ep32 Writing For Indie Films, Collaborating & Meeting Your Idols For Lunch w/ Andrew Lipow

Yo yo what's good it's your boy Roy and this is another episode of Sync Gems. Today we have Andrew Lepau. He is a dear friend and a fellow composer. I've actually hit Andrew up right as I entered the Sync space, right as I wanted to know more and he was so kind to give information because he was way ahead of me. Right now he is scoring indie films. He is doing the sync game. He does a lot of tension tracks and a lot of composition for trailers and libraries. In this interview we cover so much ground from networking to collaborating to knowing when to say no and how to utilize it for your career. We also talk about scoring indie films, what it's like, what are the budgets for indie films and what does it look like in the process. So make sure to stick around for all this interview because it's packed with gems. If you love this podcast, just make sure to go ahead and give it a five star rating wherever you're listening to it. This is super important especially because this is the beginning of the journey for this podcast and the more ears this goes to and the more listenership this podcast has means I will be able to keep on doing it. So giving this podcast a five star rating on whatever platform you're listening really makes the difference. If you're on Apple and you want to review it, that would make my freaking day. Just go ahead and do that and yes, this enables me to just keep going, keep doing what I do and it shows me that this matters to you guys. So make sure you do that and without further ado, my man, Andrew Lipow. How are you, Roy? What is good? Can I call you a friend? I think it's the second time we talk. I think I can call you a friend. Are we there yet? Yeah, we're friends. We're fast friends. Yes. Yes. Bro, I'm so happy. So me and Andrew had a beautiful conversation, but it just got ruined by the platform. Shout outs to the platform and you know what? It got us to talk again because so now we can get into the real nitty gritty. And before that, I'm going to ask you to drop that story on me again. What's been up and how did you get to where you are right now? How did it all start for you? How did you get into sync and to what you're doing right now? Okay, it's a long and winding, circuitous path to where I am right now, but that seems to be a trend with a lot of people in the sync world and music composers and music supervisors. So I'll try to make it as brief as possible. You know, just like a lot of other folks on this podcast, I started off playing and playing guitar and writing songs for rock bands, my rock band in high school, playing as many different musical iterations as I could, you know, I was just in love with music, you know, from a young age and I picked up the guitar in middle school and all I wanted to do was form a band, be in bands, play in bands, make music, by any means necessary. I ended up taking jazz guitar lessons in my senior year of high school when I joined the jazz band and that really ignited this love of like deep learning of music because I was able to really take on mentors, young and old, who really taught me some very deep, profound musical lessons. So I was able to study classical guitar for my undergraduate degree and I made some inroads in New York City and toured with a rock band out of New York City and I played in clubs every weekend, playing jazz music for restaurants and small jazz clubs for a while, I toured after a lot of touring and dropping an album with my rock band, I was playing in a club in the West Village and I just decided this is, oh, this is about what, 2008, before then I lived in Holland for a year and played music out there and then I came back and I decided, you know what, I'm going to move to Nashville and just pursue guitar playing, session playing. I had gotten a good amount of session work in New York City and that just made me want to really pursue that in the real home of session, you know, I think the best session players, there's so many great, I mean there's a lot in LA and a lot in New York and there's something about Nashville that just pulled me there. So I moved to Nashville, pursued the guitar, got to play and with great acts and do some amazing session work there and while I was living in Nashville, I realized, you know what, I've been wanting to write music for TV since college, since I was always so curious about where this music comes from on television, I love the music of Thomas Newman, I really just want to pursue film scoring and what I now know is production music and so I went onto a Facebook group for young industry people in Nashville, I said, does anyone here write music for television and one guy wrote back to me and he said, oh I do, I'd love to get lunch with you sometime, so we got lunch and he said, hey, can you write some, I've got this brief for a publisher, I had no idea, you know, about how it all worked, he said, can you do a mix of Beastie Boys style hip hop drums meets Ennio Morricone spaghetti western guitar, those are my favorite things. So I went in my little home studio in East Nashville and banged out some drums on a, you know, MPC MIDI controller and threw on that spaghetti western guitar and some tremolo and that first production music track I made ended up getting on the show American Greed within a few months, I think, or maybe a year and when that happened, I said, wow, okay, I think I really do want to pursue this and since then I've moved to LA and I've been writing tracks and got for television, been doing some trailer work and scoring films too, indie films, so that's as brief as I can make it, I think. Word, to be honest, I, yeah, I remember from last time we talked, you did like the conversion when you were in New York, you were like, I move into Tennessee, to Nashville and then you converted to country, right? You started playing country there. I bought a, yeah, I bought a Tele and I just, you know, went in, just I downloaded a course on Telecaster chicken picking, I just fell in love with the style of guitar player Brent Mason, he's one of the most recorded guitar players of all time and he has such a unique approach to playing the Telecaster, he still does tons of session work and I, it was kind of elusive to me and I really got down deep into chicken picking and really twang style of Tele playing and I just fell in love and I got to play with some of, like, just some killer musicians in Nashville and what I really loved doing most playing Nashville was playing with pedal steel players, to be able to stand on stage or in a session next to a pedal steel player and build these harmonies that, you know, you mix. What is a pedal steel, what is a pedal steel guitar? Is what you hear on one of the music records, it's a, you know, it's like almost like that Hawaiian sound that I can't sing a pedal steel, it's like a metallic thing and you put it on your knees, right? Yeah, it's the sound of sadness basically, you know, and that was just so beautiful to me and all the best pedal steel players are in Nashville and I always just got along with them so well and I loved combining those sounds of Tele and pedal steel and I really think it helped develop my ear to play so much music all the time every day, just playing, I, a lot of people would read charts and I can read a chart for sure but whenever I had to learn something I made sure to just use my ear all the time and try to learn a song with like half a listen, you know, one listen half, just as quickly as I could to really internalize the structure and the movement of a song and then you play so many songs you almost internally start understanding the, just the structure and the science of so much and, you know, when I came, I already was a songwriter, but I wasn't really pursuing that so much, I really just wanted to play but the more I played, the more there was something inside me that needed to get out to just compose more and then I ended up talking and collaborating with more producers and co-writing more which is something that I want to, that I love doing is co-writing and I've been doing that in the sync world now. A lot of what I do is collaborations with another writer whether it's a singer or another composer and I love doing that. Yeah, how does that work in the sync realm? I mean like, it's a funny, it's a funny thing you say. I mean, I've started wanting to get into that world of co-doing. I mean, usually you send something to somebody and then they send it back. How does the workflow go for you right now and is it for trailers? Is it for indie films? What is it for in your context? So the type of co-writing I've done, my first real sync placement was a co-write with my colleague down in Nashville. Shout out to Marty Keith. He said, "Just give me the drums and give me the guitar." And then he threw on a slide guitar and he threw on the bass and then he mixed and mastered it and then submitted it to the publisher. So that type of co-writing I guess brought me in. And basically all you do is you don't have to have the same DAW as the other composer. You just basically make sure that the tempo is the same and give them maybe a four-click, a one-measure count in just to make sure that everything lines up and you bounce them, wave files or whatever you have, they drag it into their session and then they add their parts and then they bounce those and you make a Dropbox or a Google Drive or WeTransfer or anything. Once you start really jiving with another writer, it goes pretty quick. I've made an album in two weeks and that was kind of long because we had other things going on but you can really crank stuff out. And what I love about co-writing is you just learn so much that I co-produced a hip-hop record with another writer and his drums were just mind-blowing to me. I loved how he produced and just processed his drums and it's made my production skills in that area. It's elevated that because I see how he works and I bring it into my process. So I'm a big fan of co-writing. Yeah, co-writing. I mean, co-writing as in collaborating. It's very overlooked and under-talked about because I mean, I can tell you so many things that I've done alone, I feel like I could have done with another person and it would have been twice as fast because it's just taking two minds and putting them into a track is more likely to bring really unique stuff the way that I see it. Even if it's obvious, I mean, there are people whose thoughts are so obvious but that's what the track needs. You know, like pop is like, it's obvious but that's what the track needs and that's why it's so successful because there are probably in every pop song that you hear in the radio, almost every, there are eleven writers in the room and they're all just sharing their ideas and something cool comes out of it, which is these thoughts that are stitched together into this beautiful symphony that becomes the track. Exactly right. And another thing that happens when you're in a room with people is the idea you throw out that maybe if you were alone and came up with the same idea, maybe another part in your brain is really self-critical and is like, I don't know about that, that's not good. But if you're in a room with other people and you throw that idea out, they go that's brilliant and everyone gets hyped about that idea and then the idea is validated and then you move on to the next thing and you build quick and you build with this energy and flow. It's the same as playing in a band. To play a gig solo is cool and fun and could be great but playing in a band brings a certain energy to a performance. So I think it's the same when you're sitting in front of a computer with instruments around you and even if it's through the internet, you're on the phone with your other writer, you're on Zoom. Usually it's just texts, you know, like, I love what you did here, boom, I'm going to send you this, boom. I wish I did more of it because I am working on a co-writing project now which is a pop vocal album. So that's like a more of like a traditional co-writing thing. But yeah, I love it. Most of what I do, I just do solo. But it is something that I want to always be working on, working with other people. It's also great for, you know, just general networking too. You kind of, you have someone else that can validate or tell you you need to work this, you need to do a little bit better on. So yeah, yeah. You're a bit of a master in networking yourself. I mean, I've just had Marcus Manderson just talk to him and he's also a master networker. And I feel like you have a bit of a networking thing yourself in which you told me where you, whenever you want to meet somebody, you offer them, you offer them to go out for lunch. And so it's something that actually Marcus was talking about after you talked to me about it a few months back. But now I feel like it was, you have a very cool way of looking at it. Can you elaborate on that and on your view of networking? Sure. I think I'm a naturally pretty social person. I think that comes with being a lifelong musician and, you know, just playing music. I think you develop connections with people. And I think if you're trying to meet another musician, you can kind of assume that they're, you know, if they're, they've worked in bands and in the studio and stuff, everyone has a certain vibe, you know, you got to be a good hang. But I just love getting lunch. There's that energy. It's weird. I mean, I'm a big, I love food. I love trying out new places. I live in LA now. So we have great food out here. And I haven't lived here too long. So there's a lot of places for me to check out. So I do have a goal to check out all these like really good places. But I really get a lot of positive energy from having lunch with folks, especially folks that I meet for the first or second time. So if I'm, I remember someone said, someone posted on one of these community message boards on Facebook or something like I'm feeling really down. Like what do you do when you're feeling down about, you know, your career, you're feeling stuck and stuff. And my advice to them is like, take someone you admire to lunch, it will really just completely turn your, turn your whole mood around. If you, if you, I used to do that in Nashville, guitar players and people that I just admire legends and stuff. If I met them in passing and just reach out to them and say, Hey, can I take out the lunch? Everybody loves getting taken out to lunch. And I love, you know, some people when they move to LA, they say, Hey, Andrew, hit me up on Instagram. I love to take you to lunch and ask you about, you know, production music and stuff. And I, I feel a little weird about that because I love taking people out to lunch, but it seems like it's starting to come around. Yeah, I think that is really cool because then you really have face time with someone like, you know, you and I are speaking through, you know, a zoom type thing here, but and we can connect at a certain degree. But when you're really face to face with someone in person and then there's a lively energy around you, especially if you're in, you know, Hollywood or Santa Monica or wherever, Culver City, where there's real industry, there's a certain energy and people want to collaborate. And that getting lunch has just done wonders. I would, if I would definitely suggest that be a thing that happens more. I think because of the pandemic, people are a little more shut in just taking that type of, you know, we all got used to being shut in and just doing things via the internet. But, but, you know, I would, I would encourage people to really make an effort, even if it costs, you know, a little bit of a change to, you know, treat someone the lunch that you got to see that as a as an investment. Definitely a worthwhile one, because people love, you know, just commiserating over food in general, I believe I do. So yeah, that's not really a free lunch as well. Yeah, I think it's just the LA thing, you know, I think that's, I think that's how LA was kind of built. This is, you know, you know, business hour lunches and deals. So I love that whole cultural aspect of it out here. Yeah. And I'm going to tell you something else. I feel like it's going to be a generalization, but I mean, anyway, a lot of go getters are daytime people. Like there's a lot of producers, yeah, who work at night and our artists who work at night and stuff like that. But most of the people I want to do business with and I want to be in contact with our day people, just like me, just a personal thing, personal preference. And also for me, I'm way more alert in lunchtime than in dinner, let's say after a whole day's work and I'm just like feeling drained at times, you know, like sometimes I'm feeling sorry for my girlfriend when I take her out after a long day because I'm just like, it's like all the air is out of the balloon. But yeah, but sometimes we have lunch as well. She knows that I'm not like that always. But you know, it's just, yeah, I love that concept and I like that. That that also vision of this is an investment, like this is gonna this this will go a long way and karma can be a bitch, but she can also be a reward or if there's a word like that, like a Santa Claus if she wants to. So I mean, yeah, I don't yeah, and I don't try to take people lunch and ask them what they can do for me. That's really not I never go into a lunch meeting or any type of, you know, meeting for drinks or anything like that with the incentive of trying to get something from the other person. I really just go because I am genuinely interested in who that person is. And I just like that that's it. I just want to know, Hey, how did you make your career here in such a competitive industry? That's all I want to know. How did you do it? How did you know what do you like went to lunch with a composer who's become a friend now? And I said, Have you just done tons of amazing films, you know, works great. Just incredible composer. I said, Did you ever study orchestration formally? He said, No, in fact, I started working and I had to just kind of learn on the fly. And only now, after, you know, 20, 30 years of full time composing, he said, I'm taking orchestration lessons. So that's amazing, you know, just you just kind of get to it when you can. But you know, everyone, everyone's just doing their best and trying to make good music in whatever way they can. What do you think about the approach of like quantity versus quality and sync? I definitely think quality over quantity in general, but I also think they're not they're not too different. They kind of exist. They're two sides of the same coin. In order to get good quality tracks, you need to write a lot of tracks, you know, in order to do anything, you need to put a lot of hours into it. And so I think the quality comes, you have almost when you do a lot of tracks, you start to develop a checklist of things that need to be met in order for you to consider it a quality track. And that only comes from just writing a lot of music, so making a lot of tracks. I think if you're stuck in the mindset of like, oh, I need to do three tracks a day or something, you're probably going to be missing out on some quality things if you're really just trying to pump out work like that. I think you can make a quality track in a day or two. You know, some of the older and wiser folks who have been in this industry a lot longer than I have, they'll say you should spend two weeks on a track. You know, if this is like a high quality trailer track, two, three weeks, something like that. But I think in the beginning you really want to focus on, you know, getting quality by quantity. And then later, once you really have your system down, then you can really get, you know, surgical with things and granular and making sure everything is absolutely perfect. But yeah, I think you got to start with just making a lot of different things, seeing where your strengths are and focusing on that. I've learned that my strength is tension, true crime, music, that's one of my strengths. So I tend to get a little more briefs in that. But now I feel like I'm at a good balanced point in that genre where I can make a lot of tracks and they'll all be at a certain quality if they all, you know, follow this checklist of things. Like does it build? Does it have the right breaks? Does it, you know, is it, does it have the right sounds, stuff like that? Do you think that it's a genre that could be replaced by AI anytime soon? Oh man, anytime soon, I guess is the question. Maybe, I don't know. I don't know how good this AI is. I don't know if they've, I feel like they've already made like, they've already made the AI that we're scared of and they're just rolling it out slowly, you know? But that's just a little, that's a paranoid thought. But I just, you know, I've seen Terminator and Terminator too so many times that I just like feel like, oh man, it's kind of getting there. But they, the AI seems to be really good at hip hop beats, you know, and voice matching rapping. But a student of mine, he made a AI, it's crazy. He showed me. He's like, check this out. I made an AI cover of Michael Bolton singing Ed Sheeran's "Thinking Out Loud." He's like, listen to this. So he removed Ed Sheeran's vocal and overlaid. He said he fed the AI bot, I don't know how he did this, all like hours and hours of Michael Bolton. And then he was able to overlay that onto the melody of "Thinking Out Loud." And it sounds like Michael Bolton is singing the song. It's crazy. So that's why the writer's guild is on strike. They're worried about AI replacement. And I think it's definitely something that AI can be a huge cost cutting measure for things. And it's getting pretty good. I think the voice matching is pretty good. And voice actors get paid a lot to do voice matching gigs for other actors. AI seems like that it might come in there in that industry. For tension music, maybe. A lot of tension music does have elements, like thoughtful piano little lines and building synth pulses and stuff like that. So I can imagine that that does. But who knows how it might be that uncanny valley thing where it sounds almost there, but it's not there because it was made by an AI brain. Music is just the thing that you need the human element in. But at the same time, AI could be a huge tool for composers to use. I think you have an episode of this podcast talking about that. Yeah, we talked with Leonel. It's a great one. Yeah, it could be. I mean, we all use AI. I need to use vocal remover sometimes. And that's AI. Even logic. I don't use logic drummer, really. I do my own drum programming. But that's AI. Everybody uses Ozone for mastering. And master assistant in Ozone is AI. So we all use AI to help us. But we don't want to, you know, we want to keep it, you know, keep it caged. Yeah, I mean, we can't be dinosaurs. You know what I mean? It's the thing is that's why I'm asking. Because I want to be as up-to-date as I can on where it's going because if it means that composers who are making full-time income from royalties, if their income is going to tank, then that means a lot. I mean, if one can say a step in the wrong direction, but also the question is how do we come into this? How do we come into this and unite in a way that enables us to keep doing what we love? If that makes sense? Because music is going to get replaced right now. Spotify from, again, this is information I've gotten from the inside. Inside a label that I do lo-fi with. They've told me that only big, really big lo-fi artists are going to be able to continue going and releasing music because Spotify is about to start taking things into their hands and make instrumental music, have people play it for them, and then have their algorithm learn it and replicate that in many ways, in many different ways. And then they can basically pay you $1,000 to just sit in for a few hours and write a bunch of melodies and write a bunch of chords for them. They'll pay you $1,000. You'll be happy. It's a good payday, $1,000. But then they will take that and they will generate millions and millions and millions of plays because of your few hours and then they don't have a middleman. They're not the middleman anymore. They're making all the money. So yeah, it's in the end of the day. A lot of these things are about the money. People want to make more money. I try not to get too cynical about the AI thing right now because I have so much work to do right now and I'm really grateful for it. I don't really see the publishers being too scared about AI right now. I'm just going to keep doing that. What I do like about where I am also is I teach. It's nice to have a teaching gig as well so I can offset that, not just rely on royalties and have a different stream of income. I think musicians really do need to have two or three or four different streams of income. I know you. You're big on that. So we probably should be shooting for the royalty checks right now, hardcore. But yeah, it is a predicament about AI. It's going to be something that changes everybody's life so much. Yeah, 100%. I feel like people are definitely aware that the Napster revolution can happen again and there are people who are standing up to that and that's pretty cool. Again, I'm going to bring up Jesse Josephson's YouTube channel and he brings up, I think it was the Senate or like a Congress, something like that, a conversation with Google. You can hear on this dude's voice that he cannot expose everything that his AI can do and he doesn't even want to expose it. He's mumbling and jumbling and giving roundabout answers. She's like, "Is this going to compensate artists?" and he's saying stuff but it's just like painting it. "Oh, we want artists to get paid." And then he doesn't answer. But are they going to actually benefit from this? And he's like, "We want everybody's best interest" kind of thing like he's going round and about. And it's so interesting just to kind of ... There's always going to be a Wild West in technology and the people with all the money who are investing in it, they need it to be Wild West so they can make a lot of money. But you can't just have a ... I mean, copyright is huge. You can't just think that, "Oh, because a machine can copy you and plagiarize you, it shouldn't make it legal." I think there's going to be a huge copyright and plagiarism thing happening. So there does need to be regulation on that. I'm not a lawyer or anything like that. I just know that copyright law is a big deal. So I'm sure that's all going to get taken up. Yeah, and I was talking to my friends, to my homies about the Pharrell thing and also the Ed Sheeran thing where it's just ... Of course, I can't ... I'm not going to say if I agree or disagree with the lawsuit and everything and what I think about labels being greedy and wanting more millions, but it actually showed the world that there's big money in the music industry and people are willing to put on big lawsuits and nobody wants to fucking sue the big boys. Nobody wants to get sued by a Sony or by Universal or Columbia. Nobody wants that. So I mean, I feel like even a big fish like Google, there are things they can get away with and there are things they can't and if labels will unionize, and not unionize, but just get together and start really going headfirst into this, there will be some trouble and I think they know it. That's the thing. That's my theory anyway around that. Do you allow yourself to bog down with thinking about AI or do you just try to push ahead and just keep writing and get your brief ... No, I'm making more music than ever. That's great. I just think the way that I'm thinking right now is people are telling me, even top composers are telling me, look how things are. I'm not thinking how things are. I'm thinking about how things maybe will be and then I'm creating music that is unmatched to anything that I can actually pitch and say, this is the new shit I have. Maybe AI will catch up to this, but you're going to be the first label to put this thing out into the world. You get this. You still got to make yourself a powerhouse artist. A feeling is, a feeling that I have is that generic music, things that are generic and repetitive. Again, lo-fi and things that are very monotone are going to be replicable, but the creativity of the human mind, I am hoping, will not be able to be predicted in the coming 10 years. Hopefully, we can make some real dough in this time and really get together and make some really cool shit happen. Yeah, let's do it. Another thing, I don't know how working with Indy film looks like and I'm sure that the budgets kind of vary, but what does it look like in your level and what does it look like in the beginning? How do you approach it and if somebody needs an intro to that world? Oh, that's a great question. There's a lot of aspiring film composers. There's probably, for every successful film composer, there's just thousands of aspiring film composers and it is such a hard freelance game to get into. There's different routes to go. A lot of people will go to school like Berkeley or USC and study and get a degree in film scoring, which is great that they make programs like that and then they'll move to LA and they'll try to get an assistantship to a composer in LA and just make their whole life work 60 hours a week just as an assistant cleaning up stems and cleaning up literally with a broom studios and getting groceries for the composer and doing all these things and then learning the ins and outs, what they can as like type of like almost internship assistantship. That's a pretty common route. That's very competitive too. For me, I haven't gone that route because I think I started getting production music placements first before really getting indie films to score. When I was living in Nashville, I scored a few films out there with local production companies and filmmakers and I just joined a Facebook group. It was called the Nashville Filmmakers Guild and would respond to classified ads for composers and got some gigs that way. The way I got that gig was I would send them albums, production music albums of stuff I did that got placed. That I think really helped push my resume and my portfolio to the top when they were choosing who would compose for them. Now that I'm in LA, I'm scoring a feature film currently, indie feature, so not a big studio, obviously not a big budget, but it's a budget. What's a big budget? Let's say what's a, do you have like a range of what's a big budget for an indie film? What's a smaller budget for an indie film? It ranges, it really ranges. It's really what you're comfortable with. A big budget for an indie film, oh man, I don't know. It really is dependent on, if you could get 50 grand, I think that would be a really cool, you know, but it all depends on the budget and depends on your credits and your negotiating skills and whether you have an agent or not. I don't have an agent, but yeah, I mean, it depends how much music you need to write. Is it an indie film that's an hour and 45 minutes long that needs 30 minutes of music? Is it an indie film that's a documentary that needs wall-to-wall music? It all depends. And you just got to, I guess you can negotiate, but a lot of the time you're just saying, yeah, I want to do this. But I've never taken a project where I didn't, where I wasn't happy with the compensation. So that's the thing that I have, because I feel like if you do something for free, and I know there's a lot of people that do work for free and I'm not knocking that if you think that's going to help your career, I just feel like you get asked to do a lot more for free. So I've not worked for free. But now, yeah, I think it's just what you can settle with and how does it work into your bigger picture of your other incomes too and how much you're willing to do. Yeah, and how much you're willing to give of your time. It's so important to be intentional about all that because if you, I mean, I can definitely see this thing being a great thing, like doing something for indie film. But if it puts you in a band in the next month, and then you're a asshole to your girlfriend, you start being more distant, you start being more stressed, which happens. And it happens all the time to musicians that are just like doing stuff, doing stuff, doing stuff, then they, and I mean, I was there where I found myself with the egg. I lived with $8 in my account for years. So I've been there like in New York, you know how New York is. It's not fun to live with $8 in your bank account in New York. So it's just being able to put you put you first, as opposed to saying, oh, my career will be great. But wait, okay, your career is great. You have a feeling that you should say yes to this, but what about the rest? Like what about the other things? How do you want to show up for your friends? And I mean, it's important. All these things are important because if you're going to be an asshole to your connections because of this, then this is not worth it by any means because you're going to have to create new connections. You're going to have to invite new people for coffee because you burnt the last bridges. So yeah, I feel like it has to be, as we're all grownups here, there has to be a rational decision making process here with the feeling in the heart. You know, if the feeling in the heart is like so strong that you're like, I gotta, gotta, gotta do this, then of course, by all means. But if it's a decision where you can go rationally and think what it will do to the big picture, and big picture is also in three months, you know what I mean? So it's just like, this is something that, that I've learned the hard way that has to be, has, has to be taken into consideration. I moved to LA to be a film composer. So I'm, I, I feel like I've come in, I haven't come here saying, I'm going to say yes to every single project because I got asked to do, I love writing horror music. I did a horror film based on an Asheville and I loved the whole process of it and is just such a fun movie to make. And the people, the collaborators, the director, producer, everything, they were just great, great people to work with. And I, and I loved it. And I came out here and then someone approached me and said, Hey, would you want to score my horror movie? And they said, but it doesn't pay anything. I said, well, I can't do that then because, you know, I would love to score another horror movie, but I, you know, I gotta, can't just, can't just do that, you know, like I did, I do want to be a film composer, but I can't work for, for no money because it is work and it's a lot of work and it's a lot of revisions and it's a lot of now a thing in film scoring is the con, the conform where you, since it's so easy to edit picture now, directors and editors will just send you a new edit and then you've got a, you're perfectly scored music to the original edit. They've locked off four seconds here and three seconds here and then you've got a, you know, like a Rubik's Cube, like figure out how this music is going to fit around it. So it's a lot of, it's a lot of work. So I only, like I said, something that I learned by being a musician doing gigs and stuff is when I moved to LA, I said, I'm only going to take on projects I know I'm going to love and I've really lived by that and it's helped me make decisions. So saying no is kind of a power move, you know, you can say no to something and because you just got bigger things going on and it's good to say no. You should take on the projects that are going to help you grow, give you income, make you a better artist, make you a better composer and say no to the things that you're not excited about. And if it's a passion project and you want to do it with some friends and something and, you know, it's total passion, you're doing it for free, that's totally fine. But just like taking a gig, you know, what is it? Music, money and hang. It has to, it has to check off two of those three to make it worthwhile. So yeah, this film I'm working on, it's all three, it's music, money and hang. It's checking off all three. I love this film that I'm working on. So I love, the director is super cool. We're very, we have a good rapport, the way we communicate with good communication about the music. So we're making a good movie and it's great to be a part of the project. That's, yeah, and that's what I love. You just got to do the projects that you love. You got to write the music you love. And it's going to, and your talent, your love is going to show through in that if you take something you love, if you don't love it, you're probably going to show that too. Yeah, you're going to be miserable. Man, I think we've covered more than enough for the first time. You know I'm coming to LA because of you actually. I'm coming to LA this October. So I'm definitely going to take you for coffee. And yeah, what is a last piece of advice you want to leave the listeners with? Oh, wow, that is put on the spot. You're not going to ask me your common list of questions. What if I had $500? Yeah, $500. Man, you just dropped $60,000 on the table here that people need to take. Okay, what was the last piece of advice? Oh man, just take it as it comes. Just do your best. Don't get too caught up in the minutiae of things. Just do a good, I don't know if this is good advice. Just general advice. Take it as it is. Here, I got it. Do good, be good, and be good at what you do. Yes, do good, be good, and be good at what you do. Mic drop. I'm not going to add that sound in fake. I just did it with my mouth. Andrew, where can people find you my man? You can go to my website, andrewlapau.com. Lapau spelled L-I-P-O-W. I'm also on Instagram @andrewlapau, and those are the places you can find me. That's where I'm most active, either on Instagram or my website. Word. I'm going to leave that in the show notes for everybody to check out. Bro, I'm sending you all the love, and I will see you in October. Let's keep the conversation going, brother. Sounds great. Thanks so much for having me, Roy. Yo, yo. Andrew is an awesome dude. I've had so much fun with him. Hope you did as well. If you dug this podcast, please make sure to give it a five-star wherever you're listening to it. Rate and review it on Apple Spotify. You can also follow it, which really helps promote the podcast. Also, if there's something you've learned from it, just share it on socials. Yeah, I throw out there some gems you can go follow, Sync Gems on Instagram. I throw a lot of the things that I find valuable, and yeah, let's keep in touch. Let's keep the conversation going, sending you all the love. Sync Gems, we out.