We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Dan Zalles a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Dan, thanks for joining us today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

I’m a performing singer, instrumentalist songwriter, music producer, and video producer. I’ve released ten solo albums and five albums with bands, all containing my songs. All these albums are available for streaming on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, and all other major streaming platforms.

I guess you could say I started performing music singing harmonies for friends and family with my mother when I was five years old. That was lots of fun because I love harmony and fortunately have an ear for it. I started playing trumpet in middle school, then guitar in high school. I added bass guitar several years later. I’ve played in various bands on all three instruments but my main instrument is guitar.

I learned formalisms of singing, playing trumpet and music theory playing in school orchestras but taught myself guitar and bass. In recent years, I taught myself keyboard playing and drumming too – enough to record my own keyboard and drum parts on my songs, but not enough to perform these instruments live in front of an audience.

I wrote my first song just a few months after I started playing guitar. In fact, I took up guitar so that I could play an instrument that generated chords and thereby allow me to sing and accompany myself. Since then, I’ve written hundreds of songs, many of which I’ve performed and recorded with bands but even more on solo albums. I would say probably 75% of my songs have vocals and 25% instrumentals. I write diverse material, including psychedelic rock, classic rock, funk, singer-songwriter, Americana, folk, jazz, new age, prog rock, and punk.

I started recording my own songs when the only devices for home recording were these little 4 track cassette decks. I hacked together primitive multi track recordings by recording myself performing three parts, then “bouncing” them into mono on the 4th track, which would clear the other three tracks to add more instruments and vocals, then bouncing into that bounce another three, and so on. This process created a lot of dense walls of sound. The challenge was to know how loud you wanted an individual part to be in the mono mix before you bounced it together with the other parts. If you changed your mind about the mix after you did the bouncing, it was too late to change anything and you had to live with it.

The next big invention for music production was eight track analog recording consoles, also with cassettes. This was followed by a quantum leap in recording technology: digital audio recording systems that you can install on your laptop computer. With digital systems, you have unlimited capability to create new tracks without bouncing into mono. And with these systems came a slew of amazing inventions, such as midi, which allows you to use any keyboard or touchpad to create digital notes onto which you can then graft any effect or virtual instrument available to you, from percussion to violins to organs. Being able to record my own music with my own studio was always my dream, ever since I heard The Beatles Sgt. Pepper album as a kid. But before these digital audio technologies, you’d have to go to an expensive studio to record anything that sounds professional. Now anybody can do it on their computer, and even on their phone.

Mastering digital audio production has been transformative in how I write songs. When I started writing, I would think of a vocal melody while strumming my guitar, then add lyrics. Now, I usually start with a theme and then go on to my computer and play around with different embellishments to the theme and think up new sections. This also allowed me to become more centered on the lyrics. To generate a theme, a phrase or a topic comes to mind that I think I can write a whole song about, then a sense of how that phrase can be sung, and what rhythmic groove could fit for that singing. When I started writing songs, the lyrics were often an afterthought. I would write the music and then say “oh gee now I have to write lyrics and I don’t know what to say.”. When using that process, I would end up generating fairly meaningless lyrics that I wasn’t too proud of. My lyrics are now a lot more thoughtful.

So, broadly speaking, my lyrics and music are better now because the technology enables me to write more iteratively. I typically write a bit of music and lyric, listen back to it, then get new ideas for how to change it or add new parts. The ability to listen and edit that comes with digital audio recording technology is critical to this process because, ultimately, one writes primarily for oneself, If you, the listener is not happy with what you the writer has come up with, then the technology gives you the writer the opportunity to quickly change course, and do so as many times as is necessary to satisfy you the listener.

I decided to produce music videos because I felt it was necessary to promote my music. However, soon into this, It became clear that music videos could become works of art on their own. I learned how to combine still and video imagery on a video production timeline and add all kinds of animations and effects to enhance their connectedness to the music and lyrics of the song. The video of my song I’m Sorry For Saying I’m Sorry illustrates how I do this.

So I’m pretty much a do-it-yourself guy in music and video production and learned everything on my own, with the help of watching YouTube tutorials. The existence of such tutorials was critical to my learning because I’m really bad at following manuals and before YouTube, manuals were the only way you could learn how to use complicated software .I must admit however that it was also really helpful to do studio recording with professionals and watch what they did and how they did it. Most helpful was Scott Mathews, a producer I used for my first solo album, Edgyometry. Scott has a long history producing music for many famous artists and is a great instrumentalist. Just watching him and his engineer Tom was critical to my learning how to do my own productions.

Dan, 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’ve loved listening to music ever since I was a kid and that love quickly morphed into a love of creating it. I also love performing it, especially in bands. Making music in a band is a wonderful experience because you become one with your band mates. And performing the music to an audience rather than just messing around with it in your garage motivates you to work hard at perfecting how well you play it.

Though I’ve made some money from my music, I’ve always made music as a labor of love and have had other means of income to pay the bills. This lesser reliance on making money from music has allowed me to not be too obsessed with its business side and instead be true to the artistry without the pressure.

With social media, streaming platforms, and digital music and video production technologies, anybody can be a do-it-yourself guy like me and make their digital creations available to the world very easily. But that comes with life choices. How much time do you want to spend creating versus promoting your creations? If you are trying to make a living from your creations, you have to spend a lot of time on promotion. The more time you spend promoting, the more likely you’ll get lots of attention but the less time you’ll have to put into your creating, And that may show up in the quality of your work.

I’m not trying to make a lot of money from people listening to my music. So, I made up my mind a long time ago to spend less time promoting and more time creating. I’ve done enough promoting via my Spotify and YouTube channels, my Facebook Artist page, Instagram, mailing list, gigs, and occasional ads to get what I consider to be enough people turned on to it. Having people listen to my music motivates me to make it better than if I was the only person listening. My interest in promotion varies a lot, peaking after I’ve produced something that I’m really proud of but then waning after that initial excitement wears off and I get motivated to create the next song. Generally speaking, I’m happier creating than I am promoting. My advice is to do your best at creating good content and then spend as much time on promotion as you feel is needed to satisfy whatever goals you have for attention and recognition, and whatever amount of money you feel you need to get from that attention.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

I know this may sound self-centered, but to me the most rewarding aspect of being an artist is to bring joy to myself as a consumer of that art. In my case, what motivates me to write a song is my interest in having the opportunity to listen to new music that makes me happy. And I have the skills and creativity to make that music rather than just be dependent on someone else’s creative choices. Often, I will be listening to a song by another artist that brings me so much happiness that I decide I’d love to hear another song that takes me to a similar emotional place, but with my own stamp. And sometimes, I’ll listen to a song critically, concluding that the song would be more satisfying to me if the artist had used a different chord change, or melody change, or bridge, or chorus et cetera. Having the ability to write my own music allows me to put whatever I want into it that will satisfy my own subjective tastes. And if that also pleases other people, so much the better. I think it’s very important for songwriters to be true to their muse and not be primarily driven by writing what they think other people want to hear. Unfortunately, the business and financial side of music drives people all too frequently to focus on that. This is completely understandable given the stakes. But I think that’s a slippery slope, leading to less inspired output and disappointment when one’s expectations about that output prove wrong.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

It depends on what the artists and creators are trying to get out of that ecosystem. There has never been as good a time for artists and creators to have the best possible tools for inexpensively making their visions realities and then inexpensively making them available to massive swaths of people. Unfortunately, people trying to make a living from this are confronted with a daunting challenge. Because so much content is so available digitally to so many people, any individual person’s chances of success are that much smaller. You are a very small needle in a very large haystack. Certainly, some creations go viral but for this to happen it may be too tempting to compromise one’s integrity because shock and notoriety too often gets more attention than upstanding, positive, quality material.

There is also the issue of emotional investment in the art we consume. Before there was free universal streaming of music, people would have to spend money to be able to listen to the music that they wanted to hear, whenever they wanted to hear it, and nobody could afford the universe of music that you can now hear for free or for a monthly subscription. When people buy content , they are more likely to push themselves to become more emotionally invested in it than if they can access it for free. And with the massive universe of content that is available to everybody at any time now, our attention spans suffer because there are always available to us unlimited rivals for our attention. Short attention spans of music consumers lessen the chances that that they will invest the time to be exposed to the diversity in a particular song as it proceeds through its changes.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://danzallesmusic.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/danzalles_music/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61571646128043
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzxZubBpqeFfnawIpJ_pH6A
• Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-507094812
• Other: Form for subscribing to Dan’s newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/11a825165c8b/dan-zalles-newsletter
  LinkTree landing page: https://linktr.ee/Schlep9
  Reviews: https://danzallesmusic.com/album-reviews/
  Spotify Artist Page: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4oNdAEX1xaDYEEG3LbYp0a?si=l2eTbBKKSA29tLOqgKhWng