Steve [00:00:00]:
Hey, everybody. Steve here. Today we're going to be talking to a gentleman by the name of David Gerhart, and he is from a company called Musiversal. Now, I don't know if you've heard of musiversal or not, but it blew me away. I just found out about this company about a month ago, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to try and kind of summarize what I think Musaversal kind of is. And then I'm going to ask David. First of all, David, thank you so much for spending some time with me today.
David [00:00:26]:
No, of course, Steve, thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it. A ton.
Steve [00:00:29]:
Yeah, this is great. So there are so many things that I think about this company that are beneficial for people, even myself. I mean, I think about, you know, where I, where I was five years ago and where I am now and how I could have used this all along the way. Let me, let me just first start by kind of describing what I think musiversal is. It's a website that you can go to if you're a musician and you need some sort of assistance in your recording. So let's say. Let me. Let me go a little bit further here.
Steve [00:01:01]:
So let's say I'm writing a song and I've got the guitar part because I'm a guitar player, but I'm a horrible singer. So I've come up with some lyrics. I've come up with maybe a melody or something like that, but I don't have anybody near me that I can have sing. Maybe I don't have the recording capability to have somebody sing. Even if I had a singer, I don't have a setup for someone to sing in my house or something. I could go to Musaversal and I could have hire somebody to do the singing for me. Is that, is that kind of right?
David [00:01:33]:
Yeah, absolutely. You know, you have, you know, like you said, you've got some lyrics written, you've got a guitar part, and you basically say, I want a vocal, a vocal, you know, a vocalist to bring this to life. And, you know, you can go to them. And we have a variety of different vocalists, male, female vocals, and they all have different ranges covered, and those ranges are shown on their profiles, on the website. So you kind of pick, you pick a vocalist that you want to work with, you can listen to demos of things they've sang previously and kind of pick one that works for you. And then whatever sound you're going for, you should have something on there for you.
Steve [00:02:09]:
Okay, perfect. So how does styles work, like, musical styles in Musaversal? Like, if I wanted something that was a bit more ballad or I wanted something that maybe was a bit more rock and edgy. Are there different styles or different people that cover different styles?
David [00:02:26]:
Yeah, you'll see that in their profiles. Like, they'll have preferences or not preferences, but they'll have typical genres that they've covered off in the past. You might hear some of their demos and think, like, wow, this would be perfect for this. Some of our vocalists might specify that they don't do a specific genre. Like, maybe. I think we have one vocalist that specifies very specifically that they don't do metal because they don't do the screams. Right. So, like, that kind of guttural sound maybe isn't perfect for them.
David [00:02:54]:
Right. So they kind of make it very clear up front, like, hey, I love metal. I like the music. I don't sing it. Right. But, yeah, you'll have vocalists that cover off a bunch of different styles. And, you know, generally speaking, we find that there's something on there for everybody. If that's not the case, we'd be surprised.
David [00:03:12]:
That being said, you know, everybody has visions of their own, and it, you know, if it doesn't work out, you know, it's unfortunate, but at the end of the day, a lot of different genres are covered off.
Steve [00:03:21]:
Perfect. Okay. So somebody comes into the world of musaversal, they become a member. And so now this is kind of what I want to get into is, so if I've written, I've got my guitar, maybe I'm writing. We'll keep it easy. I'm writing an acoustic thing, so I've come up with just a simple chord progression, maybe for a verse and for a chorus. And I've got some lyrics and whatever. And now I'm going to book a session.
Steve [00:03:46]:
But I need a drummer, I need a bass player, and I need a singer. I need all three of these things from Musaversal. I could get all three of these things from Musaversal. Is that right?
David [00:03:59]:
Yeah, absolutely. And that's what's so cool about the model is, right. Like, you pay this $200 flat rate, and you can book as many sessions as you can book that month. The average user is booking anywhere from five to seven sessions a month. Some people as many as 1012 15. And so what's awesome about it is that exact example that you just described. Right? Like, you might come in with a guitar part and some lyrics written, and you might say okay, you know, I have this guitar part. I'm gonna get a bass player to play along.
David [00:04:26]:
They lay you down an awesome bass line, and now you can take the guitar that you have and the bass to a drummer, and you can say, hey, can you give me an awesome drum part to go along with this? And so now the drummer plays his part, and now you say, okay, I want a piano on top of it. So you go get a piano player, and then you get a vocalist to do the top line demo or the top line recording. Now, all of a sudden, you put together this incredible demo with professional session musicians, wildly experienced session musicians, and you put together this demo for a flat rate of $200 a month. And then you can jump in and you can say, okay, I'm going to mix it on my own. And then I don't know the first thing about mastering. So I'm going to go to a musaversal mastering engineer, and mastering is included in unlimited. And you book a session, and now all of a sudden you get it mastered, and you have a radio ready track for less than $200 a month. 199 a month.
Steve [00:05:17]:
That's crazy. Okay, so now you're gonna. So I'm gonna book this bass player that we were just talking about. I'm gonna book this drummer that we were just talking about. So how long are the sessions, generally, with these musicians?
David [00:05:29]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good question. So, the sessions, one session is 35 minutes long. So the session musicians will receive files from you, the user, beforehand, and they will prepare for that sessions ahead of time. They'll have it all loaded up, ready to go. So when you jump in, it's really like they're jumping right into it. They're playing it for the first time, and you're going to say, oh, it sounds great. Or, hey, I would like to actually make this little change.
David [00:05:54]:
I had thought about it since I sent my materials in and I wanted to change this. And they'll say, okay, cool, no worries. And so the sessions are 35 minutes long. You'll get a ton of takes within that time. But one of the things that people do is if they have a more complicated piece or if they have a. A longer piece of music, for example, they might do something where they actually book two sessions back to back. So they'll actually run a 70 minutes session, and that'll count as two sessions, but they'll run a 70 minutes session, so you can actually have two bookings at once.
Steve [00:06:22]:
That's great. Okay, well, that makes sense. So during those sessions, then that's when the revisions would happen. So they're working in real time, working these parts out and deciding, yeah, we should switch this or whatever. And that's all happening. Right? Right during that part, which is great. So when you're dealing with a client like me who has signed up and so do I have to record it? Like, can I talk to you about it in real time during the session, or should I have. Should I need to record it beforehand and send it to you?
David [00:06:50]:
Yeah, so you can talk about it in real time. It's always helpful to have session files in advance, for example, you know, even things like a BPM, a key, a chord progression that the musician can play along with, you know, in that bass player example, um, if you can give them a key, BPM and chords, you know, they can give you. They can give you something to work with. Um, the cool part is, you know, the session happens. They play, and then, you know, you jump into the session and you're like, hey, can we change something here? Um, you know, it's totally fine. And, you know, people ask about revisions all the time. Well, the, one of the best parts is the revisions are happening in real time because you're having this session live with another musician. Right.
David [00:07:30]:
So the revision process is very seamless and done most of the time within the confines of the session. And so that revision process. And by the way, they're going to record every, they're going to keep the recording of every take that happens in the session. So once that session ends, after those 35 minutes, they will upload all of the stems that they've recorded on their side to the musaversal platform. And you will actually, at that point, be able, within 15 minutes after the session ends, to download all of the materials from the session. Like I said, within 15 minutes after it ends. So you'll have all the stems yourself.
Steve [00:08:06]:
That's great. So is there any requirements, just from a tech point of view, is there any requirements in terms of the software that they're using to record the DAW, we call it, or a bitrate or anything like that? Or is it anything?
David [00:08:19]:
Yeah, good question. So the way that it usually works is that the musician themselves records in their daw of choice. So they'll record in cubase or logic, Ableton pro tools, whatever they kind of use to record. Then if you are working in the same Daw as the musician, you can actually request the DAW file, the session file, for example, the logic file. You can request that. But generally speaking, what happens is they'll upload Wav files, and then you can actually specify the bitrate, the sample rate that you want them to record at. So you select that when you're booking the session. So it's one of the.
David [00:08:55]:
We say, have a session with a session musician in a few clicks. Well, one of those clicks is to select the sample rate that you prefer to be recording in.
Steve [00:09:03]:
That's awesome. Okay, so another question that I've got for you is, what other services? So I've done this now. I've gotten together with the bass player, then I got together with the drummer, then I got together with a singer, and so on. And now we're all back, and I want to maybe do something further than that. Are there any other services you offer other than the musician? Services? Like, is there any mixing or anything like that?
David [00:09:29]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So some of the additional services, and I can. There's a bunch of them, but what I can say is I can kind of go in order of the production process. So we actually have pre production help. Before somebody even books a session musician, we have pre production services where they can go to the musician and they can say, hey, can you help me build out the chord chart for a session musician to be able to play this? And so you can actually get. You send them a guitar part, and the pre production service will actually give you a chord chart as a result of that. And then you can take that to the rest of the sessions. Another one that's really cool is we have this new service called marketing advice, which is essentially, what do I do with a song once I have it already? And so somebody can come to us and we actually host marketing sessions where we can guide them on things like social media strategy, content creation, how to release your song, how to use distrokid or tunecore or something like that, which is pretty cool.
David [00:10:28]:
And what's also cool about it is we actually. A little bit about my background is I actually worked in the a and r space for a small distribution label in LA for a couple of years. We always talked about the waterfall release. How do you properly do a waterfall release? That's another thing that we get users asking about all the time. Pre production services, marketing advice services. We actually have a new session, a new service called Quick Mixes, which is, like, for demo purposes. Basically, you come in and you give us a song, and the engineer that's working on it will slap together a quick mix that is really intended for demo purposes, for songwriters, producers, etcetera. Another one that's really cool is we have mastering, and mastering is fully included in unlimited.
David [00:11:13]:
We have a couple of awesome mastering engineers. A bunch of Latin Grammys won between them. You know, it's really, really an amazing kind of full stack production service. So, yeah, off the top of my head, I'm just thinking pre production, quick mixes, mastering, marketing advice sessions, and then we do actually have a couple add on services that are things like full mixes, and full mixing is. It's a dollar 200 add on, but when you think about it, it's actually not that bad. Like 200. $200 for a mix is actually pretty, you know, it's really good. And so the mixing sessions are about 6 hours long and they happen offline.
David [00:11:50]:
But halfway through the session, at that three hour mark, the customer is actually scheduled to join live and listen to their mix back in real time. So that's where they start to give the opportunity to give feedback, do revisions, et cetera, and then the mix engineer steps away for the next amount of time, the next block of time, and makes those changes and revisions. Yeah, so that's an awesome one. And then another one is actually on the arrangement side, which is also an add on. Arrangement's really cool because you can have an idea for a song, and this happens to me all the time, where I'll have a chorus in mind or I'll have some verses, and I don't really know where I'm going with it. And sometimes I get blocked out, I get distracted, and I can go to an arranger on Musaversal, and for that add on fee, I can literally, you know, have him help me out with the arrangement and having just that second ear and saying, you know, what are the peaks and valleys we need to create in this song? What are the moments that we're trying to get after and what we want to highlight? And so having that extra ear and that expertise on the arrangement side of things is also extremely valuable.
Steve [00:12:53]:
That's amazing. So the big thing here is, again, what I always try to do is I try and find product out there that I think people that I deal with would really benefit from. And I find this amazing. And even though somebody might initially think $200 is a lot of money, $200 is not a lot of money. And I'm saying that honestly, because if you hire a session musician, most often you're going to get a solo on a song or a rhythm guitar on a song, and it's going to cost you three times that. So it's pretty incredible. Is there? What I'd love to be able to do is put some links in. If people have questions or anything like that where they can reach out.
Steve [00:13:33]:
So I'm hoping that I can grab that from you before we're done, and then when I'm doing the editing and everything, I'll put that in there for people. So if they do have questions about this, they can reach out to you, so. Exactly.
David [00:13:42]:
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Of course. And, you know, we're going to set up, you know, you know, we can have. They can literally email me personally. I'll be happy to respond to them. Um, but we also have our support line, um, you know, where it's. It's literally just support musaversal.com.
David [00:13:55]:
But, you know, we also have our team of. Of people that's actively working on customer success and making sure that everybody has a great experience. So, yeah, I have no doubt that if people have questions, if they want more clarity, they can reach out to us at any time and I'll be happy to answer, jump on a ten minute call, 15 minutes, whatever it takes, be happy to do so.
Steve [00:14:13]:
Yeah, that's awesome. Well, cool. I think that's all my questions. Like I said, I was blown away because there's so much to offer here. And if you're like, so many people are, you're at home, you've got a recording piece of software that you can use, but you don't have all these other musicians accessible. But you want to write your own music and you want to create stuff. You've got everything under one roof with this. With this app, with this software.
David [00:14:39]:
Yeah, we really do. And that's the story that we want to tell. You know, it's like, if you're an artist, if you're a producer, if you're a composer, you know, you write for film or games, like whatever, whatever the use cases for you as a creator of music, you know, we really believe that this platform has something for everybody, and we built it with that in mind. You know, the. The team here at Musaversal is, you know, 15 people deep right now. I would say out of 15 of those 13 are musicians themselves. I played the drums for my whole life. One of the co founders is a trained pianist.
David [00:15:14]:
There's just so many musicians on the team that this platform wasn't. It's not a bunch of suits that have built a platform to make money off music. It really is built by musicians, for musicians. And so when we came up with the model, and I shouldn't say we because I wasn't part of it, but when we. When they originally designed the model, it was kind of it was born out of the pandemic, right, which was session musicians could no longer go into studios. You know, gigs were shut down, tours were shut down. And so you had all these session musicians that have this amazing talent that, that were providing service for. For so many artists and producers and composers worldwide that no longer could do this, could do exactly that.
David [00:15:52]:
And so you had the people in the corporate world that could work from home, and nothing was changed. In fact, actually, a lot of life was improved because they could work from home, spend more time with the family, not have to commute, etcetera. And that reality for a lot of the working world was in some ways beneficial. And then for the session musician, it was like, oh, wow, I really have to figure something out here. And so the musaversal platform for session musicians was really born out of a way to provide session musicians with an opportunity to continue working. And then the cool part is we actually pay all of the musicians a full time salary, so they get a stable income. They get to work from home in their home studios. They get to set their own schedules, they get to go on tours and gig, and all of that flexibility is still there for them.
David [00:16:43]:
You know, we're not trying to ask for exclusivity. They can do whatever they want outside of musaversal, but what this does is allows them to have that access to, uh, and. And that freedom to work from home and to earn a stable income, you know, for almost the first time ever as a session musician, where you're getting a stable monthly paycheck. And so we've had musicians tell us, you know, I was able to put a mortgage down on a house. I'm at home with my kid more often. I was able to buy a car. And these are all things that the working world takes, you know, for granted. It's like, yeah, I have a monthly check, so of course I can, you know, take a car payment or put a mortgage down or, you know, whatever.
David [00:17:19]:
But I think the reality for musicians is that sometimes these things feel, like, risky, right? And now it's a world where, hey, we have stable income, and these things are no longer risky to me, but instead something that's very feasible and attainable. So that's how we were born, and that's the message that we want to send, is it's like we're not out here trying to just make a quick buck off music. The reality is that this is really a place that was built by musicians, for musicians, and is built for, you know, artists, producers, and composers worldwide to have high quality access to that talent.
Steve [00:17:53]:
Well, I'm hoping that we can have another conversation further down the line. Once. Once word gets out on my end anyway, I'm sure there's going to be some questions and things, and I'm just really intrigued. So hopefully you and I can connect again sometime in the near future and just keep chatting about this and letting people know, because I think it's just a. I think it's a great thing, man.
David [00:18:14]:
Oh, absolutely. And I'd be so excited. We can come on and do regular stuff. Like, there's so many different topics we can talk about. You know, we can keep one specifically about guitars, and, you know, all of the benefits of having, you know, guitarists through music versal. We can do one about bass, about drums, about vocals, about mastering. Right? Like, we have so many different things that we can talk about. And, you know, I think.
David [00:18:34]:
I think between your audience and ours, there's just such a massive overlap of that at home. Kind of diY. I want high quality, but I know that there are barriers to me getting it. And I actually just had another conversation with someone earlier today that was like, you know, does it really cost more than $200 to get a high quality recording? And when you start to think about it, it's like, you know, if I'm at a record label and I have the budget, I'm working with the best session musicians, the best mixing engineers, the best mastering engineers, and that becomes thousands of dollars for one song.
Steve [00:19:09]:
That's right.
David [00:19:10]:
Very, very quickly. Like, extremely quickly, it can become thousands of dollars. And so to have this all under one roof for $200 a month and you know exactly what you're getting and what you're paying for, we really think it's one of the best value adds to the music community that we've seen in a long time. And from us, from our point of view, we love digital tools. Don't get me wrong, I'm never going to say that you shouldn't buy plugins, or I'm never going to say that you shouldn't take advantage of the things that are out there created online. But at the end of the day, we're kind of like the new way of doing things, the old way. And there's this magic in that. And it really, really does get as close as possible to replicating that in the room experience that you have with musicians that may be your friends, your acquaintances, you know, partners, etcetera.
David [00:19:55]:
So, yeah, that's really. That's really the value behind it. And what, you know, I was really excited to come on here and share that with your audience just because, you know, everybody wants that record label quality sound, but they don't, you don't necessarily have access to the resources that they do to create it. And this is one step closer to that.
Steve [00:20:10]:
Yeah, that's right. Very cool. Well, thank you, David. I appreciate you taking some time out to talk today. And like I said, we'll stay in touch and do this again real soon. Um, because I. I really do see that there's some amazing value in, in this to certainly my audience because I feel it in my own, my own world. You know, before.
Steve [00:20:29]:
Before I. I got into the industry, there were so many things I wished I could have done. I didn't know anybody. I didn't know how to do any of those sorts of things. And I know there's a lot of people out there that, that feel the same way, so.
David [00:20:39]:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, from personal experience, you know, I make my own stuff in logic Pro X and I'll play my own drums, but, you know, say I make a hip hop beat and I lay some piano chords underneath it. You know, I was telling this story to someone recently where the magic moment for me is when I had these chords under this beat that I was producing. There was a bridge in the song, and it was kind of boring because it was just the same piano chords that were rolling and then the lyrics and the pianist comes on the song and within ten minutes of the session, he has this beautiful, I mean, a beautiful bridge. I almost teared up at it. And he has this beautiful bridge played with the piano. And I was just like, I could have never come up with this on my own. I could have never made this on my own.
David [00:21:18]:
So to have that level, to have that access, you know, sitting in my basement studio here, like, it just is unbelievable. Yeah, so absolutely, man. And absolutely can't wait to have you play around some more with the platform and get in there and get some killer drums over top of you playing guitar. Get a bass line under there, man. It's going to be super cool.
Steve [00:21:36]:
Yeah, awesome. Well, I'm looking forward to it, too. Very soon, I'm going to jump in there and start checking some things out. Everybody make sure that you check out Musaversal and I'll have some contact information posted too, from David. So if you have any questions, things like that, you can get a hold of him again. Thanks for your time, and we'll talk again real soon. Okay, bud?
David [00:21:54]:
Awesome, Steve, thank you so much. And there's one more thing I wanted to add that might be a cool value piece for your audience is because we obviously are super appreciative of you having us on here and really excited to continue talking to you. I want to offer a discount to your audience on the platform to get started. What I want to do is we can give. We'll do 25% off for their first three months. So the price is normally $200 per month. Us, 199 per month. We would like to provide it for 149 a month.
David [00:22:23]:
For their first three months. They get $50 off their first three months. And then we actually run a two week waitlist. But I would love to offer them the opportunity to skip the waitlist. So if you're hearing this right now, jump onto our website. I'll have a unique link stood up for guitar Zoom specifically. You can jump on there, sign up, get your discount, and start booking sessions tomorrow. I think you'll love it.
Steve [00:22:44]:
Very cool. Well, thank you so much. That's very kind of you.
David [00:22:47]:
Awesome. Yeah, no problem. Of course. Happy to have. Happy to have your audience in, man. I can't wait to see what they do with it.
Steve [00:22:52]:
All right, well, thank you, everybody, for listening. Go check out musiversal, and we'll be talking again to David very soon. Have a great day. Have a great week, and I'll talk to you soon. All right?
