We recently connected with Dave Tough and have shared our conversation below.

Dave, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

My guiding motto and the main thing I always communicate to my students is to use God’s gifts he has given you to bless others. If you figure out a way to do that you’ll be fine and find your path in your place of purpose. If you are selfish and just want the accolades to bless yourself or your shattered ego, that is where it goes wrong. And you really need to figure out if you are truly blessing others or if you just think you are…are they gaining value in their lives but what you are doing? Are they giving you “certificates of appreciation”(otherwise known as dollars in our business) for what you are putting out there? It takes a while to find your unique voice and unique path. I try to tell my students this, you have to try many things before you find where God wants you, just be patient. Belmont used to have the motto “a career is where your gifts intersect the world’s needs”. I like that statement as well. Business-wise I would say be prepared to wear a lot of hats in the music industry….meaning if you want to survive today in our industry be prepared to write, produce, teach, play live, play in cover bands, etc. And if you don’t like that, selling insurance or banking is a lot safer career path.

It goes back to you being able to do it all (write, play and track instruments yourself, mix, master, know the style and history of the music) as a producer of the project…or at least understand how it should be done. If I can’t do it, or feel like I am not the right fit as a player or engineer, I know who to call in town, which is another reason to live in Nashville and a trait of a good producer…jack of all trades, master of none! Finally, about every ten years or so I do an album for myself, without any commercial restrictions on my creativity, so I feel like it is about to be time to knock out another one of those soon.

Dave, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am first and foremost a music educator. I am full professor of Audio Engineering at Belmont University in Nashville, TN. I love working with students and equipping them with the skills and tools they can use to become better creators themselves. Teaching has several things in common with being a music producer which is my second passion. I have led hundreds of artists through the creative process, hopefully with a better result at the end. My production company is at davetough.com. And really thats my ultimate goal, equipping artists to become better and more successful, in whatever capacity I serve. I also write and produce songs for film and television. I have had over 500 placements of my own songs in film, television and advertisements. My company can be found at https://www.instagram.com/unitedsyncartists/ and my full list of credits is at https://www.smcartists.com/_files/ugd/621699_a96dfdd8e8d541e687206ad97e40c440.pdf

I got my start at an early age. Both my mother and father were musical, singing and playing the piano. I remember being 2 years old and singing songs into my dad’s dictation machine at his law office. I also remember sitting on his lap while he played the piano and sang around 3 or 4. I always played around with a variety of instruments around the house at a young age. I started saxophone in elementary band which led to piano, drums, guitar, and singing in middle school and high school. I learned drums to old Paul McCartney/Wings and Tom Petty records. My first band crush was Metallica in high school. I eventually went to the University of North Texas to study jazz drums.

A lot of people ask me how I got stared in creating music for film and television….I was making good demos of my songs in the 2000s for artist pitches. It was about that time I realized you have to be an artist’s cousin or signed their publishing company to get a cut. I said to myself, “I have good master quality demos that are just sitting on the shelf, why not repurpose them?” When I started there was not a lot of action, now there are tons of people in the sync space. For a business perspective the general public seems to not watch to invest much for services like Spotify (getting $12 a month is like pulling teeth) and yet they will go and pay five or six times a month that for all the streaming services. There is consumer money still to be found on the visual side and with 1000+ streaming channels, cable channels, speciality networks like Roku, and online platforms like Youtube, everyone needs content and music for their visuals. Sync could be a whole college degree in itself so I am not sure I have a lot of advice that could be shared here. I would say that I took the longer road, owning my masters and pub and signing term limited single song sync deals, but it has been worth it because I have over 1000 masters I own all-in at this point. And the sups like that too because its one-stop, easy clear. Even with that, I am not getting rich but I make a decent living on top of my teaching. What students need to realize is that sync is all about having a quality product but it is really having a large quantity catalog that makes you a living. Meaning you might make $250 a year on one song, $500 on another…but it all adds up. I also try to relate the concept of mailbox money to students..i.e. you could go down to Broadway and play a gig for 3 hours and make $150 or you could write and produce a song in 3 hours and make $150 every month for the rest of your life!

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Here is the story about my heart transplant…

In early fall of 2016, Dave Tough found himself suddenly experiencing night sweats and shortness of breath when walking down the street. With the encouragement of his mom and a few friends, Dave went to the ER where doctors noted that he had the heart of an eighty-year-old—one that wasn’t pumping and working correctly.

Doctors first tried to treat his heart with drugs and cardiac ablation, a procedure to treat heart rhythm problems. However, after approximately one month, they determined that these treatments would not work and told Dave he would need a new heart. He knew he didn’t have much time left; his ejection fraction measurement was low, meaning his heart wasn’t pumping out enough blood to his body with each beat, and he had to stay 24/7 in the Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit (CVICU).
So, Dave was scheduled for surgery to get a left ventricular assist device (LVAD), used to help restore cardiac circulation in patients with end-stage heart failure.

Due to an infection, Dave was forced to push back his scheduled LVAD surgery by two days. During that time frame, he ended up receiving the call that a new heart was available for him. He describes the situation as “a blessing,” with all the pieces falling together so that he could receive his new heart. The surgeon who performed the heart transplant would later tell Dave that, having seen it, his old heart would not actually have been a good candidate for LVAD.
All in all, it took five weeks from when Dave went to the CVICU to when he got the heart transplant at the Vanderbilt Transplant Center, which is one of the world’s busiest heart transplant centers. In 2022, they performed 123 adult heart transplants.

Dave said he began the rehabilitation process almost right away and was up and walking around a bit just twenty- four hours after surgery. By three months, he felt “pretty good” and now works out approximately four times a week to help maintain his health.

“When I got my heart, the old me was gone, and now I was given a new chance at life,” Dave told SODA via Zoom from his home in Nashville. “Every day is like an added bonus. It’s hard to explain because I would have been dead [seven] years ago, so every day is like a miracle.”
Having had cancer and heart failure, Dave now strives to live life for the now, not solely for the future. His advice for everyone is to wake up every day and try to do something that makes you happy, “because we don’t know what’ll happen—that’s life. It’s the preciousness of life.”

His health journey has motivated him to consider what positive impact he is having on the world, both within and outside of his work as a professor, to make the most of this new chance and honor his donor, who he feels is now part of him as well.
Organ donation advocacy plays an important role in Dave’s life and new chance. He’s speaking out and sharing his story because he’s realized that many people are not familiar with organ donation (prior to his heart failure, Dave himself wasn’t familiar with organ donation beyond signing up at the DMV) or are afraid of it because they don’t understand the process or don’t want to consider their own mortality. He wants people to know that organ donation is a way to keep giving, even after you’re gone.

“Being a donor is a certain way to continue helping people after you aren’t here anymore, but actually you are here and still living, through others,” Dave said.

SODA interview, 2023

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

What has been your favorite career experience or moment so far?

I love teaching students so I would honestly say it had nothing to do with music…most likely it is making full professor at Belmont and getting my doctorate degree. I ask myself on a daily basis “what will make more of an impact after I’m gone?” 50K people hearing my song in a movie (that they will most likely forget about 20 minutes later) or changing 200-300 student’s lives per year and equipping them to be future leaders and creators in our industry? I will choose the latter. Typically, I won’t even watch a show with my music in it. It’s really the creative process of writing and producing I like the most but I would still take a Grammy if they are giving them out!

Describing my creative process..

With regards to the music I create, I’m a melody and harmony guy. So l like anything with good melody and harmony. I’m a sucker for jazz. These days I also turn on music for healing and mediation so I play any type of music that encourages that.

Since I write especially for sync nowadays, a lyrical direction is usually dictated for you. However, when I can choose, I typically get inspiration from poets like Charles Bukowski or Allen Ginsberg, gritty modern, and sometimes random, observations. Lyrically, if I had my choice I’d be of the John Lennon school where a lyric can mean different things to different people, open to interpretation.

I agree. I think that Mozart and Beethoven were early “producers”. They wrote the material (songwriter) and told the musicians how to play it (performance coach) and used instruments made out of certain materials in certain spaces (engineer). Then Brian Wilson and Spector came along and treated the studio itself as an instrument.

There are so many ways to approach writing a song. When you do it for a living you have to learn a lot of different approaches to get something done for the deadline. Paul McCartney calls it “going to the office” and it is a job, not just writing when divine inspiration hits. So you have to find a lot of ways to get your creativity going.

Being a melody/harmony guy, that is usually what I begin with. So my typical process is I will first throw up some type of groove on the monitors (drum loop/drum machine) then just absorb the feeling, singing a melody and playing changes on an instrument that fit the melody. Or even just sing a melody as that way you can create a memorable melody and outline harmony later, rather than letting your chord choices dictate your melody. I might also have one or two hook words I try to sing variations of as well if its for a commercial project.

Once the initial tempo/groove, inspiration and the basic chordal structure is found, I most often sing a melody with words that flow out subconsciously. I am always recording this process with an iPhone so I capture everything. I won’t call these subconscious uttering “throw away” words because a lot of time your subconscious actually knows what it is trying to say, you just need to interpret it later. Then after that, I typically nail down more deatiled lyrics and the song form. When you watch the Beatles’ “Get Back” documentary or listen to their demos its exactly how they wrote. Keeping a childlike flow/feeling space going and then using logic to arrange it all after the fact.

When I write on piano I am able focus more on advanced harmony and voice leading. When a song comes from guitar it can typically easier to come up with a song that is rhythmically driving. I may even pick up a bass and treat it like Bach counterpoint where my melody goes one way and the bassline the other. Or perhaps writing on a detuned guitar ala Joni so you don’t play the same old shapes and you are not thinking in music theory, just letting harmony flow that you like the sound of.

Production-wise I feel like you have to have historical musical reference points. Music is like fashion, it all eventually comes back around. For example, I might say I hear this song having a Steve Gadd midtempo funky 16th note beat, with a Bernard Edwards style bass line, and a McCoy Tyner parallel 4ths style accompaniment played on Ray Charles type of wurli sound, complimented by the sound design found on the latest Dua Lipa record. That’s where having a large musical vocabulary and catalog in your mind to draw from helps.

To be a successful producer you really need to know the whole history of recorded music (both the facts and aurally). You are always building on the shoulders of giants and then adding your own unique 10-15%; it is really the same for any creative process. Quincy was that way. Just listen to “Thriller” and tell me if he didn’t use his big band arranging chops he perfected with Sinatra years earlier on that record…it is obvious. Additionally, when the production and arranging is dialed in, it is a lot less technical work on the back end.

What do you look for in a new artist when considering working with them as a cowriter/ producer?

I look for uniqueness…period. This could include a unique viewpoint or a unique voice/vocal approach. The world does not need another John Mayer or Justin Bieber clone. Now I have students that say “a lot of country stars or rappers sound exactly the same” and I would say they are right. But which ones will be around in 30-40 years? A: The ones with the unique voices like Willie Nelson or someone that can phrase a song different than anyone else like Sinatra or Snoop Dogg. If you can hear the first three notes of someone singing on the radio and know who it is immediately, they’ve got a chance in the business. Otherwise it’s just another loaf of homogenous Wonderbread.

Can you share the genesis of your TV show “ Producers’s Room with Dave Tough? What made you want to start a TV show? How did you prepare? How did your personal background and experience prepare you to enlist the participation of and preparing to interview such luminaries in the field and colleagues like Dan Huff, etc? What are your favorite highlights from that show? Favorite interview from the show?

My youtube show (I think its still on Nashville TV as well on the NECAT network) is really a labor of love. In fact, I lose money at it by the time I do the shoot and pay the editors. I started it because I really think there is a lack of mentorship from the veterans in our business. It’s not their fault. We have just lost the old apprenticeship system where you could study or train under a mentor for years. That is one facet of it. However, the main reason I do the show is to preserve the knowledge that is being lost for future generations.

I just did an interview with Jay Graydon at his studio in LA and I tried to get to the bottom of what he was actually thinking or feeling when he produced and played on all those famous albums. I don’t want to ask the surface stuff like “where were you born?” or “it’s great you played on this album..kudos, kudos”…that information is easily documented on the internet. I really want the human element, to get inside the creative process and figure out how and why these folks make the creative choices that they do. I know a lot of this stuff just happens from the gut on the fly, but there were still elements that still informed those reactions/choices. For example, on his guitar solo on Steely Dan’s song “Peg” he said he was thinking Hawaiian-style on the bends, jazzy licks on the major 7th chord and blues licks on the dominant chord. That was his overall mental plan, they he just executed from the gut. Yes, it is a little nerve-wracking to interview the Mt. Rushmores of the industry but most of all its truly inspirational as you get to sit next to someone like you, a creator, another human that has used their gifts to bless others.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.davetough.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unitedsyncartists/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-david-tough-3a7229a/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@producersroomwithdavetough8983
• Other: https://www.smcartists.com/film-television-composers