we're always happy to find people speaking English in their combination of laziness and culturally, we don't need to because everyone speaks English. So we're not exposed to other languages or pushed into there. We are. Yes, we get we get taught French and stuff at school. But who cares about French and we forget it as soon as we leave school, don't we? Yeah, you get you get taught to pass an exam and you don't actually really get taught to speak it. So. Let's know in the comments in the chat, how many languages do you speak? All about Mimo Japan. I know he he speaks English and I know he's German. So I assume he speaks German and he lives in Japan. So he's probably got three or more. Let's know about that in the comments. Have you written? Has anyone written any songs in a foreign language? Let's hear about that in the chat as well. I'd like to know that'd be interesting thing to do or second language, at least for lyrics, would be interesting. Yeah, would would. Lyrics are hard enough to write in, you know, in Northern English alone. In a second, more than English way up now. Let's bring in talking about people who speak more than one language. Let's bring in the man himself. Here we go. I can see what's going on here. Here he is. What's he up to? He's just being a child here. Oh, there we are. Massive improvement. All right. And that is gone. Hi, Ed. Hello. Have you written any songs in foreign languages, Marlon? I only write in English, so it's a foreign language for me. Yeah, you don't write music in Dutch. No. No, because I don't think you either have to be very talented to do it in Dutch. And if you were not that talented, you can do it in English. OK. Do you think Dutch is a nice enough sounding language here? This is a terrible thing for me to say right off the bat. But is it a good sounding language to sing in? I think some languages are not as good as others, personally. It really depends. I can hear the lyrics too well, so I don't know. So I personally don't like it. But it's a it can be a very strong language to listen to with a heart G and stuff like that. No, it's not that good. It works for rapping, though. That's interesting, because in German, you could argue isn't as nice a language to listen to say Spanish, which is very it's a sexy language. But Ramstein's songs sound great. And part of that is the delivery of the of the of the little but also German rapping is really it's actually really fitting because also it's really strong and really, really pronounced. I bet it sounds quite terrifying and brutal and aggressive. No, it depends. It really depends. Ramstein's probably the best hand in life. Before we get into things, I just want to say to the people in the live stream chat, I normally like to put some of your comments up on the screen. That's not working for some reason. I can see them off of my second monitor, so you're not being ignored. But if I don't manage to get your comments up on the screen during tonight's show, my apologies, the technology is just not working for that for some reason. I don't exactly know why. There you go. I'm playing around here. Guys, I'm going to start off with something a little bit different tonight. We if for those of you who do not know the format of the show, we'll be listening to three songs submitted by viewers tonight. A couple of things on that. I've been chatting behind the scenes to fellow guests on the show. And I've got to say, I agree with a sort of consensus, which is I have personally been a little bit tempted to play some of the best music that I receive on the show. And that's fine. But I'm sort of thinking now it's a little bit more helpful to play some of the music that I think may need some attention and could benefit from the critique of other people. So just have that a little bit in mind tonight. That's not to say that, you know, there isn't great music in there, but I think there's some things that we can definitely make comments on. So let me know what you think about that in the comments again. What do you think in terms of should I play some of the worst music that I receive? Is that is that a good idea? Ed thinks so, he told me. I'm open to ideas on that. And I think that it would be interesting to see the nature the way the nature of the show goes and talking about opinions. I'm going to do something a little bit different to start off the show. I was watching a video the other day with the great guitarist Tommy Emmanuel. I'm a big fan of Tommy Emmanuel and he was being interviewed. Now, for those of you who don't know, Tommy Emmanuel has been he's probably been playing for about 50 years. He's sort of got more famous after YouTube came around because he is like a guitar virtuoso. He does incredible things with the guitar, percussive things, all the blah, blah, blah. I've been to see him live a couple of times, really, really good. And he happens to be a fellow Australian that's got nothing to do with it. He was being interviewed and he was asked a question by a young fellow about opinions about people giving their opinions on YouTube. And I want to play for you what his reply was. I thought it was really interesting. Here we go, Tommy Emmanuel. And it's dealing with the criticism that we receive as as musicians, especially in an online era where people have such easy access to be negative towards you. How have you dealt with that through your career and how do you what do you do to process the problem I have with this all that stuff? What you're talking about is like, since when do I think my opinion matters that much? You know what I mean? I do. When, you know, if you want my opinion as as a fellow traveler, as a friend, I'd be happy to give it to you. But if you don't ask for my opinion, why do why should I think that I should force my opinion on you? You know, I don't get that. I agree. So, you know, YouTube, Facebook and all those things have created a generation who think that their opinion really matters. Yeah. And it doesn't. One of these days, they're going to wake up and realize their opinion means nothing. Well, I think he said it pretty he said it pretty hard. So we've gone straight to Marlon there. I just was kind of I'd like to hear your opinion on that. What do you think? Well, he has a point for sure. What is someone's opinion? What doesn't matter if you give your opinion? But what he doesn't realize is that your opinion or your video you make can help others in their research for plugins, hardware, whatever. Well, I think he's more specifically talking about people's comments in terms of their opinions of people's work. You know, our comments are not care about comments. I'll delete them all. No. Do you think he's got a point, Ed, though? Just what do you think is everyone gets to just think because their opinion is so important now? What do you reckon? I think it's time to close my channel because it's all based on opinions. Marlon has a valid point. I mean, he also has a good point in terms of everyone does feel like they can hide behind keyboards and make themselves feel better about themselves by pooing on other people's achievements. But there was a very good phrase said to me, which was the only people who will criticise you are people behind you in the journey. So people who aren't as good at you will criticise. People who are better than you will just think, OK, they're working on it. They understand the journey you've been on.  But no, that obviously comes from a friendly place of care and consideration. Yeah, I mean, opinions, everyone has one. I think I agree with them that we are a generation now. And I think everyone falls. It can be guilty of thinking their opinion is useful. But as Marlon also said, in terms of what we do, creating videos to help other people make decisions, opinions are important. Well, I think that's the distinction, though, isn't it? That is that we, people are coming to us for those opinions. You know, we're not shoving them down the throats in the comments of... As influences. Well, yeah, exactly. Yeah. However we became qualified to be influences, which is another whole thing. I will say, though, it's kind of interesting because the three of us are going to give our opinions throughout this show on the music that we're hearing. And constructive opinions. Well, absolutely. And that's the point, I guess, is that for the people who submit their music and no doubt, we'll have some things to say tonight, which are a little bit. Let's use the word critical in the negative sense, rather than the overall sense. They've implicitly sort of sought our opinion and we're going to give it publicly. But hopefully that will be helpful to them, is the main thing that I hope. And I've got to say that we've done 15 episodes now, and I haven't actually told you guys, but I've received a number of emails from artists who have been on the show who have been really thankful for the opinions that people like you guys have given for their music and it's helped them to think about moving forward for the next releases and things. So I think that's really good. I've had a few personal messages as well on Instagram. Yeah, same here. So they're useful, very grateful. If in the criticism, constructive criticism, we give to help them out making better mixes or better music. So that's good. Absolutely. So I'm going to read out some comments here. We've got Doug here in the comments, he's saying negativity is alive and well, unfortunately. Yes and no, Doug, you know, I think that it depends on the people you hang out with. I personally try and try and seek people who are going to, you know, sort of help me grow in music, in life and everything.  Surprised I haven't said goodbye to Ed and Marlon now. But yeah, I get what you're saying, Doug, it certainly feel like that. And now sausages, nice to see sausage in there. Opinions like arseholes, everyone's got one. Yes, a classic old one, a drum drum thing from you there, Ed. He's not paying attention. Anyway, let's move on. The first piece of music in the show, because Ed is not paying attention, I'm going to have him read out the name of the next artist. It's a foreign language name as well, which should really, you know, eat away at his northern Englishness. So here it is, here it is. I'll let you read that one out, Ed, and we'll get some information. Ladies and gentlemen, coming up, we have No Mad Luke by DeMar Evans. Oh, that was good. I think it probably is DeMar. Anyway, so this song was recorded, mixed and mastered in Studio One. It's mainly got guitars in it, mainly guitars, some other things recorded with two SM57s and an SM7B. Guitar process with what's that plug in? Archetype Pliny by Neural DSP. Haven't got my hands on any of their stuff yet, but everything I've heard is really awesome and use a synth called Serum, which is pretty well known as well. I haven't personally used it, but very well known. And this music is solely instrumental, acoustic guitar inspired by artists such as Mike Dawes and Alexandra Misko. Again, these are virtuoso type guitarists. And I know Mike Dawes has gained a lot of notoriety recently, especially on YouTube. And indeed he's been supporting Tommy Emmanuel, who we heard from earlier. Anyway, the music he creates is meant to be story driven and emotionally captivating. Now, he also sent me a remix of this, which was really quite different, I have to say. However, I decided to play the original because that's what's available on Spotify from him at the moment. So here we are. This is the song called Nomad Loop. So that was Nomad Loop. And funnily enough, I was going to go to Ed first and he's the one who popped up. Ed, it's going to be opinion. Merely my opinion, let's be clear. OK, I only wrote three things down. Firstly, the the guitar motif caught my attention straight away. I like that kind of feel. A little bit Metallicaesque, which is always a win. From a mixing point of view, it sounds like there's quite a lot of compression going on, but there's also some resonant frequencies on the guitar, which as a result of the compressor are just created just a bit muddy and a bit washy. I would suggest putting an EQ before the compressor. It's also worth always trying an EQ after the compressor. And sometimes you need both. So before the EQ, you can and there's so many great plugins now. Marlon did a fantastic video this week on the new Rezo plugin from mastering the mix, which is brilliant. And I know is it soothed does a similar thing that finds your resonant frequencies and also Clara by Sonox is a very good plugin for identifying resonant frequencies and giving you the ability to the option of removing them. And these plugins use AI and identify them for you if you don't want to do the old school way of sweeping us across the spectrum and finding the frequencies for yourself if you don't know what they are by your ear. So I'd suggest EQing before the compressor. There was a tuning issue when the bass came in. There was one note on the guitar that was flat, I think. And then the guitar melody or is it a synth or a guitar? But the high pitch melody came in and I thought that was lovely. And I was thinking, hang on, that's come in after a minute. Can't have come in after maybe 20 seconds just to keep the song like the harmonics, maybe the harm. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I thought it was really nice. Isn't that a pitch, pitch something like an octave up? Effect or doubling or something like that? I'm not a guitarist, I don't want to guess. But I thought the melody was lovely. Could it have come in earlier? Now, from that point, I felt like it was very repetitive and I found myself drifting off. But I mean, my attention spans minimal today at best. But it did drift off a little bit. However, I really did like the sound of the reverb on the high-pitched guitar sound on the melody. I like that. OK, cool. Interesting, a lot of the stuff that I was going to say there. So thanks very much for that aid. I always do that. What a talent. Marlon. Yeah, as usual, Ed's already covered most of it. I wrote down it's over compressed, over limited like crazy. It's so squashed, this song. There's no dynamics. I would cut the intro, I thought it was a bit long. And it's also mentioned in the comments of the video. And then I agree, the bass timing, especially at the start, seems off at times, right? The year that bass is struggling to keep up. And to be critical, I got distracted after a while, like 30 seconds in, 40 seconds in. I noticed my attention wandered away. I could not keep attention to this song. There's too much of the same thing going on and on. I would really mix it up to make it more interesting, a little bit more dynamics would help for sure. And maybe chord changes or something like that. So that's that's what I got from this song. You know, I think there's a number of people who agree with you in the comments there as well. A number of people were saying that they would like to see more chord changes. Sausage thought that the bass was out of time here and there. Someone said, sort of reminded them of tubular bells a little bit in a way. Brad Ferguson was saying he wanted chord changes. So was Chris. Sorry if I get your name wrong, Chris Peasy. So here's my take on it. First of all, to Demere. I think it's Demere, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly. I'm not sure which stage you're at, you know, in your sort of music making career or or pastime, whatever it is. I think context for this piece of music would be interesting. So if it was for a piece of film, for example, it may work really, really well, even with the repetitiveness, because sometimes for background music for film, you actually really don't want it to be distracting at all. You want it there to sonically create an atmosphere, but maybe not be that interesting musically. So if that was a context, then I feel that it kind of worked a lot better. But in terms of a standalone piece of music, I think that one of the tools we have in music is repetition. And we can if we overuse it, it's one of the worst things that we can do as well. So we need repetition to create familiarity within music, to create hooks and things like that. But once you overdo it and I think these days that we need to break the rules a little bit more. So for example, a chord progression like we had there, I think it was four chords, usually at the beginning of a song, a guitar or a piano or a run around it twice and then vocals have come in. And I think these days we've got to go, oh, let's just do it once or maybe straighten with the vocal because over the last 30, 40 years, those formulas have been used so much that people can switch off like really, really quickly if we're not careful. So but I disagree with Ed and Marlon in the overall production demand. I thought that you were on to something. I thought the production was fine. I didn't really detect the over compression that these guys detected, but, you know, they may have better hearing than me on it. But in my opinion, for sure. But but I, I I sort of was more focused because I let me put it this way, the mix and the production, I didn't think was the really problematic part of it. So the other thing is from a guitarist point of view, and I don't know if anyone would agree with me in the comments. It may be my hearing again. There was one string, there was one string, an open string, maybe the B string, I think was being played throughout the whole piece, which is fine. That's the kind of a drone kind of thing. I think it was slightly out of tune, that string, just ever so slightly. And it was kind of bothering me a bit. So when you release your music and you put it out there, especially if you're trying to put it out there in the context of the artists that you mentioned, those things have kind of got to be right and got to be second checked and the things like the bass guitar being sort of out of time was definitely was out of time in places, which kind of can make the I mean, you don't have to perfect time. I'm not saying put everything on the grid or anything like that, but it can make the the listener sounded feel a little bit uncomfortable when they're listening to it, when that bass is just slightly out like that. So yeah, it's OK when something is out of tune. It really doesn't matter if you listen to the songs by Richard Dawson. I don't know if you know him. Guitar player as well. He uses a lot of detuning detuned guitars and it sounds absolutely great because he intends to use that. If you're not intending to be out of tune, then it can be really gnarly at times. Yeah, and I have to say what some interesting stuff recently in terms of tuning, I didn't know this, but I was watching. Rick Beato did a great interview with Brian May from Queen and he was explaining that on the outro of Bohemian Rhapsody, that last little bit where it goes really quiet. And there's like, I'm not going to sing it, but there's a little bit of guitar just on the end. Brian May was saying that he it was it was actually out of tune that he was bending the notes course on guitar. You can only you can't you can only bend sharp. Yeah, you can't bend flat. And he was saying he just hadn't got quite right. So he didn't bend either. I think he went too sharp on it and it bothered him for like 30 years that that was slightly out of tune. I've got to say, I never, ever noticed it. He was saying that this is the interesting thing for me for all those people out there who are cynical about new technology that when they got they got the opportunity to remaster, I think in 2005. He didn't really record it. He pitch corrected it. Oh, just so you know. So for all those people who you should never pitch correct, you should just re-record it until you get it right. Yeah, yeah, you can argue with Brian May about that, I guess. But yeah, so his opinions are right. And I think the other one, what's the one? Can't remember the one, but it starts off with Freddie Mercury, the drums and then the guitar comes in. He definitely comes in. We will rock you. We will rock you. Definitely comes in a little bit either out of tune or out of time. I've always noticed that over the years. Didn't stop it being an absolute hit. So, you know, take up speaking of speaking of speaking of pitch ban and out of tune. If you listen to Roxanne by the police. Yes, I don't know if they have corrected it, but if you listen to the at least the older versions, you can hear in a very first second, you hear the tape pitching up like, yeah, so fun, so fun. So it's interesting. I think what my sort of thing is, is obviously bad timing and pitch cannot prevent an absolutely incredible song from becoming, you know, a massive hit that will last for decades. However, you do have to have a fantastically incredible song to overcome those flaws. Yeah, there's a few people with Mac songs that he's dry army, but seven nation seven nation army by the White Stripes. If you listen to the timing of that, the drums, not that great. Do you know the song Free by Denise Williams? Don't know. That's a 70 song. It's basically over in a fire with a great singer. But that song starts, I think 20 BPM slower than it ends. I think that's OK. Maybe maybe it's intended, but it's good. Yeah, I think regarding songs as they were recorded without clicks speeding up is is fine. I mean, there's a couple of great fleet with Mac songs that tempos dive in the middle after the first chorus. That's fine. I think what we're talking about in this track is the subdivision timings between the instruments. And this is something I as a drummer, I can't help it. I guess so anal about quantizing when I do my my songs. But I would say timing discrepancies are the difference between a good sounding track and a professional sounding track. Don't get me wrong.  You know, I've quantized drums in Pro Tools once and once I did that, I could hear every single track that had been Pro Tools quantized because there's a there's a there's a feel to it that as a drummer isn't natural. The average person isn't going to notice. But in terms of just tweaking the odd bass note that's one gin or the odd guitar line, if it is a loop, if all these sections in this nomad loop have been copied and pasted, just be worth spending time just getting those four bars or whatever the loop is. Just get them to sit right and the whole production will be elevated considerably. Yeah, I should mention that I said at the beginning that he also sent me a remix, which I decided not to play because it's it's not the version that was originally sent to me. And it's also not the version on Spotify. The remix has got drums on it. And it's sort of, I don't know, pretty electronic electronic drums. And that makes the whole thing feel like very, very, very different. But as I say, that's the reason I didn't play. You touched on that there. Now you say, Ed, I wonder whether he didn't quantize the bass and get the quantized settings wrong, you know, like if some things in say straight sixteenths and you you actually accidentally, you know, do it dotted like triplets and and it just doesn't work. You know, I am not particularly a fan of quantizing to a grid. Per se, I do really like instrumental timings. That's really important. So the bass has to be in timing with the drums and stuff like that. I don't mind if it goes a bit like this at all. It actually helps a song in most instances. But I lost my train of thought. That's good. What I sometimes do is I actually manually line things up with each other, not all the time, but just occasionally.  So a bass guitar and a kick drum, which are supposed to hit the same note, not all just exactly with each other. It can be like magic, you know, often that can be just before. It's a difference between I think it's a very small instruments line them up. So we hear the other remix. I don't have it to hand. He only sent me the way file and I can't just play way files on here, unfortunately, but yeah, I'll send it to you, Ed. Talking about it, Ed, you've got a choice. I'm going to talk about DistroKid at the moment. Now or later. I'm going to give you the choice about you would like people to know about the spot playlist feature spot playlist. And if you know, if you talk about it, you get 50 percent of all revenue. My guess, I just paid myself for a load of DistroKid stuff. Actually, this week, that was fun. Let's go spotlight. OK, cool. Interesting choice. By feature, it gets entered into this competition where it gets played alongside other songs and people will vote for which of the two they see on the screen is their favorite. Now, the bit more likely you are to appear in one of DistroKid's playlists on Spotify. And that means your music's got a much better chance of being heard. So you simply go ahead and select one of your songs. And then you've just got to select a 29 second clip. The best way to go with this. And you've got this nice to do that. You simply then select the connect with Spotify button and you're away. There you go. Thanks for choosing that. It's quite an interesting feature and a bit of fun as well. The next song up has got quite an interesting backstory. This one, let's have Marvin read out the actual fact. Oh, no. Here we go. Easy. Can you do it with a Jackson? Yeah, but I'm just interested. The next song is Dave Sweeney with Gersh. This song caught my attention in the cakewalk in my cakewalk group. Message Dave and say, could we put it on the show? Just a bit of an interesting one. Now, it was inspired by a news article about a person who went out at night time and was dressing up in a creepy clown outfit. And people were taking photos and he got a bit of a clown and he was dubbed. He was dubbed Gags, which is that's what it's the the the type. So background on the actual production chose a minor key with a weird sounding thing, since I can speak, to represent his personality. He wanted to create something unsounding music to match the character of this sort of clown phenomena. Productions, by the way, I just love songs which are by a thought and ideas. I think they're thinking about the music in terms of it. Create a song was this is interesting as well. He produced this after watching my series, which I had a series which I created early on in my YouTube career called Record Mix Release, where I sort of went through the whole process of recording a song and releasing it on disroking. In fact, he followed that and said that that great really influenced him, which I'm really surprised by because whatever you guys think of the mix, I actually think it's a better mix than I could do. So figure that one out. So plugins he used were Fab EQ or some good choices, in my opinion. Virtual instruments were Easy Drama 2, Ed. Modo bass, Raven's Croft piano, which is one of the best pianos around and expense. And he mixed the song over several weeks, taking lots of time in between. So you can gain perspective, Mark, Dave Sweeney. Yeah, all sounds. This is my initial reaction. The exact opposite of the last song, isn't it? Right. Instantly, the song worked. I really, really liked it. Right from the intro, that mood, right? The mood he sets with the sample mood. It's a bit of a super-tramp-meeting-musical song for me, vibe-wise, of course, that he used and the way he sings. On this, I think it's an excellent song. The only thing I can comment on is in the mix at times it's a bit sharp in the four to six K range. You can hear that filtered with the distortion. It's also later in the song on this. It's a bit sharp, but it's the only thing I can comment on mix-wise. I would dip it a bit or do it in mastering or in the mix. But that's actually all I can say about this song. It's really good. I really like it. You were frowning a lot. Yeah, I love this. Yes, this is a circus theme. I was thinking Psycho Circus by Kiss kind of vibes. It fits the story of this guy dressing up as a clown and wandering around Mike's neighborhood. Might even be Mike. And then I thought I'm so glad Mike's changed platforms to restream because hearing that in mono would have been atrocious because there was a great use of stereo on that. So Mike, well done. I love this. I quite like the... Is it an envelope filter on the VV? Yeah, some sort of filter with an envelope on it, yeah. Chorus, maybe? I don't know. Yeah, very theatrical, perfectly matched the subject matter. The lyrics quite suited other than telling him to go home. That was the only lyric that... Bo-esque sound. The arrangement development on this is spot-on. And as Marlon said, the opposite to the last track. Things were happening. Every is a bit of a pop modern part of a better phrase and then it's popular and you need to keep people's attention. But this song did that. Something changed every four bars, something developed. Incredible orchestration between all the instruments. I was thinking there's one bit when the drums broke. Fantastic programming. Great attention to detail. The danger with programming is just to get it together and it just sounds rubbish. But the detail they've put into this, massive thumbs up on that. It works well with the bass and then the... Nothing's overplaying in creating the groove of the song. And this is what turned me on so much about this. I love all that interplay stuff. It's something I think about extensively when I'm doing my tracks with Where's the Space? This was very well done and as a result, I think it sat very well. And it was very musical, creative section. They've had a few different sections, maybe six or so and a few of them repeated nicely. I didn't get bored. I thought the snare sound was a little bit weak. I want more of a rim shot backbeat sound just to give it some drive because the instrumentation is driving the song in this. I just wanted a bit more of a solid backbone to the snare drum but that's the drummist, purist opinion. But yeah, overall I loved it and I'd like to listen to it again at the end of the show, Mike. Yeah, okay, we might do that as the outro. I'm not going to add anything. I did enjoy this song right away. I remember listening to it, I think it was last Sunday morning and I was just like, ah, yes, thank you. This is just fun. It just cheered me up, the whole thing. But also, beyond that, look, I think it's a huge compliment to me. Thank you if he's created this after watching my series. Then great, I should do this as an advert for my series. I actually do think it was mixed way better than a lot of the songs that I've mixed in the past, to be honest with you, so. The student becomes the master. I know. Exactly. Wait, you can stay closer. The student becomes the master. But thanks for the compliment anyway. A few who are getting bits of this on YouTube. It seems to me like it's buffering on YouTube but we're simultaneously streaming to Facebook. It seems okay on Facebook in my creative source group if you'll tell over there, but sorry about that. We or I cannot do anything about it and it's a bit of a shame. It seems as though it may be okay now looking at it over on YouTube, so thanks for hanging in there in the chat. Marlon, you've got a choice. You can either let people know about, why don't we go for here. You can let them know about the pricing of DistroKid or you can let them know about just DistroKid in general or the Wheel of Playlist. The what? The Wheel of Playlist. It's one of their features. Oh, do that one. Okay. Can you point to DistroKid for me right now? Wait, this is... Yeah. That's it. That's all here. Just say, thank you, DistroKid. You're awesome. Just say that for me, Marlon. Thank you, DistroKid. You're awesome. Let's hear about their Wheel of Fortune. One of the ways to actually get your music heard on Spotify is to get onto a playlist. Now, DistroKid offers a really fun with their Wheel of Playlist feature. Simply head over to your DistroKid account, go to the top right where it says Goodies, Playlist, and then you start off simply by selecting a song, something you've already released and then click on Connect with Spotify. Now, obviously the further or likely people are to actually... So what DistroKid do here with this feature is they give you three chances to spin a wheel, a kind of a Wheel of Fortune type of thing going on here. Now, the best result of those three spins determines your number in the playlist. And as I say, the higher up you are, the better. So on this occasion, I achieved 1,088. You can try every day if you like. So maybe that's something you'd like to do to actually get your music in a playlist on Spotify. Cool. Have you tried that one, Ed? I have, Mike. What gives that away? I just thought I'd just get you out of your bubble there. Ed, in fact, you can read out the name of our final artist and song here tonight. Northern Accent. Northern Accent. Northern Accent, please. Introduce him from... Very good. Actually, we're on Accents. That was a Yorkshire accent. Can you do a Jordy accent? I'm going to get a Jordy and Scals mixed up. Wait, I'm on. All right, now. Maybe how much Scottish? All right, on the creative... Running in tonight on Creative Source, we have Kevin Worley doing Art of Stone. Yes, yes, yes. I love it. I love it. Very good. Very good from Accents. So the song was, after a heated conversation about social responsibility versus social freedom. I don't think I want to know about the context of this conversation, although I can probably guess. Usually, Kevin performs this with his wife as a duer and a single guitar, and that's something to keep in mind. That sounds familiar, Mike. Yes, something to keep in mind when you listen to this song. I've got a comment about that later. He used a product called Band in a Box, which I've heard a lot of people use in conjunction with Cakewalk. I've never used it personally. Doesn't probably sound like my cup of tea, but each to their own. And I think with Band in a Box, you kind of like give it some chords and it automatically creates a bit of an arrangement of bass, drums and piano or something like that for you. Anyway, he's done that. Now, he does one of the issues, because I do ask people to talk about what issues they have in their production. He was saying he suffers from hearing loss in high frequencies. So older fellows like me know about this. Just you've got to be very, very aware as you get on in your years, especially just about those high frequencies, you can easily misjudge the high end of your mix. I think there's ways around it personally, but yeah. And he also mentioned that he was using a really old pair of monitors, which he'd got years ago in an untreated room when he mixed this. And he's since upgraded to some IK Multimedia i-Loud monitors. I didn't use those, must get my hands on some, and using the acoustic calibration software as well. And he's also using Slate VSX headphones. Have either of you guys used those headphones at all? No, I reached out to Slate this week following my video partly reviewing the Adam Audio SP5s. And they basically said no, they weren't interested in doing a collaboration with me. It doesn't mean you have to be negative about them, but it may affect your opinion, I guess. Oh, by the way, Ed. I'm not going to pay for them, for sure. I've got half a dozen set of headphones. Just to sidetrack, didn't you, those Adam Audio, which ones did you have, the five inch ones or the 18 inch ones? The speakers, the TV T5Vs, yeah. Yeah, did you enjoy those without spoiling your video? Ooh, everyone should have watched the video, shouldn't they? I watched a bit of the video earlier on. No, you didn't. I turned them on and genuinely, very impressed, immediately. Great sound, frequency response is pretty flat. In these kind of low cost speakers, yes, there's a tiny bit of, I don't want to say distortion, because it's not really distortion. THD sound when you boost them. There's a tiny bit of that, but they go loud and it's barely audible. Yeah, really impressed. Fantastic. Revens as well, right? Reven tweeters, right? Also the small ones. Yeah, they do. Yeah, I think across the range with Adam or everything's. Yeah, but I didn't know if the small ones, also Adam, the cheap ones, that's what they do. All right, well, let's listen to this song anyway. We've digressed Hard of Stone from Kevin Walley. Get comfortable, this is a five minute song, guys. So have a listen to this. Listen, keep the story in mind as well. You were a friend of a friend. Started out fine when the talk was live. The guy's a bit near the end, but you seem to see around. The blinders that he wore. He was so wrapped up in what was in it for him. He considers life a sport. Holy, it's all that matters. That's all it is. Try to tell my story to a man with a heart of stone. He wouldn't listen to what the facts would tell him. He couldn't see that the lies were his. He wouldn't open his eyes, no matter what he'd shown. He's got a heart of stone. He's got a heart of stone. He was so down to the meeting, hoping to stay in my feet. They wouldn't even obtain the fact I had something to say. They didn't even notice that the time was growing short. They were so wrapped up in their own little world they considered life a sport. Only to win, that's all that matters. Only to win, that's all it is. Try to tell my story to a people with hearts of stone. They wouldn't listen. They couldn't know. They couldn't know what the facts would tell him. They couldn't see that the lies were theirs. They wouldn't open their eyes, no matter what they'd shown. They've got hearts of stone. They've got hearts of stone with heart of stone. The truth doesn't matter, it's a place that can be reached first.  Are there any answers? Listen to me, y'all. He's got a heart of stone. He's got a heart of stone. He's got a heart of stone. He's got a heart of stone. Sorry, thank you, Ed. Assuming anyone can hear, we're going to go to Ed first. Folks, do check the links in the description down. Links to the YouTube channels of my guests on tonight, both Ed and Marlon. They both have great channels. Marlon particularly focuses in my mind on great plug-in reviews. Ed does some fantastic stuff on hardware, particularly on audio interfaces, microphones, headphones, that kind of reviews on that kind of stuff. So definitely check that out. And also, I'm not really familiar with Marlon's music, but I really do enjoy Ed's music. So he's a great drummer. He's done some great mixes as well. Not an issue. Ed, I would love to hear from you on this track that we've just been listening to. The channel shout and the kind words, Mike. I appreciate that. Let's talk about this one. My initial reaction was drum sound and I'm being kind, I think, by saying this is not appropriate for the song. It sounds like it and the file of a T.D., Roland T.D., whatever. Could be programmed. But there's some humanized bits in that, I think. Lady Antebellum, sorry, Lady A. They had to rename there. That's a great story, by the way. If anyone knows, that's not brilliant. Anyway, that's a good story. They're a music production. Marlon, can you tell that Ed only had about four hours sleep last night? I just want to tell you just a little word about it.  It's very interesting. Let me kind of say this isn't appropriate to the song. Check out Lady A. Stuff, their production is unbelievable for this kind of, it came in on the vocals and I thought they were very, this person's clearly very good at delivering backing vocals with themselves. Now, that might sound attention to detail with your diction, with your syllables, your phrasing, when you're coming off words, when you're starting words, how you're emphasizing words. And I like the vocal melodies. I like the phrasing and I liked the fact that they were bold to take space between some of the lines. It's very tempting just to fill all the space with lyrics because you can do, but I think some of the greatest songs aren't afraid to perform on with another bit. It could be another line or that's good. Now, with the vocals, I felt like the vocals were the only real source of development in the song. Instrumentally, it was very repetitive until the middle eight. So instrumentally, I wanted more development. Now, the song works, I think, because of the melodic development and the melodic development is good and the phrasing development is good. I like that. But if it had some instrumental development as well, it would elevate this song again. Everything just going on a loop all the way through. I don't think works as we've discussed in this live stream already. What else was there? I wasn't convinced by the bass sound being appropriate for the song as well. I thought it was a bit thin and a bit toppy. But then it seemed to change towards the end after the middle eight seem to just get better. It seemed to fit in the mix a bit better. And the mix is a bit heavy on quite decide which frequencies. But certainly on my headphones coming in about 800 to one and a half K was a bit prominent and not necessarily in a nice easy listening way. OK, interesting. Well, Marlon would love to have something left for him to say. Sorry, guys, I do have a habit of saying that. No, it's because I have an opinion and I space it. You do. You make the most of this point. So what's your opinion? Everyone wants to say yeah, come on now. We're going to go to Marlon. But as I say earlier, do check out the links in the description. Marlon's released some really interesting videos recently, particularly the last couple of videos. I found them really, really good and interesting. Check them out. He's done some great reviews. There are some great plugins as he always does. So follow the link in the description for that. Thank you, Marlon. One day I'm going to actually listen to some of Marlon's music. I have listened to some of it, like your kind of experimental forty five minute death metal thing. I am. No, it's really broad. I have several projects going on. My thirty nine minute doom blast beat metal, which is only in a really the only play a that's right. Life performance. I play with a bass, which is tuned in three octaves in a. It's lovely. Awesome. Anyway, getting back to this. Yeah, sure. Um, you pointed out at the start that hearing loss was an issue and acoustics was an issue and more. And that's all over the song. It doesn't help to, in my opinion, to point out a specific thing. But all all things you hear in this song mix wise are due to bad acoustics and poor listening conditions. You can hear all the mistakes, which happened with a two roomy two five year room and also the best thing would be to put those speakers in a very damped cupboard and remix everything. Give you all different perspective. It won't be perfect at all. But maybe just the headphones, maybe just the room out of the equation could be, could be. But I think it's I don't necessarily know if that is also your headphones can skew your mixing perspective also really badly. That's because of that, there are a lot of headphone mixing tools out there, which I will release a new video on in exactly 52 minutes. That's a nice takeaway, isn't it? I'll be doing a bit tonight. Yeah, I care. Yeah, here's your bedtime, right? What worked for me for this song is actually the tempo. If this were any slower, it would be I would lost any attention after I think 30 or one minute, 30 seconds to one minute. So I think the tempo was actually really good for this song. And it kept the pacing going on. So that was good. I agree with Ed on everything he said. There's literally no development in the song at all, not even between choruses and verses. It's all one dynamic. That is actually something which is not dependent of your listening of your acoustics or hearing loss. That is arrangement wise, something you can work on. Yeah, that's about everything I have to say. And I can agree with everything Ed said for the rest. It's interesting, the last sort of point you made there, because when I got the way file for this song, this is particularly striking for this style of music, which I don't think this isn't a country song, but I'm going to hazard a guess that they come from a country background. The way file was like a sausage for this song. It was it was just and I don't even think that was compression. I mean, it was partly compression, but there was the song did. I'm not necessarily meaning mix wise, that has no dynamics. I mean, arrangement wise, you can do a lot. But adding a guitar, changing up the bass, reminding me of the bass. The bass had also had some timing issues. A little bit here, yeah. I think electronic keyboard bass sound like samples to me. And this can be that sort of touches upon my sort of main point. And I tried to highlight this when I was introducing it because Kevin and his wife do perform this song regularly as a duo live. And you can hear from the quality of their voices that they are experienced live performers. OK, you touched on the harmony and quite typical of, you know, partners who sing together, it was really nice, tight harmony. They obviously work together a lot. They know what they know, what each other are going to do kind of thing. What I would like to say to Kevin, if when you're watching, I don't know if you're in the chat at the moment. So this is a storytelling song. This is really important. This I picked up in some of the lyrics, some of the background for sure. But the music doesn't, in my opinion, suit this song, right? I would encourage you to do whatever you do live normally with your acoustic sound. You normally play it with just acoustic guitar and your vocal. Make a recording of that. I would nothing against band in a box. I haven't used it, but forget your band in a box. You may have used that as a kind of a crutch thinking, oh, when I record this song, I've got to have this whole band. Try and record this just as an acoustic song. I bet it would come to life a lot more than actually having all that backing in there at all.  But I really think, Kevin, maybe you've done this out of a lack of confidence, maybe thinking, oh, you know, just acoustic and vocal is boring. Nothing can be further from the truth with a good storytelling song. Then people would just hone in on the lyrics. And yeah, I still think maybe it's a little too long even under that circumstance. I don't know. But you see length of a song is only dependent on how interesting you can make it for that length of time. And Marlon's touched on it there and it as well. Dynamics really is a part of it. And I know I was talking about dynamics in terms of, you know, that sausage wave, but obviously dynamics can be created through arrangement as well as Marlon was saying. So like, I definitely feel, Kevin, I'd love to hear this song again. Actually, can I challenge you to record this song again, but just with acoustic guitar, maybe a bass just to add some low end in there. But I would ditch the drums and everything else in there personally. Maybe instead of the bass with a cello. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah, something like a cello. I would try first just acoustic guitar and vocals. And it reminds me, it doesn't have to be acoustic. It can even be electric guitar depends on what you want. But I really love Jeff Buckley's live at C&A's EP. I don't know if you know that EP. It's so good. It's just guitar and his voice. It really draws me in right from the very first second you listen to it. It has only his guitar and only his voice. So you don't need anything in backing or whatever to tell a great story. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that hidden under, you know, this accompaniment here is probably actually a really good song. So I really encourage, Kevin, thanks for sending your song in. And I hope that's going to be helpful to you. And sometimes I just a little story. I remember there's a song here in Australia called The Band Played Walsing Matilda. It's a kind of an old folk song about the First World War. And I used to perform it live when I was gigging solo. And, you know, people kind of love that song and they liked my rendition of it. It was just me and guitar. And then I decided to make a CD and sell a gig. So I recorded this song. But in my mind, you know, the song had an orchestra and all kinds of things on it. I spent four months recording this song, tracking it, getting these perfect string parts and everything. Loads of harmonies. And I played it to a friend and we just kind of soloed just the voice and the guitar. And he said to me, it sounds so much better with just the voice and the guitar. You should teach the rest. And I was like, yeah, I know it does, doesn't it? It's the it's the MTV unplugged effect. If a song works unplugged, just acoustic and vocals. It's a great song. If it relies on production and doesn't work on its own, then put it in the bin. Yeah, absolutely. And I can see we've actually got the comments that you can see me putting them up on screen here right towards the end of the stream. Better late than never, I guess. But there you go. Thanks so much for the people who have been watching. Don't forget to if you want to send your music in for some for some constructive criticism, then please do that. Follow the links in the description down below. Another thanks to the sponsor for the show, DistroKid. Who are doing a great job of distributing people's music. And of course, a huge thanks to my thanks to my bearded friends here tonight. Look at them either side of me with their ginger beards. Full of opinions, these guys, and I'm glad of it because where would we be without your opinions on these shows? Thank you so much again for the people who have been sticking around in the live chat here. There's a few of you still left and you've had to hang in there because there was a lot of buffering on YouTube tonight, which surely just really spoils your enjoyment of, especially when you're trying to listen to some music tracks. But you've hung in there and I appreciate it so very much. Folks, do keep sending your music into me as well. Some of you in there, we've listened to some of your music and I'm quite prepared to put songs by an artist on twice. Ed asked for it and I'm going to do it. I'm going to play the second song, which was buffering a lot actually in fairness, it was buffering a lot. So we're going to leave on that song. But Ed, any final words from you before you nod off to sleep for the day? I think the theme of the live show has been to consider orchestration. And I would say consider moving the song along by bringing in different elements. Every four bars is a good rule. It doesn't have to be anything much. It can be a tambourine or moving. Even suddenly, yeah, it can be it can be a backing vocal. It can be a delay on a vocal. It can be a call and response. It can be anything, just something to give some audible change every few bars. But ultimately, you know, as we're going to listen to now, a great song is a great song. Cool. Marlon, anything you that I mean, Ed usually seems to speak for you, but anything you can add. No, I'm not a nice. I'm better in UK, right? Still, I food over there. Now, I just had a nice outro, actually, just just a goodbye. But then you have to play the song, Mike, so I don't know if you want to do that. I will do that. Thank you. OK, thank you for hanging out. Make sure to subscribe to Mike's channel and we'll see you at the next three.