Episode 002: Peter Lubbs

Adam Pippert (00:02)
Well, Peter, thank you so much for jumping on. This is awesome. This is great that I get to catch up with you. So hopefully for the next, I don't know, roughly hour, give or take, we'll have ourselves a nice conversation. We'll talk a little bit about your technical life, what your role is like, maybe a little bit about your background because you've done some really cool stuff. And then for the last half an hour, we'll talk a little bit about your music, what you used to do, what you do now.

Peter Lubbs (00:08)
Yeah, sure.

Adam Pippert (00:33)
We'll see where we go from there. Does that sound good? Awesome. Cool. So welcome everyone that is viewing here to the Text and Plugs and Rock and Roll podcast. This is a place where I go and talk to various people who are in the tech industry and we discuss a little bit about their tech background, but also we talk about their music background because everyone that I bring on this podcast is either a musician or recording engineer or has some sort of music-related...

Peter Lubbs (00:35)
Yeah, sounds good to me.

Adam Pippert (01:02)
background in their lives. My plan is to have guests on here, everyone from just random technicians or whatever, roles all the way up to the director of VMware that I'm going to interview in the next couple of weeks. We've got all sorts of different walks of life in the tech industry, a lot of different stories and a lot of different people, some people that are very heavily involved in tech, some that maybe aren't so much anymore. But everybody has a passion and love for music.

I'm hoping that this podcast will help bring some of that to light and let some people learn just about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. So Peter, why don't you start and tell us, well, I mean, you don't have to tell us your name, right? We all know you're Peter. But tell everybody where you're from and how you know me.

Peter Lubbs (01:53)
Oh, I'm a grown up Virginia and Adam and I went to college together and we were in the college choir and that's how we met and interacted over the years. Well, was that a run of college?

Adam Pippert (02:03)
Yeah. Yep, yeah, and that's been a long, long time. So I'm trying to remember, Peter, what year did you graduate?

Peter Lubbs (02:08)
Yeah.

2006.

Adam Pippert (02:12)
Okay, yeah, so I graduated in 2003. So a little bit earlier. And then where did you go when you left Roanoke?

Peter Lubbs (02:25)
It was sort of a weird circuitous path a little bit. As far as sort of about the first question with, you know, sort of my journey into the tech industry and everything, I had been since I was a kid, I had been working as a student technician for the school system that I went to and I had always just been interested in that kind of stuff and when I started college I worked at a video store, which is like saying I worked at the dinosaur shop. I mean, how many kids know what that is? I try to explain to my nephews, they don't know what a video store is.

Adam Pippert (02:42)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Peter Lubbs (02:54)
But yeah, I ended up working there, but I got an opportunity to work for the Roanoke College IT department. And over the years that I was there, I worked up to senior technician and it was a lot of simple help desk type stuff and everything. And that sort of led as like a platform for the next phase of my life. You know, like I sort of did it as like a side gig because I had a philosophy degree and I was, you know.

I was hoping the Flossitarium was hiring, but I figured it was good to have a good skill set. I ended up working at Holland University for about six months after that because one of my bosses had been one of the guys who had been at Holland and had helped with their tech department. I was there for a short time and it was just help desk and student imaging and stuff like that, stuff that I've been doing already. Where it sort of took off as far as actually getting into where I went after Roanoke, I

Adam Pippert (03:25)
Yeah, yeah.

Peter Lubbs (03:50)
the majority of it. I ended up working for a startup in Blacksburg, Virginia, and the Corporate Research Center for Virginia Tech. It was this place called Webmail.us. They just hosted mail. It was pretty hosted post-fix, effectively. I worked there. At first, it was just as a frontline person helping people get set up, helping them set up. I was pretty much just helping secretaries and self-help set up Outlook and change DNS records and pretty basic stuff.

Adam Pippert (04:19)
Yeah.

Peter Lubbs (04:19)
And sort of my gateway into actual technology, not just being like a sort of journeyman tech guy, was that we use a lot of tools for migrating both pop mail and IMAP mail and post-its, as well as exchange mail into our platform. And I inevitably ended up starting using a lot of those tools and it sort of whet my appetite for Linux and specific Linux and that's been my background, but also a little bit of Windows here and there.

Adam Pippert (04:35)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yep.

Peter Lubbs (04:48)
which I had experience with. And then from there, my company shipped me down to San Antonio, Texas. And for 10 years, I worked in rack space hosting from the time that they were sort of like right out of the startup phase until, look at their ticker sometime and you'll see. It's a, yeah, I mean, not to talk you all of the dying, but yeah, it was a great experience. It was pretty much like my second college, 10 years of just being involved in building.

Adam Pippert (05:05)
Yeah, yeah, of course.

Peter Lubbs (05:15)
and maintaining large scale systems. At first it was post-fix and exchange systems. And then I moved on to working with OpenStack and we were sort of innovators in that space, before Amazon and Google just completely ate OpenStack. And doing the Neutron, the Neutron stack working on that with like a...

Adam Pippert (05:27)
Yeah, yeah, yep.

Peter Lubbs (05:36)
doing F5 management and those kinds of tools, F5 management, logging, aggregation, stuff like that. And then eventually I moved on to load balancers, hosted load balancers and it was like Stingray Brocade and it was sort of tagged on. It wasn't the trove that they eventually went with an OpenStack, but it was sort of like bolted on a little bit to the Rackspace environment. And then, yeah, from there I went to, it was time to move on because it was just not, it was time to move on.

Adam Pippert (05:55)
Right.

Peter Lubbs (06:04)
and one of my coworkers actually was friends with a person who worked at the University of Texas and I ended up working at the Texas Advanced Computing Center when an opportunity came along. When I started working in Linux, I sort of said, yeah, I'd like to work at CERN or some sort of science facility and so I ended up finding pretty much like a dream job maintaining a giant supercomputer called Stampede II as well as a smaller one called Wrangler at the Texas Advanced Computing Center and uh...

Adam Pippert (06:27)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Lubbs (06:32)
I was involved with building that out, managing it. I was the lead admin on Stampede 2 for I think two years or so. And it was dealing, you know, mostly my job was dealing a lot with Omnipath and with InfiniBand and dealing with ClusterStore, a lot of HPE Cray, but you know, HPE Cray now, dealing with a lot of their systems, including the, I think it was XC5 that I did a little bit of work on.

Adam Pippert (06:38)
Hmm?

Great.

Peter Lubbs (07:00)
And yeah, I did that for about five years. And in specific through all of those, the things that transected it was, I'm a very operationally motivated guy. I love making sure the system's up. I guess they would call that site reliability engineer these days more than they would like it. Yeah, but yeah, basically just systems administration. I worked up to engineering and designing and it just wasn't really my passion necessarily. And moving back to administration and making sure that things are working up.

Adam Pippert (07:13)
Yeah, that's kind of the hot new word for that, but.

Peter Lubbs (07:29)
available and everything. That's just that's where I really thrive and I did that for about five years at the University of Texas and now I work for a company out of Hungary that just does web, it's in the web WordPress hosting environment type of space a company called Kinsta and they're a really great company and at these days I'm mostly doing LXC the Linux container system for our WordPress hosting offering and then a lot of Cloudflare. I spend all day in Cloudflare

Adam Pippert (07:42)
Yeah.

Peter Lubbs (07:57)
And the other part of it is working with Google Kubernetes, the Kubernetes engine, and running our AppMDB platform off of that and sort of drinking from the fire, has literally learning that. But yeah, that's sort of the journey it took. And I've moved back to the East Coast from Texas, and now I'm in Virginia. It's sort of semi, I'll say like semi-retirement a little bit from, you know, I turned up around 40 and it was time to sort of wind down a little bit. So I'm not as much in the innovating space as I used to be, but yeah, it was, that's sort of the...

Adam Pippert (08:02)
Hehehe

Sure.

Peter Lubbs (08:26)
circuitous route I took where for a while I was running systems that they were processing COVID research on, that they were imaging black holes with, that they were doing all kinds of processing for CERN with, and it was a really cool experience. So that's sort of where I went after run-up.

Adam Pippert (08:39)
Yeah. I mean, if you had said that you were retiring today, you've had a great career so far. I mean, there's nothing you've done that I would say is underwhelming between the stampede stuff and the stuff you did at Rackspace. I think you've had a fairly, or at least I would hope so, a fairly fulfilling career thus far.

Do you find that now that you're moved into this new role, you get to play more, you get to explore more, or is it just different?

Peter Lubbs (09:05)
Oh, for sure, yeah.

It's very different because for years I was in the hosting space and the thing about hosting is you're constantly scaling, you're constantly growing whether it's vertically or horizontally, you're constantly in motion. With HPC it's very waterfall oriented, it's very old school, you know by admission just because they have to be incredibly stable, they're incredibly innovative as far as the technology, as far as the you know.

Adam Pippert (09:24)
Mm.

Peter Lubbs (09:42)
the actual components are bleeding edge. I mean, we were working with stuff that was just not available to the public, that was, you know, Nvidia was sending us special pieces and, you know, Fendiband, oh, what is it, Mellanox and Intel and everything, we have representatives all over and it was really cool, you know, a buzz of that, but the technology stack itself was very old school, very old school mentality that moved very, very slowly because you built the system and once the system was built, it was built.

Adam Pippert (09:43)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Yep. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Peter Lubbs (10:10)
You didn't add nodes, you didn't remove nodes, unless a node died or something like that. You didn't add or remove nodes, you didn't scale, you didn't have to consider those kinds of things. But as far as where I am now, it's back to that sort of rapid environment that I absolutely love. And it's not so much about playing around as much. There is a lot more latitude for me to... HPC is very hierarchical.

You know, it's very like I was the lead admin, the guys under me were the ones who were, you know, they had their very assigned, very niche role of, you know, troubleshooting nodes and InfiniBand and everything. I did all the config management and all the maintenance scheduling and all that kind of stuff. And then the person who was above me, who was the director, he was in charge of several of the systems and it was just, you know, you were assigned to one system. You did it very well.

every day was very similar. I mean, again, not knocking it, it's just the different workflow. But where I am now with hosting, I really did miss it because they're very innovative as far as cloud is concerned. And especially with Docker and Kubernetes and all the sort of buzzwordy type of things that everybody loves and makes the world go round at this point. And so it was sort of nice getting back into that because I really miss working since I'm operational as far as my mindset.

Adam Pippert (11:18)
Mm-hmm. Sure, sure.

Mm-hmm.

Peter Lubbs (11:31)
it's very nice to be back in an environment where it's very operationally focused, you know, making sure like site reliability. I guess a lot of other companies are probably called that site reliability engineer, but yeah, now it's systems operations, systems engineering, systems ops, sorry, systems operations engineer, sys ops engineer. And so yeah, it gives you a chance to sort of play with some of the newer technologies, especially being back in a Google cloud. That's the one that we use for the most part.

Adam Pippert (11:43)
Sure, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Peter Lubbs (12:02)
And yeah, it's got its own level of innovation and of scaling and of responding to different types of emergencies and alerts and this and that and the other. But yeah, it's just different. HPC can be a little bit slow as far as the pace and as far as the, you know, it was sort of a job where I was on call 24-7. So you know, I didn't really have working hours. I had hours at work and that was sort of the trade-off. Yeah, I mean, it was, I was married to it. So you know.

Adam Pippert (12:26)
Yeah

Peter Lubbs (12:33)
I guess that's sort of the roundabout answer to all of that.

Adam Pippert (12:37)
That's a good long answer. That took you about 11 and a half minutes. But we're here to fill an hour, so I'm good with it. So you mentioned GKE, and as of the time of this recording, there's a fairly interesting vulnerability that's going on right now that Orca just flagged around the possibility that attackers could take over clusters and access sensitive information from system-authenticated group. Are you worried about that at all?

Peter Lubbs (13:06)
I know the people who worry about that at my place are worried about it. It's like any environment, you're going to have vulnerabilities.

Adam Pippert (13:10)
Okay, okay. But you, but yeah, I'm guessing in your role, like you have a little less of that responsibility than you did when you were like a lead admin, right? So you don't necessarily have to worry about that stuff quite so much.

Peter Lubbs (13:22)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's mostly just the people who are worried about that saying, hey, we need a patch and me working. And actually that's one of the things that's working on right now is, you know, patching things. So.

Adam Pippert (13:34)
Got it. Yeah. I mean, do you find that a lot of your work is reactive versus proactive just simply because you're not in that role of responsibility anymore? Or do you feel like you're fairly empowered to catch things before they can become problems?

Peter Lubbs (13:49)
It's sort of a mix of the two. It is more reactive as far as with HPC, there is a little bit of reactiveness where, you know, some researcher decides to dump like, you know, one petabyte of data into a script to be processed in a scratch and it has no IO boundaries or anything like that and takes down a cluster or something like that. But for the most part, it was pretty regularly running. It was just, you know, issues with down disks and, you know, a little bit of reactive like that, but it was mostly proactive.

Adam Pippert (14:08)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Peter Lubbs (14:19)
and planning out things and working with researchers and everything. Where I am now, it is more reactive because when you have a live system with tons of users who are not contractually obligated and bound according to university rules and the side of the other, you're just working with the general public a little bit, who are hosting sites, you see some interesting things and especially when you open it up to the general public rather than research facilities, the profile of the user base changes a little bit. So it is a little bit more reactive in that sense that

Adam Pippert (14:35)
Yep.

Yeah.

Peter Lubbs (14:48)
you have people doing more creative things and more interesting things with the system that you're running. But yeah, there's a fair amount of proactiveness involved with it, especially with the capacity planning and with balancing the environment and making sure that resources are sort of, you know, anticipating new technology as far as new machine types and profiles and those kinds of things. So yeah, I mean, it's less overall architecture planning, but...

Adam Pippert (14:52)
Sure.

Peter Lubbs (15:17)
I do get to do a fair amount of, you know, Jira tickets and stuff that are, you know, sort of planning out scaling and those kinds of concerns and, you know, opening new data centers and that kind of stuff. So yeah, I mean, a lot of my day is a little bit more reactive and in the more operational sense. But yeah, I mean, there still is a fair amount of proactive planning.

Adam Pippert (15:25)
Yeah.

Nice. And are you finding that given that your new workload is much more public facing rather than the, you know, kind of walled garden of academia, are you finding that AI is affecting the way that customers are using your platform? Like, for example, folks that want to just have an AI script, generated script, like automatically create WordPress profiles in bulk and that kind of thing.

I would imagine that being a WordPress host, you probably get a lot of those people that are just trying to automate their entire business and scale inappropriately, if that makes sense.

Peter Lubbs (16:17)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, we encountered a bit of that. And especially with our cloud offering, our apps and databases offering, we encounter people who are running a little bit more custom code that might be hooking into AI frameworks and stuff. With our WordPress offering, it's a little bit more element box and controlled as far as what they can install and what they can run and what's available in the platform. But yeah, as far as our cloud offering, it's...

it's sometimes a little bit wild west and you find some very interesting uses. A lot of telegram bots, a lot of those kinds of features. And as far as AI is concerned, when I was working at UT for TAC, AI was sort of a burgeoning thing. It's always been on the cusp of next week we're going to have a self-aware machine since I've been a kid. But when I was working at UT, it was sort of a glimmer. It was something that we were running a lot of

Adam Pippert (17:08)
Right, since like the 60s. That's, yeah.

Peter Lubbs (17:17)
AI and machine learning networks, neural networks and stuff like that on the computers. People were platforming that, but it was very walled garden. Like you said, it was academics and stuff. Sometimes people were doing weird things, but for the most part, they had to go through an approval process in order to get their dissertation approved and get the thesis approved and get simulations approved and everything. We use a lot of...

virtualization to sort of wall that off a little bit. But yeah, I mean, we were seeing a lot of, what was it, TensorFlow. That was the one that I encountered a whole lot of, people were running TensorFlow simulations. But yeah, for the most part at my new job, AI has completely changed it. There was the initial rush about a year ago or so, year to six months ago, where everything was gonna be taken over by AI, and now people are sort of realizing like, well, it is just sort of a giant if-then tree, but.

Adam Pippert (18:11)
Yeah, yeah.

Peter Lubbs (18:13)
It has an effect, but it's, you know, it's cooled a little bit, but it definitely is having an effect on the way that

Adam Pippert (18:28)
Oh no, that's fine. Peter, I guess now's the time that I will interrupt for a moment and let people know that we're using a platform called Riverside FM to record all these podcasts. And one of the cool things about it is that it actually creates a local stream on both sides. So the whole thing will end up getting uploaded to the cloud, and wherever the audio clip happened, I'll be able to catch it and hopefully just edit.

edit that out so I wouldn't worry about it too much. Yeah.

Cool. Yeah, I mean, I would agree with you that, like, and definitely in my world, you know, obviously I work for a Linux vendor that has an AI platform. So AI is definitely super important for us. But it is interesting how there was that, like last year, I guess, a giant hype cycle around what LLMs were gonna do for people before they realized that it's essentially just a glorified machine translator.

Which is great, I mean don't get me wrong, there's lots of fun things that an LLM can do, but it's not the right tool for all problems, and I think a lot of people are trying to shoehorn it in, LLMs into that kind of thing, so.

Well, it looks like I've lost Peter.

Peter Lubbs (19:53)
I'm sorry. It's a...

Adam Pippert (19:54)
Okay, no worries, no worries. Again, the magic of editing, we can make things happen. But yeah, what I was just talking about was that I feel like this time last year, we had just a huge hype cycle around LLMs and people were claiming that LLMs could do just about anything. And really at the end of the day, they're just machine translators. I mean, that's a hell of a trick, right? But if you think about a large language model as...

Peter Lubbs (20:14)
I'm gonna go.

Adam Pippert (20:20)
something that can translate from one language to another, whether that is English to Chinese, or English natural language to code, or whatever the two media are, even if they're synthetic languages, that's really what an LLM does. So it's not the be all end all tool for everything, but if you can think about your problems and think about your workload in this very sort of abstract language to language.

translation thing, then it's a really useful tool.

Peter Lubbs (20:53)
Yeah, for sure. I think it's one of those things that you have two camps on it. You have the people who think that AI is just a complete shell game and it's a Ponzi scheme and it's ridiculous and it's this, that, the other, and it's just a big if dent tree. And then you have people who think that it's literally going to be like a Ray Kurzweil sort of new era of productivity and of data processing and stuff. And then somewhere in the middle, I mean, it's just another tool. Whenever I've looked at any of those kinds of

Adam Pippert (21:18)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Lubbs (21:23)
artificial intelligences or machine learning or language modeling or anything like that, it's a tool. It's something that simplifies and functionalizes a lot of stuff that used to take a lot of effort to put into it and it just reduces effort. For my own work, it's been pretty positive. I mean, the thing that I run into constantly is I can ask a question of one of these different models and say, hey, can you write me a code snippet for this or that or the other? And no matter what.

Adam Pippert (21:40)
Sure.

Peter Lubbs (21:52)
I still have to be a human who has oversight into it. I'm not going to automatically port that code right into an infrastructure. So yeah, I mean, I think it can be valuable and especially in, you know, there can be the sort of ethical concerns as far as art and music and those kinds of things where, you know, it becomes a little bit more fraught. But like when it comes to just purely technical applications like that, it's been a boon for me. It saves a lot of time and a lot of effort on things that you don't really need to necessarily spend a lot of time or effort on or shouldn't.

Adam Pippert (21:57)
Of course.

Right, that makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah, I mean, what are your thoughts on AI music? It's kind of an interesting debate. I would say that there is still opportunity for musicians to be creative outside of what AI can generate because by definition, AI is going to pull from whatever is most popular in its dataset. So, if you can be creative and think outside the box, you're more likely to be able to do something an AI can't.

Peter Lubbs (22:49)
Yeah, I think that's the thing is I have friends who are artists and stuff and they're really concerned about AI, you know, whether it's music or visual arts or whatever. They get really concerned about it. And I think that sure, there is a giant concern with it as far as intellectual property and questions of what's being scoured, how the things that are being scoured and cataloged and added to the model and everything, how they're accounted for as far as, you know, compensation, this, that, the other. But like, when it just comes down to the technical thing of

in the future will robots create all of our art? No, of course not. I mean, like, I think that maybe it'll be able to create, like, incidental music. It'll be able to create, you know, like if you just got a commercial application and you need, you know, like, do your computer please write a jingle for me for my hemorrhoid cream or whatever. Yeah, I mean, that, that kind of stuff is just sort of, you know, incidental. It's sort of oatmeal and it's stuff that you don't really need to have, like, tons of creative juice to put into it or anything.

Adam Pippert (23:42)
Great.

Peter Lubbs (23:47)
But whether or not we're going to be able to sit down and say, write me a moving symphony or something like that, I'm a big believer that you can't really fake funk, that you just know. And I mean, there are very compelling examples of it, but at some point, there's a difference between artificial intelligence and artificial spirit, I guess. I don't know if you would.

Adam Pippert (24:10)
Yeah, yeah, I think that the people that are going to be the most threatened from an AI music perspective are like the music librarian people that make music for giant music libraries. Like for those of you who don't know essentially all of the backing tracks you hear in reality shows and television specials, Netflix series, all that stuff. Generally, those come from what's called a music library. And so there are people whose entire job essentially is to sit down with a workstation eight hours a day and just crank out like

20 to 30 second clips of music that they would think is palatable and create descriptions. That's their job basically, is they're just like an AI. They have to create a natural language description of what that particular 20 to 30 second segment or that song sounds like so that somebody that's going through a music library can use those descriptive adjectives to go and find their track. So I think that the industry that's going to be the most impacted by AI...

and by LLM specifically is gonna be music libraries. But other than that, I mean, you don't really see, an AI is not gonna go out on stage and go perform unless it's captured by robots. Do you know that band? Yeah, yeah. So like that was novel and cool because it's, you know, this guy built an animatronic band essentially like, you know, Chuck E. Cheese or something, or Shobas Pizza. That's what we had in Roanoke, right? Yeah.

Peter Lubbs (25:22)
Yeah, yeah

Yeah, yeah, it's just like more of a cyberpunk version of a rock-a-fire explosion or whatever the name of it is that, yeah. I think that as far as extending the AI, you know, like, yeah, I think like a lot of canned music and commercial art and stuff like that, that'll be replaced. I mean, you know, that'll be, you know, that'll be just a thing that happens. But I think that there will be people in the same way.

Adam Pippert (25:41)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter Lubbs (26:03)
I think we have a precursor to it with sampling, with looping and sampling. It's the exact kind of thing, because when we were younger, that was the thing that was gonna ruin the industry, that people were just gonna sample music now, and nothing's gonna happen. And then you have people who came in and had creative applications to it. And I think that people will be able to integrate artificial intelligence almost as an instrument and use it as like a guided.

Adam Pippert (26:06)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. No for sure.

Peter Lubbs (26:30)
thing to fill out the skeleton that they're creating, you know, like almost generative music in the sense of like Brian Eno of, you know, setting up machines that generate the music, but you're still the one coordinating the machines. You're still the, you know, the cybernaut who's setting up the parameters and this and that, the other, you know, like sort of that, that like creating an experience that incorporates it. So yeah, I think, I think that it's like sampling where, yeah, there'll be a lot of doom saying about it where people say, oh, it'll kill the industry. And

Adam Pippert (26:36)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Peter Lubbs (27:00)
No musicians will ever make money again, this, that, the other. I think it's just going to be a new territory for people to explore. You know, it's really got a new, not to get all deluds and glutari on it, but it's a line of flight. It's a new line of flight. And I think it's just going to be another plateau for people to explore. Um, so yeah, I think that's, it's going to be incorporated.

Adam Pippert (27:17)
Yeah, can you think of any other tech trends or advancements that you foresee that have a significant impact on essentially the intersection between technology and music? Because that's where we're going right now, right?

Peter Lubbs (27:27)
I mean, yeah, and I think sort of inheriting the legacy, you know, one of the questions that we talked about before this was, you know, like what had a significant impact on the music industry from tech. I think two things are happening right now. In the past, you had MIDI and you had Max MSP that came along and made it so that music could be measured as a quantum.

uh, you know, measuring and staves and notation and all those kinds of things existed before, but you still had to have an element of human, but the sort of notion of like a piano roll of automating music, this, that, the other that Max MSP opened up. And I think continuing on with that, uh, there are a couple of really good channels on YouTube. One I like to follow is called Venus Theory. Um, I forget the name of the guy who runs it, but he's, he's really fascinating even though I'm not necessarily a professional musician.

Adam Pippert (28:03)
Mm-hmm.

Right, right.

Mm-hmm.

Peter Lubbs (28:25)
He's fascinating as far as a guy who creates workflows for his music and approaches it not as some sort of romantic type of thing, but just sort of, you know, he creates a lot of soundtracks, he creates a lot of music library type stuff, you know, like he has that kind of feeling. And he talks a little bit about artificial intelligence, but I think one of the things that's the big innovation is that music software is no longer just a DAW that you record music into.

Adam Pippert (28:38)
Mm-hmm.

Peter Lubbs (28:55)
It's no longer a thing that has a basic ability to do VST plugins and everything. I mean, some of those VST plugins, I think the VST, if I had to pin it down, the VST plugin is the thing that's really changing music because now people have access to, it used to be to create certain kinds of music. You had to have all this analog hardware or even digital physical hardware on DAWLess setups and have all kinds of external sequencers and this, that, the other. I mean, you know, whether it was like a

Adam Pippert (28:55)
Mm.

Mm.

Yeah.

Peter Lubbs (29:23)
Atari ST back in the day or a Commodore or up to, you know, like any sort of number of sequencing innovation type program, you know, products or anything like that. But now if somebody has Ableton, if somebody has ProLogic, if somebody has, you know, any of these kinds of frameworks that people are using Reason, anything like that, it used to be that you could plug in a couple of VSTs and they were sort of cool to play with and, you know, they were never quite the same. But at this point, VSTs have gotten so advanced that...

Adam Pippert (29:33)
Hehe.

Peter Lubbs (29:53)
Now you can have access to a literal limitless studio full of classic hardware, of classic sounds, of these kinds of things. And it's made it so that producing with high quality sound is much easier and in some cases free if you're able to get a good, be it like VITAL or something like that, one of the same famous plugins that people are using. So yeah, I would say like the plugin modular nature of

Adam Pippert (30:18)
Yeah.

Peter Lubbs (30:22)
modern DAWs is probably the thing that's having the biggest impact. Because not only can people create bedroom music like they started creating when we were younger, but now they're creating bedroom music that's like professional quality. There's not that wall between the hobbyist who has acid pro on their computer versus somebody who has a 48 track mixer with all the bells and whistles and this, that, the other and some sort of English studio or something. With a basic...

i7 processor or something like that, you have pretty much everything you need. And you know, again, it's one of those things, VSTs are quite the same as the real thing, but I think that is something that's an extension of MaxMSP, an extension of MIDI where it had been, and it's taking it to the next level, where those things are becoming pretty indistinguishable from the physical hardware in a lot of cases.

Adam Pippert (31:12)
Yeah, and it's really interesting to see specifically musicians that actually prefer going that route. I mean, especially in guitar, like that is one of the most gate kept, like old school kind of electric guitar, like especially rock guitar has always been this very like do everything analog. You have to have one of three kinds of guitars. You're essentially not a real musician. Like there is all this just like crazy gatekeeping.

Peter Lubbs (31:20)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Pippert (31:42)
and misinformation and all sorts of stuff that happened in the electric guitar scene. And now we've got these guys like Tim Henson for Polyphia that are just playing the craziest semi-sampled, everything goes out of your camper out of a modeling experience. And he's essentially a digital native on guitar and very well respected for it. So I've seen that industry finally open up to some real innovation that isn't just like

Peter Lubbs (31:50)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Adam Pippert (32:11)
Okay, let's make a slightly cleaner tube amp, right?

Peter Lubbs (32:15)
Yeah. And I think it's interesting too, because of that VST culture and that sort of innovation that we're seeing, like I've got four nephews, none of them listen to guitar. And it's an interesting thing to me. I mean, it's never going to go away. You're always going to love guitar. There's always going to be people who love it. It's an instrument. You know, it's not going to go away the sack butt or anything. But I think at the same point, the proliferation of these kinds of low cost, high efficiency music studios and setups.

they're really changing the landscape, especially for younger people, so that I just noticed, you know, with like Gen C, Gen D Alpha, all those kinds of younger people, they just don't have the same kind of approach to how music is created in the same way. The possibilities are so much more open for them. And yeah, there is stuff you lose, but there's a lot of stuff that's changing it. It's sort of interesting.

Adam Pippert (33:08)
Yeah, well, it's interesting that you mentioned like going away like the sack butt because I've seen a lot of revival of some of these very esoteric old instruments on YouTube.

and on other places like Brandon Acker, who's a classical guitarist, but is more well known for his lute stuff, probably because there aren't that many people playing lute, but he's doing things like covering the aforementioned Tim Henson on lute, or introducing people to the theorbo, or these other Renaissance era instruments, and I'm seeing, what's the bard guy that does the Metallica covers in Renaissance style?

So there actually is a lot of revival that I've seen in these older styles that by their nature because they're analog instruments, people are starting to appreciate those things because an AI can't do it and because it's not sampled and because you don't have access to that from a computer. And so people are starting to branch off in the long tail and go explore these other previously sort of...

not downtrodden, but anachronistic instruments.

Peter Lubbs (34:25)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I agree. Rob Scallum's another one who's interesting to watch for that kind of stuff.

Adam Pippert (34:31)
Yeah, exactly. Like the fact that he's coming out there and just doing things that are that are sort of ridiculous, but they're but they're physical, right? They like having, you know, the giant 24 string guitar or whatever, you know, just stuff that is interesting. But it's interesting because it is physical and not because it's something that's generated by AI or generated by something digital, right? So, and the internet in general has

Peter Lubbs (34:38)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Pippert (34:59)
democratize the creation of content. And because of that, you have to do stuff like that in order to be interesting. Like I have to do this podcast essentially, because it's one of many ways that I can essentially send my brand out to the world. It, you know, I mean, there's a lot of different ways that I could do that. Right? Like I could be making weekly YouTube videos, playing lounge piano, or I could be, um, you know, creating a Twitter series all about music or whatever, whatever I chose to do.

And maybe I'll do all of those things, right? But these days, the fact that content creation is so democratized has almost made it table stakes. And because of that, that means that the barrier to entry is low, but it also means that the barrier to differentiating yourself is fairly high. So you have to do stuff that's interesting or bizarre or out there or just simply different just to make a niche, right?

Peter Lubbs (35:59)
attention to the new currency.

Adam Pippert (36:01)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's the classier way to say that. So how about you? We haven't really talked much about your musical journey. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what you have done music-wise, other than the fact that we sang together in college choir. Like, where did your musical career go after that?

Peter Lubbs (36:22)
uh... so where it's really is uh... we require together and i've done marching band before that all through high school everything and uh... i didn't really continue on necessarily with like more classical forms like that or you know whatever uh... lot of it ended up being uh... i got the real book for electronics like uh... i have a guitar and i had a base and even when i sold it

Uh, those two for me, I picked them up because I had to. My real passion is synthesis. Um, one of the things that really, at the same time I was in choir took off for me was I had Dr. Marsh for a, uh, Dr. Gordon Marsh for a, uh, a unit on computer music. And that's where we were digging in with like max MSP and learning how to make our own plugins. And.

Adam Pippert (37:12)
Nice.

Yep.

Peter Lubbs (37:18)
you know, doing like the really, really low level type of stuff that had always been interesting to me. I grew up with a lot of industrial music and a lot of electronic music. Yeah, my family, my mom wouldn't ever let me get a guitar because she thought that guitarists were all on drugs. So I had a computer, so, you know, I ended up playing with synthesis and that carried on through college and everything. And then once I got out of college, I've had for a while.

Adam Pippert (37:25)
Yeah, I remember in college you were a fan of like skinny puppy in ministry and stuff like that. Yeah.

Yeah.

Peter Lubbs (37:47)
a collection just like a hodgepodge of tracks I make every once in a while, every couple of months or so, I get the itch to sort of record a little bit. And the things I'm really interested in are I like creating, I guess, music that has a sense of space to it. Brian Nino, I mentioned him earlier, Brian Nino was a big influence on me. I like to create sort of like a generative type of style.

machine in the background, whether it's like a synthesizer loop that I treat or some sort of platform to sit my stuff on. Crout Rock is a huge influence on me. I know that's sort of a contentious term because it means not a million things, but that sort of motoric type of sound. So a lot of what I've done in the meantime, I didn't go the route. I've been a pretty obstinate Linux user for a long time, Linux desktop user.

Adam Pippert (38:23)
Yeah.

Peter Lubbs (38:43)
I played with Windows and Ableton a little bit for a short period of time and it was interesting. I liked it. But what really got my goat was I got into, on Linux there's the Jack audio stack, the Jack API. And that's where I really cut my teeth doing that kind of stuff was playing with, at the same time I was learning systems administration, I got into music production with Linux, specifically using the Jack API and learning how to, you know.

Adam Pippert (38:53)
Yeah.

Peter Lubbs (39:08)
it goes a little bit lower level than sometimes Ableton and some of those programs can go, which can be a blessing and a curse. I mean, if you're just wanting to create music, sometimes it's a little bit of an uphill battle to get what you need done done. But once you get things set up, you create your patch phase, you get really dig into what's going on in the sound level, what's routing here, what kind of latency you're using, this, that, the other. It forces you to have to do those kinds of things and be aware of those kinds of parameters. So,

Adam Pippert (39:12)
Great.

Thank you.

Peter Lubbs (39:37)
A lot of the music I've created over the years, it's Halcyon Tentacles on Bandcamp. It's like a collection of just stuff I've done over the years. But that wasn't like the big thing of it was just learning the Jack API and learning the various programs. Ardor was the DAW I've been using for years, Hydrogen for my drums, Zenad Fx for my synthesis, and then VST plugins like Vital and...

That's the name when I use the vital. I love vital. But yeah, just ever since then, it's just been figuring out how to create wide open spaces and sort of decorate the wide open space. I don't like crowded music. I don't like first chorus, first chorus bridge. I'm not a songwriter. I'm not really a musician. I'm not a songwriter. I like just creating sort of like a texture that I can play around with over. So I guess that's sort of, yeah.

Adam Pippert (40:13)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Right, more like soundscapes, less like... Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that was interesting. First of all, it's interesting you mentioned Dr. Marsh because you may not, you may know this, but he was my advisor. And my senior project was a computer-generated track with piano. So a lot of the stuff that he was starting to teach in the computer music class, when I graduated in 2003, they didn't have a computer music class yet.

Peter Lubbs (40:45)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Pippert (41:00)
And the next year after I graduated was the first year that he was planning on teaching that. So I'm assuming that's the course that you were in. And so we were putting together sort of a little bit his curriculum on Max MSP and on just generating stuff like that in general. Cause I did use Max to process the stuff that was coming out of the piano and then mix together. So, and it's interesting how like these days that's like table stakes. It's like really easy to do.

Peter Lubbs (41:06)
Yep. Yeah.

Adam Pippert (41:30)
compared to the old days.

Peter Lubbs (41:32)
Oh for sure, I think that's sort of a rejoinder to what I was talking about with VSC plugins and with sort of making that yeah, like now this kind of stuff that we're hearing, you know, like I hear a lot of these newer bands, you know, the Hyperpop I think is what a lot of kids are calling it now on this, or you know, like what is it, King Gizzard, Lizard Wizard and stuff like that. All these bands that are using like techniques that Dr. Marsh was talking about, which at the time was like...

Adam Pippert (41:36)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hmm?

Peter Lubbs (41:59)
pretty cutting edge stuff. Like he didn't really, I mean, you might see it in like Terry Riley records or something like that, or, you know, Ken Gaburow or whoever, kind of like avant-garde type of people doing granule and synthesis and going way out there and, you know, doing stock house and any type of stuff. Exactly, yeah.

Adam Pippert (42:00)
Yeah.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, now you can buy a pedal to do granular synthesis and it's like this big and it comes from Red Pan, it's like 300 bucks. Yeah, and it's easy. You know, it's like that kind of stuff. It's amazing what's out there. And at the same time, there's also a lot of that old school analog technology that has come back. Like, there's a store down the street, well, not down the street, but in Portland, where it's like all Euro rack stuff. And there's so many guys that are super into that Euro rack scene and they just go and they just get a giant rack and basically build their own.

Peter Lubbs (42:18)
Yeah, yeah it is. Yeah, and I'm.

Adam Pippert (42:41)
mini-modulars that sit on their desk and just plug in the Banana Jacks or whatever and go to town. And it's kind of interesting that there's still a growth in that area despite the fact that there's all this other stuff that happens that's more computer-based.

Peter Lubbs (42:43)
Yup.

Yeah, there's...

I think there's just a value to tactile. Like as much as I can put all my stuff on the computer and do all my music production that way, there's just something, the funny thing is like, I've got all these kinds of tools and everything that I use on my computer, but you know, I love playing with this stupid little Roland Gaia, this little commodity, yeah, the sort of commodity little synthesizer that there's just something to twiddling a knob. I can...

Adam Pippert (42:59)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, the keytar! That's so cool.

Mm-hmm.

Peter Lubbs (43:27)
I can use my MPK2 or whatever it is, the Akai, you know, any of these kinds of things that are, yeah, anything that's like a sampler or like a mini controller or something like that, but there's just something to being able to twiddle a knob.

Adam Pippert (43:31)
Yeah, yeah.

It's never quite true zero latency. Like that's the thing that always bothered me the most about doing music on a computer or with a computer was the latency issue. So I remember the way that we solved that was essentially to actually delay the input of the analog instruments exactly the amount of whatever the delay was for the.

Peter Lubbs (43:44)
Yeah.

Adam Pippert (44:09)
for the computer, like from the point of input, so that the two instruments would play at the same time. But then, like over time, it would start to drift away and it would become very difficult for a human performer to follow along with it and then they get disoriented. So it never really quite worked out the way you'd expect it to. And even now, just playing around with GarageBand on my Mac, if I wanna go and bring up the drum set and just try out a riff on the, you know, just with the keys on,

Peter Lubbs (44:17)
Okay.

Yeah.

Adam Pippert (44:37)
drums or on a keyboard or whatever, there's still just a little tiny bit of that latency in there. And it makes it really hard for your ear to grasp onto it. So that's always been sort of the killer thing. Now what's interesting is that when you do it with a MIDI instrument, for whatever reason, it doesn't feel like that latency issue doesn't quite feel as bad. And I think it may be because there is a certain amount of time for your finger to go through that tactile process.

of going from the top of the key to the bottom of the key. And it's just enough that it makes it feel like you're actually doing something and your brain doesn't have that disconnect. But on a chiclet keyboard, like here on a Mac, there isn't that much travel when you hit the key and it still throws me off. Or if you do it on a phone, like if you're on your iPhone and you go and try to do with your thumbs, the drums to input drums into GarageBand, it just racks with your brain because it's not real time.

Peter Lubbs (45:21)
Yeah.

Adam Pippert (45:33)
So that's always been the biggest challenge for me, working with stuff on a computer.

Peter Lubbs (45:40)
Yeah, and even with real time, like Jack has real time support, even with real time, it's just not quite, it's just small. So you can minimize the gap, but the gap will always be there.

Adam Pippert (45:43)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's just not quite there. Yeah. Yeah, and it's really interesting that you that you mentioned, like just going straight for the API in Linux. Uh, and I would expect that being a Linux person and being, you know, with your background, but I think a lot of people, when they start messing around with, and I know I was this way, I was like, Oh, well, why don't I just use Rose garden? Because I was thinking in terms of like, I need the same experience that I have on Mac or I have on windows on Linux.

rather than like, let's use the strength of the platform to do something creative with it. And I think that's a real testament to you that you're doing that kind of thing and that you're thinking about music and you're thinking about the way that you create it with the platform strengths in mind, rather than just like trying to take this model that people use for one OS and then pick it up and drop it off in the other one and expect it to behave the same.

Peter Lubbs (46:43)
Yeah, I think you're going to be disappointed if you expect the functionality to be one-to-one. It's just a different kind of approach to it. I mean, I don't know too many people who use, like, for professional, the de facto is Mac and Ableton or Reason or whatever, you know, kind of software or whatever, but I've tried using those and they just don't feel the same for me. I just, I was on Windows for a while, I was making music with Ableton, and I was making pretty decent stuff, but after a while, I went back to Linux. It just, it...

Adam Pippert (46:49)
Yeah.

Hehe.

Mm-hmm.

Peter Lubbs (47:12)
did the things I expected it to, I guess, a little bit. And the sensibility of the API, you know, I love it.

Adam Pippert (47:15)
Yeah, like I have a guy, yeah, I have a guy I used to work with at Intel who was a DJ and he would trigger sounds from C sound with his Akai sampler. He kind of said the same thing. It was like he knew how to generate a sound, but he didn't know how to put sounds together in Linux. So like for him, it was, he was just comfortable at that basic level of, let's generate the thing that I'm asking it to do.

Peter Lubbs (47:24)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Adam Pippert (47:44)
when it comes to mixing everything together, he was just like, I'm a DJ, I'm used to doing this as a live stream of consciousness. I can't edit and parse things together like it's a DAW, because he just doesn't work that way. So every time he would create new music, he would just go and hit the record button and just DJ for 45 minutes, trigger sounds, and that was how he generated music, like to him.

Peter Lubbs (48:00)
Yeah.

Adam Pippert (48:10)
There's no such thing as editing. There's no such thing as going back and fixing a mistake. It's all part of a live performance every time, no matter what.

Peter Lubbs (48:17)
Yeah. Yeah, that's always how I've sort of approached it with my, uh, with myself that I make is, uh, there's a couple of basic parameters, but for the most part, yeah, I'm just sort of hitting record and using it like a giant tape recorder and then, you know, polishing up a little bit, treating the channels, cleaning up stuff here and there. But like, yeah, when I was treating it like a piano roll and, you know, doing all the Ableton type of things, I can do that, but it just doesn't feel as natural to me. I don't know.

Adam Pippert (48:20)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. I mean, so other than the industrial influence in the past, are there other bands or musicians that you've looked up, like that you've looked towards for figuring out how to incorporate tech into your music? Or did you just take the technological background you came from and directly apply?

Peter Lubbs (49:03)
I think it's a little bit of both. You know, some of the stuff that's really been interesting to me, when I was a kid, my mom was at the University of Illinois and she did the music program there. And so she was there in the 60s and you know, early 60s, early 70s, she was there. And for her classes, she was studying with people who were like, the kinds of, you know, like cutting edge type of, you know, tape treatment type of people.

people who were doing things that were way, way far ahead. Like I had a record of Kenneth Caburo where I used to listen to it all the time as a kid. They didn't listen to rock and roll. I didn't have like Led Zeppelin or Rolling Stones in my house or anything like that. Cause my parents just didn't listen to that stuff. But they had a whole collection of like weird experimental records. And one of the ones that was a big influence on me was Kenneth Caburo, where he took voice clips of opera singers.

Adam Pippert (49:40)
Right. Mm-hmm. Right. Mm-hmm.

Peter Lubbs (49:59)
and interspersed them over each other to make like a texture like that. So that kind of approach of tape splicing and creating soundscapes and everything that's translated through Frank Zappa was one of my huge influences as a kid, particularly his stuff with the noise clodges and with making weird sounds and everything. Like I love everything, well, he's got his problems, don't get me wrong, as far as lyrics and everything like that, stuff I wouldn't really defend. But as far as

Adam Pippert (50:22)
Yeah.

Peter Lubbs (50:28)
his tape splicing and everything, he was a big influence on me, Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, those kinds of guys. I've always tried to sort of take that approach of recording and manipulating snippets and samples of music and trying to weave them together, I guess is a way of putting it. Those are some of the people who were a big influence on me.

Adam Pippert (50:52)
Okay.

Peter Lubbs (50:53)
And then as far as more contemporary people, I'm really bad about listening to stuff that was made before 2000 because I'm old. Yeah, I just turned 40 a couple weeks ago and I'm sort of a funny dude. But yeah, I mean, as far as everything's concerned, a lot of it was just like the ambient artists and one of the big things that's been really interesting to me that I've been revisiting actually and it's had a big influence on me are...

Adam Pippert (51:00)
Yeah.

Peter Lubbs (51:18)
the people who are reconditioning like Atari STs and Commodores and stuff and making their own jungle tracks and everything. Sort of that sort of sense of turning your computer into a routing and conditioning and functional brain that sets up all the other things that are going on rather than like approaching it like a compositional tool. It's almost like just a coordinating tool for external sources or for clips that you're putting together or...

Adam Pippert (51:20)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Peter Lubbs (51:48)
uh... you know any number of those kinds of things uh... but yeah i mean it all really boils down to Frippertronix that was the biggest influence on me as far as i like making weird sounds and i like making them sound even weirder with a whole bunch of effects and i think that those kinds of people are probably the biggest influence on me as far as what i take to the technology

Adam Pippert (51:54)
Mm-hmm.

Didn't listen to rock music, but apparently King Crimson's your biggest influence. That's funny. Oh, and Zap Out, right? But yeah, that's true.

Peter Lubbs (52:11)
It's one of them, yeah. Well, Robert Fritz solo stuff, I'll put it that way. No pussy footing and his collaborations with Eno and everything. Also, another guy who's a big influence on me is Daniel Lanois. He's sort of in the DNA of pretty much all of the modern music around him. He's one of those subterranean characters, but his book Soul Mining actually was a big influence on me as far as how he approaches...

Adam Pippert (52:34)
in.

Peter Lubbs (52:39)
structuring music as an incidental event that you're sort of coordinating that kind of way. And anybody who does that, where they just sort of set up parameters and let things run, I love that. I'm far less straightforward with composition, I guess.

Adam Pippert (52:44)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, and he's an interesting one because he has both this very esoteric kind of like Brian, like he collaborated with Brian Eno, right? But then he's also got this other part of his life that most people know him for, like producing Joshua Tree, right? Like doing the whole like producing U2 and I think he was on Octang Baby and a bunch of those, right? So he's got this very, this almost pop-minded side to him as well, but then also the more generative

Peter Lubbs (53:02)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Adam Pippert (53:23)
kind of playing too.

Peter Lubbs (53:26)
And I guess another artist that's like sort of left field that I'll plug a little bit is Venetian Snares. That guy, uh, man, making some of the weirdest music out there.

Adam Pippert (53:36)
I don't know Venetian stairs.

Peter Lubbs (53:41)
It's a Canadian project and it's just super cut up sample, hyper sample. It's sort of like a more aggressive apex twin I would say. I guess that's maybe the way you describe it.

Adam Pippert (53:49)
I always have to make sure I learn something from a guest every time. Oh, snares. Snares. Sorry, I thought you said stairs. Snares. Okay, Phoenician snares. Here we go. His name is Aaron Funk and he's from Winnipeg. I was just in Winnipeg this year. Maybe I should go see him. That sounds like fun. Cool. Okay, so he's like a kind of like a breakcore guy. Okay.

Peter Lubbs (53:53)
Yeah, Venetian snares.

Hey

Yeah, breakcore is a good way of describing it, yeah.

Adam Pippert (54:18)
Interesting. Okay. Well, I definitely have something I got to listen to after this. Uh, I guess the, the last question that I'm going to wrap up with, um, and I'm not necessarily doing this for everybody, but I think for you in particular, because you have a very unique background and a unique way that you create. Uh, if you were, if, if somebody who was like 20 or 25 was coming up to you and said, you know, like, I have a specific way that I approach music, but I'm going to

I need something new, I need something creative, I need to think outside the box. And I need to figure it out. What kinds of advice would you have for those people that want to explore both tech and music simultaneously? Especially like people that are just starting out or maybe they've always played in this very analog kind of way and they want to embrace technology.

Peter Lubbs (55:13)
Well, I think the first thing I would do is I would suggest they go get a Brian Eno's deck of oblique strategies or any one of those kinds of systems for randomizing choice making as far as music. Because I think that's something that is easy to sort of get. I have a formal background, like we have the common formal background of Dr. Sandborg, of the really old school type of...

of music, yeah, of doing very analog, very straightforward and everything. But when we were in his choir, one of the things that was big influence was how much improv he did. And that's really carried over a lot for me. And I think if people were looking into sort of breaking into the first part of the question, how do I break through my creative block? And that's something I have to fight with all the time because I go through whole periods of time where I don't want to make any music. I feel completely creatively devoid. I'm just like, I hate music at this point. But...

Those kinds of randomization systems, whether you figure out some way of using tarot cards or the Yi Chang or Brian Eno's oblique strategy cards or something like that, getting yourself out of the comfort zone and offering yourself suggestions that make you uncomfortable, putting yourself in a place that you're uncomfortable with the way that you conduct your music is the first step. And then as far as the more...

technical aspect of it like, you know, I've been analog for this long. How do I, you know, how do I get my technical chops up, you know, like how do I explore that space a little bit? My best advice is just find a really a really cheap subtractive synthesis system of some type, you know, whether it's like a commodity hardware, you know, sort of like TV3 or something like that, you know, something that just has like a cutoff and

you know, an ADSR filter and you know, the basics, just learning about filtering, enveloping, those kinds of things, signal, you know, oscillating, taking an oscillator and carving it down. And I think that's one of the things that synthesis and technology has a benefit to, because analog music, especially when you're performing, you're going through and you're, you've got to define sound, your sound generator,

your tar or your lute or your sackbutt or whatever kind of instrument or whatever, it has the sonic profile already and you're just performing it according to the sonic profile. But I think one thing that jogged my creativity and my brain as far as learning about getting out of the comfort zone, creating weird sounds, creating things that are not just performing standard canon type of music or anything, is getting familiar with the idea of taking a sound signal.

and sculpting with it. Any music you can have that kind of analogy about sculpting, you're taking a song structure or something and narrowing it down and you know taking like a big lump of marble and you know taking the big thing and shit and link down everything. But I think the thing that's interesting about synthesizers and that's so free about them and what I would emphasize for anybody who's in the analog world who's looking to break into this and considering

is considering the fact that you've got a noise generator and you're taking just a noise and you're whittling it down, you're refining the noise until it becomes something musical rather than taking something that's got the parameters already in there and performing according to those parameters. So that's something that I would say to someone young is consider the sounds that you're making and not just performing things that are pleasant, not being a songwriter necessarily. Those are good skills to have.

Adam Pippert (58:44)
Right.

Yeah.

Peter Lubbs (59:03)
People don't want to listen to somebody just doodle around on a synthesizer for hours or whatever. Maybe they do, but by and large you've got to have a reason you're doing it or whatever. Sure, songwriting, structuring, that's important, but getting out of the comfort zone of saying things have to sound like another thing. I think sort of capping off the question, you can look at the history of Mood versus the history of Buchla. You can look at...

Adam Pippert (59:08)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Peter Lubbs (59:29)
you're either trying to approximate sounds that exist in the real world like Moog was, of trying to make flutes and whistles and organs and this, that, and the other, and trying to approximate it. Or you can be like Buchla and you can cover your entire Euro rack and acid and plug together all kinds of weird machines and go out there and not even worry about meter or structure or anything like that.

Adam Pippert (59:32)
Ehh

Peter Lubbs (59:54)
And I think that that's one thing that can give people an edge on even standard songwriting. What are some of the things that you remember from some of the more far out songs that are out there? Why are you going to remember like, you know, Welcome to the Machine by Pink Floyd with the beginning where it's all the tape slicing of, you know, all these incidental sounds and soundscapes, you know, like the stuff that Richard Wright was doing, where he was sort of taking flight with the sound and taking these noises and tweaking them.

Adam Pippert (1:00:10)
Thank you.

Peter Lubbs (1:00:23)
whittling them and you know, like in echoes, taking the guitar, twiddling and wheedling them and whatever, and just sort of not considering yourself as performing songwriting and performing according to these set parameters, but rather just sort of saying, what can I do with this? Where can I go? What kind of weird sounds can I make? What kind of ugly big bricks of marble can I put in front of me? And how can I whittle it down with envelopes and with cutoffs and...

you know, low pass, high pass, all those kinds of things. How can I shape the sound so that it sounds like something that I haven't heard before? So yeah.

Adam Pippert (1:00:54)
Yeah. And I think, I think the way to whittle down what you just said is that when you de-emphasize rhythm, timbre suddenly becomes way more important and often overlooked. And in the end, since this, especially in the end of the day, timbre is everything. So you have to decide where, what approach you want to take for how you create those sounds, whether it's subtractive or additive or, you know,

Peter Lubbs (1:01:09)
Yeah.

Adam Pippert (1:01:22)
emulating nature or destroying nature. Like it's up to you to decide how, how and when you want to make those, uh, sonic choices, right? Cool.

Peter Lubbs (1:01:33)
Mm-hmm. Yes, yeah, I mean, music, I think sometimes in traditional music, you start at a point, you end at a point, you decorate the sound along the way in regular patterns that people can discern. But if you really want to, you can open up that space. There's nothing saying that you have to do that. So much of what we consider musical convention, I won't say it's made up or it's just a social construct or something like that, but it is a social construct.

According to, you know, centuries ago, some monk said, well, meters have to have four beats or whatever, you know, like a lot of that kind of stuff where like it comes from historical processes. It's a material process. The way that we understand music and songwriting in the mainstream is a way of doing it, but you can open yourself up to things that are outside of that. If you just, like you said, dive into the timbre dive into the sounds that make you make the hairs on the back of your neck tingle a little bit. And, uh, I think.

people need to spend a little bit more time doing that. Opening up the space, listening to drones, listening to pedals, listening to tone generators, and then playing around with it, yeah.

Adam Pippert (1:02:41)
Yeah, awesome. Yeah, yeah, for real, for real. I mean, it reminds me of bringing it back to where we started, where this is how we know each other. Do you remember Gunnar Eriksson, the Swedish composer that came in? So you don't even necessarily have to have that mindset with synthesis. You can have that mindset with choir, with voices. So Gunnar Eriksson.

Peter Lubbs (1:02:43)
You don't have to play the 4-4.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Adam Pippert (1:03:08)
as a composer and arranger who teaches at the State College of Music in Sweden in Gothenburg. Gothenburg is a really big university area in Sweden. Gunnar Eriksson came over to our college to do a week-long engagement. He brought a pianist with him. I can't remember the pianist's name. But one of the things that he does is do this sort of randomized...

Peter Lubbs (1:03:21)
Thank you.

Adam Pippert (1:03:36)
timbre generation with voices. So he would experiment with having folks sing in the round, but have the times be different, or have the starting points be different, or have people sing with different vocal qualities in order to be able to do essentially generative synthesis, but a cappella. So that was a really cool experience. I'm sure that probably had an influence on you as well. And I think that, yeah, I mean, I think that...

Peter Lubbs (1:04:03)
Oh, for sure.

Adam Pippert (1:04:05)
Having the mindset of taking sonic qualities and doing things with them, regardless of what the rhythm sounds like, is something we can all learn from whether we're in the business of playing acoustic guitar, or we're creating everything that Peter has just mentioned in the last hour. So Peter, we're going to wrap up. Before we go, will you remind us again where we can find your material?

Peter Lubbs (1:04:34)
Yeah, it's like I said, it's sort of ill-maintained. I haven't been recording as much recently. It's on bandcamp.com slash Halcyon Tentacles.

Adam Pippert (1:04:39)
That's okay. No shame here.

Halcyon tentacles. OK, I just want to make sure I can find it first.

Peter Lubbs (1:04:50)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I mean it's sort of a mixture of sort of ambient type of stuff. I'm a pretty devout practicing Zen Buddhist and there's a lot of stuff that's sort of devotional music to that, you know, of rearranging my voice on the Heart Sutra and doing variations on those kinds of themes and everything. But there's a little bit of something for everybody and there's some straightforward, just riff rock, sort of bluesy riff rock-y type stuff. Hopefully people listen to it and like it.

Adam Pippert (1:05:22)
Cool, awesome. Well, Peter, thank you so much for coming on. This has been a lot of fun. I would expect nothing less from you. So hopefully you enjoyed the experience. You will be able to hear this episode and many others after we launch. I'm gonna try to record maybe five more with some other various folks. So hopefully you will follow along in this podcast and enjoy the musical journey. And again, thank you so much, Peter. You have a great night. Thank you. Yeah, yeah.

Peter Lubbs (1:05:28)
Yeah, for sure. Yes.

Great.

Thanks, you too, great catching up.