In this episode, John Kozicki (Michigan Rock School and RockSchoolProprietor.com) interviews Sam Reti, founder of Muzie.live. Sam discusses the full rebuild of Muzie, the online music lesson platform, and why his team rebuilt it from the ground up. He also shares how their innovative tech used to deliver live video music lessons online inspired Sam and his team to launch a completely new company called Hiyve.io and compete with the likes of zoom and Google Meet.
In this episode:
- The evolution of the Muzie platform and why it made sense to for Sam and his team to completely rebuild it to best serve online music instructors.
- Which features from the old version of Muzie are still available in the new version, which features were cut, and how new features will improve online music lessons.
- How a casual discussion between John and Sam about online drum lessons sparked what could be one of the most innovative new features to Muzie and a complete game-changer for practical online drum lessons.
- How enhanced audio and video quality from Muzie has launched a new company called Hyive.io
- What the future of online music lessons holds for both music instructors and their students.
The episode closes with thoughts on where online music lessons are headed and how music teachers can use these tools to expand recitals, masterclasses and hybrid teaching opportunities.
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Episode Transcript:
(Please note: This transcript was generated by robots. There may be errors. For the best experience, please listen to the podcast episode.)
John Kozicki (00:00.669)
Welcome to Rock School Proprietor Podcast. My name is John Kazicki, and my co-host Mandy York is not with us today, but I have a guest, a returning guest. He is a guitarist and a guitar instructor and a founder in the tech and music lesson space. Previous guests on the podcast, as I mentioned twice, I think we talked about AI and how AI is changing music lessons and when
will continue to change music lessons. he is the founder and CEO of Hive.io and Musi.live. Sam Ruddy, welcome back. How you doing, Sam?
Sam Reti (00:40.204)
Hey, great. Thanks so much for having me back. Round three.
John Kozicki (00:43.297)
Round three. Yeah, I think you’re the first guest to be on the podcast three times. I think, maybe not. Mike Grande might have been on three times too. So you and you and Mike. Yeah, yeah, right. so for anyone who has not listened to prior episodes with you or is not familiar with your company Muse.live, why don’t you give the kind of the quick
Sam Reti (00:46.722)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Reti (00:53.294)
Perfect match.
John Kozicki (01:12.909)
thirty second overview of what Muse is.
Sam Reti (01:16.204)
Yeah, absolutely. So Musi is essentially an online teaching platform. The best simple comparison is Zoom for music teachers. But we’ve gone quite a bit further, so you could almost now say like Google Classroom for music teachers, where you have a whole suite of tools designed specifically to execute online music lessons, but now in-person and hybrid teaching.
John Kozicki (01:30.275)
Mm.
Sam Reti (01:39.811)
so it’s grown quite a lot, but the the fundamental product is is high fidelity audio and video for online music lessons.
John Kozicki (01:47.566)
Yes, and with that audio, now we’re friends, so I know a little bit about this. From the the is it proprietary sound that you have built into the music platform?
Sam Reti (02:03.327)
Yeah, this is where Muse sort of differs from a lot of the other options, specifically in the music space, is as far as I’m aware, we’re the only platform that has actually built the entire audio video infrastructure completely from scratch. So most platforms utilize like a third-party video conferencing service and then layer on their own tech on top of that, which is completely valid.
John Kozicki (02:19.384)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Reti (02:28.185)
but Musy, we go a little deeper because we’re we’re kind of like you said, we’re sort of a technology company that happens to just have a passion for music. so we built the whole video conferencing suite completely on our own and we and hive the other business we have, which we will get into, but we we sell that technology to other companies. So we’re also a provider of this tech, which is why we’re able to sort of have such a granular sort of
John Kozicki (02:36.856)
Yes.
Sam Reti (02:57.613)
hold on each piece of the the puzzle when it comes to the music and the audio for music.
John Kozicki (03:03.351)
Right. And as the listeners of this podcast know, and anyone who has ever taught an online music lesson using something like Zoom or Google Meet or anything like that, it is the audio that is always the biggest challenge. So yeah, that’s exactly where I I think your background in both music and tech really leverages what you’ve been able to do with music. So
Sam Reti (03:19.286)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Reti (03:28.684)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (03:31.735)
Yeah, you mentioned Hive.io. And again, you’ve shared with me. I think it was like in the last year you launched Hive.
Sam Reti (03:40.962)
Yeah, pretty much yeah. It’s it’s probably not even a year old. I mean, we sort of did like a slow rollout and then like an official thing. so we’ve Hive is kind of that secret project that’s actually always been there. because Hive is the technology that Muse runs on top of. So the audio video tech that I was just explaining is technically Hive, right? And Hive is this this and it it’s all the same company, really. Like it’s all the same people doing the same stuff. So
John Kozicki (03:53.091)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Reti (04:11.253)
so it’s just two brand names, mostly for us to keep it simple in our head about what we’re talking about. but Hive is is both a product and what’s called a a developer SDK, which is basically a toolkit for companies to to take the technology and then put it into their own product. so we do have Hive as a platform, which some music teachers do use. it functions and acts more like Zoom, where you send a meeting link, join a call.
And away you go. It’s not very specific to music, but because the audio technology is the same that we use in Musi, it’s it’s like literally Zoom with really good audio. so it’s like if you’re really comfortable with Zoom and you just want like a one-for-one trade-off, Hive is kind of a good, you know, a good approximation where Musi is more of a very specifically music platform.
John Kozicki (04:52.791)
Yeah.
Sam Reti (05:09.323)
So yeah, hive we sell to corporations, to businesses, to sales teams, you know, it’s not music specific.
John Kozicki (05:16.001)
Right, right. but this podcast is music specific. So yeah, and the reason why I wanted to have you back on is really to talk about a brand new version of Musi. And we were talking just before we hit record, and I said, Well is this Muse two point and because I think it’s important to clarify w you know, what is the difference between this new version and the
Sam Reti (05:20.019)
Right.
John Kozicki (05:45.53)
previous version of Muse and you said, well it’s a complete, full rebuild. And I I guess first what was the you know what was the inspiration or what when did you decide like, you know what, it’s time. It’s time to do this differently.
Sam Reti (06:02.955)
Yeah, I think every five years or so, the technology takes sort of a a leap forward. and it’s like a slow burn, but within that five years, like you kinda like cars, right? If you have a 2020, it’s great. If you have a 2021, there’s probably not much difference. But when you jump up to the 2026, you’re like, there’s a pretty big change now. So it’s the tech kind of works in the same way. So for Musi, the last big update we did was probably 2022.
John Kozicki (06:10.36)
Yeah.
Sam Reti (06:33.057)
Where you know we kind of had the I almost think of this as like Musi 3, because we had the first version of Muse through the pandemic. Then when that slowed down, we had like a minute to sort of recuperate and do a big update. and then this is because the tech has gone so far, and a lot of that is our work we’re doing on Hive, that allows us to experiment with new things.
So there’s a lot of stuff we did with Hive that we kept saying, man, that would be so good in Musi. Like that would help so much. That would really improve the product. And it got to a point where we realized it would be more work to retrofit all of that stuff into Musi than it would be to just build it again. And the irony is because we run Hive and it has a developer kit that allows you to build products, we literally are using our own developer kit.
John Kozicki (07:14.243)
Yeah, yeah.
Sam Reti (07:24.609)
To build the new musy. So we kind of have our own, you know, it’s it’s like a self-fulfilling cycle. so you know, we’re able to build quite quickly because we already have all these, like you can almost think of as like Lego breaks that you’re kind of just sticking together. and then of course we go like another layer deeper and make all of that very specific to music. And honestly, it’s five, six musy’s six and a half years old now.
John Kozicki (07:24.649)
Ha ha ha
John Kozicki (07:31.544)
Yeah, yeah.
Sam Reti (07:52.32)
And so that six and a half years of talking to teachers, refining products, building things, and and just my knowledge plus the team’s knowledge plus the users, it just felt like, okay, now’s a good time for us to put out this new thing that is just the best version of what we’ve always wanted to provide. And it just felt like, yeah, well, we we have the time to do it, we have the resources to do it and and the knowledge. yeah.
John Kozicki (07:52.601)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (08:21.092)
So the the features. I want to talk about the features because and you’ll have to refresh my memory a little bit on on some of those features, but when I looked at Muse, the old version, there’s obviously the stuff that you would expect. There’s the the video conferencing and then there’s there’s all sorts of tools like the f for I’m a guitar player, so the the
the visual fretboard and the visual piano and the tab tools and the whiteboard that has the the notation and all that stuff built in, as well as the creating your own files and and library as an instructor so that you can share those with your online students and everything is sort of self-contained. When you went to to rebuild Musi for this new version, w which
Which features or which tools did you decide, okay, we’re not going to need these anymore? And which features stayed?
Sam Reti (09:24.333)
Yeah.
Most things stayed and got a good improvement. There were a couple things though that we kind of just realized no one’s using it. Or it’s not really being used in the way that it was intended. Or it was something we started working on and honestly just never fulfilled the sort of destiny of that feature. Like a a good example is we have this notes tool. It’s it’s super simple.
John Kozicki (09:28.922)
Okay.
John Kozicki (09:37.475)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Reti (09:53.85)
you open the notes and it’s kind of like sticky notes that you can type onto. But the sticky notes are just for the teacher. They’re not shared with the student. And it’s because there’s a whole bunch you can create assignments, you can chat with your students, there’s tons of other ways to share things with your students. Fundamentally, though, we found it to be confusing because it’s the only feature on the platform that does not share with your students. And people just write notes anywhere that they want to write notes. So
John Kozicki (10:17.241)
Gotcha.
Sam Reti (10:23.327)
It became one of those tools where it’s like, I actually think this is not only not useful, but confusing people and they think that they’re sharing them with students when they’re not. And that’s creating another layer of of sort of misunderstanding. So that was one that I was like, just don’t do it. We we don’t need that.
John Kozicki (10:39.544)
Yeah. It’s funny. I I love a sticky note. You know, I love sticky notes. I use them use them all the time. Right. and I’m a Mac user and I don’t even I know that there’s the the Yeah, I don’t know if it’s still in in the latest version of the the operating system, but I just never felt comfortable using them on on my actual computers. Like that’s an analog thing, yeah.
Sam Reti (10:43.051)
Yeah.
Sam Reti (10:51.437)
Yeah, there’s literally a sticky note tool, right?
Sam Reti (11:03.265)
Yeah. Exactly. Actually it that’s actually probably a good point, ’cause if I think about I haven’t seen the sticky notes in a couple of years, so I’m wondering now if if Apple even came to the same conclusion, which is, you know, kinda like a neat neat concept, but sort of a useless product. ’cause honestly I’d rather write on a sticky note myself than than have a digital sticky note that then I have to go and find and catalogue and
John Kozicki (11:16.408)
R right. Yeah, who knows? Who knows? Yeah.
John Kozicki (11:24.036)
Sure.
Sam Reti (11:32.44)
So that’s like one simple thing that we got rid of. another thing is we did these live transcriptions of of playing the MIDI instruments. And we’re not that we’re not gonna do it, but we’re not gonna roll that out in the first version because the original one that we had only supported quarter notes. because it was really complicated to like run a metronome and then calculate.
The timing that you play, and if you if you’re even off a little bit, then you get all this really messy transcription. And that in itself was one of those things, like it’s a cool function, but it’s not that practically useful in a lesson to teach someone. And so I think there’s a few things we did that were like, that’s really neat, but does it actually move the lesson?
And you can still upload Music XML, which we found to be much more useful, right? So like after we built sort of the self-transcribing thing, we then implemented uploading your own Music XML, which you can create on like NewScore or whatever replaced Guitar Pro or whatever replaced finale. and and those are so much better at.
John Kozicki (12:26.714)
Mm.
John Kozicki (12:31.606)
Uh-huh.
John Kozicki (12:43.748)
Guitar Pro, yeah. Mm-hmm.
Sam Reti (12:52.503)
They have the full suite of tools, they have the full integration of all the music notation. So you’re better off just making the thing in Guitar Pro and then just uploading it into Musi than trying to have like a half-baked Guitar Pro inside of Musi. so so those those are kind of things that we realized we don’t n we don’t need to go down that rabbit hole as much. On the flip side, they all got replaced with things that we find to be much more useful and much more practical. So
John Kozicki (13:01.849)
Yeah.
Sam Reti (13:22.067)
It’s a bit of a where do you focus your attention? And if you’re not careful, you end up doing what’s called feature creep, which is you just build a lot of stuff. And that’s easy to do, especially now when you’ve got Claude, you know, working as a like a co-developer. You can have Claude go build a bunch of widgets, but are those widgets actually focused on the objective of making a lesson a better experience? Or are they just cool widgets
John Kozicki (13:25.784)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (13:39.32)
Yes.
Sam Reti (13:50.945)
To have, you know.
John Kozicki (13:52.399)
That is yeah, that is so smart. and I I guess I have heard that term feature creep in in passing in the past, but that’s it it’s so smart because I you know, I’m a generally I’m kind of a less is more kind of a person because I’ve definitely seen seen it work in my own life where when something is like when software is so robust and it has absolutely everything, it’s almost crippling.
Like like where do I start? Or I liken it to maybe the the recording process when you’re recording a song and recording music. Yeah, you could and and I my very first recording experience ever was to analog tape. So and an actual studio. So we were limited. We have only this many tracks. So you have to be really smart. And if like eight of those right off the bat are dedicated to drums, right, then you know, you’re limited.
Sam Reti (14:38.868)
Right.
Sam Reti (14:48.79)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (14:51.118)
But in a world where digital audio and the recording process now means you can record as many tracks as possible, there’s literally no end to what you can add. So it takes some self-control and some editing on the spot to understand, well, what do I need and what is adding to this song versus I’m just putting this in for my my own entertainment.
Sam Reti (15:17.645)
Absolutely. I think that’s actually the perfect analogy because now you’ve got, you know, six, seven hundred tracks you could build with a million plugins, with every sound profile you could think of. Before you, if you don’t go in with a strong vision of what this song is going to be and what this is going to sound like, that’s when you find yourself spending a week tinkering with stuff and adding, and then when you come out with that final song, you’re like, this is nothing like what I had thought I was.
Going in to create. And software is the same thing. You have to have a really strong mindset of this is what I want, this is how it’s gonna work, this is what it’s gonna look like, and this is how we’re actually gonna do it. And I think that is what the six and a half years of running Musi has shown me: is that because Muse is not even my first product, the Muse is actually my third business, and the first one, the first couple failed.
John Kozicki (16:13.786)
Uh-huh.
Sam Reti (16:16.139)
Because of feature creep. We had this like lesson management platform you know 10 years ago in 2016, and it got so bloated that even I couldn’t figure out how to do stuff. And I was the one in charge of designing the product. It’s like I knew that things had gone off the rails when we’re having a meeting about how to implement birthday tracking. And I was like, okay, hold on. I was like, isn’t this a music?
John Kozicki (16:17.775)
Hm, interesting.
Sam Reti (16:45.441)
like management tool. Like what do what do birthdays have to do with this? But it’s like it’s you you just get in down the rabbit hole. And so there’s a lot of self control to say, man, that is wicked cool, but we don’t actually need to do that. And
John Kozicki (16:50.523)
Sure.
John Kozicki (17:01.573)
So question about that because and I know you’re in a unique situation because you you come from a guitar background, you you teach, so you have that perspective as well as the the software perspective. But at this point, I mean, would you say you’re more like do you teach anymore ever?
Sam Reti (17:26.197)
I’m more software than teaching. So yeah.
John Kozicki (17:27.875)
Okay. And that and that’s where I’m going with it, right? So given that you’re way more software than teaching, and you know, I’m like with my business, I’m I’m similar, right? I’m like I don’t teach that much anymore. I don’t do any private lessons. I work with one band a week at this point, right? but with my perspective, you know, I I have to
Sam Reti (17:40.373)
Right.
John Kozicki (17:51.586)
still talk with my instructors to understand like what are you what’s important to you where are you at you know what is not important to you and so you not being in that teaching world anymore how are you how are you determining what is important to for the instructor and for the student.
Sam Reti (18:07.757)
Absolutely. Yeah, it got trickier because I used to use Musi every single day as a teacher. And it would be so easy to be like, well that doesn’t work. That doesn’t make sense because I’m the one struggling with it. And I kind of joke that like maybe two years into Musy, the other teachers surpassed me in that we we’ve now had teachers on Muse for six years.
John Kozicki (18:15.418)
Yeah.
Sam Reti (18:33.941)
Right, who have been there the whole time. So we have a pretty good group of I don’t know, the beta testers isn’t really even the right word because they’re not like they they’re like foundational users, is probably like a better way of describing it. And there’s a lot of them. You know, Muse’s got 30,000 people on the platform. So we’ve got, you know, hundreds of people that I can tap into and say, like even recently I did a round table.
John Kozicki (18:49.753)
Yeah.
Sam Reti (19:03.487)
with a group of like I did maybe three or four group sessions with users from the platform to sit down and say, okay, here’s what I’m thinking, here’s where we’re going. What are you guys noticing that I don’t see anymore? And what do you so it’s luckily for us, we have a really good relationship with our users. And I think it’s because I I handle Muse not like a software company and more like a
John Kozicki (19:23.961)
Yeah.
Sam Reti (19:32.172)
personal project if it and I mean that in that I’m very involved on the fr outfacing side of the business. Like I still look at the chat support all the time. I still field a lot of the requests that come into the business and I still do most of the demos. So I still keep my hand kind of in there because I need to see like if I’m doing a demo with someone I need to see where they’re confused about things. And if
I have one of the people on my team do it. Like that’s great. They’re capable people. But when when it comes like it’s secondhand knowledge when it comes back to me, right? So I take a very hands-on approach to to musy. And I think it is because I have the background as a teacher and I do still understand a lot about what it’s like to to run studios and teach and everything. I am definitely mm sliding quite far off of that scale now, but
John Kozicki (20:11.791)
Yeah.
Sam Reti (20:30.699)
Because we’ve built these relationships over many, many years, I have a lot of people I can ask questions to and they will be blunt and they don’t have to sugarcoat it because they know that I’m not asking for approval. I’m asking for an actual feedback and opinion. And I think that’s invaluable. Where when I talk to new users, they’re just, you know, more often they’re just trying to be n polite and nicer, because they don’t, you know, we haven’t built that rapport yet. So
John Kozicki (20:46.8)
Yeah.
Sam Reti (20:58.731)
That core user base that I can rely on to actually give me information is is huge.
John Kozicki (21:05.413)
That’s great. And it’s interesting because what you just said, it kind of mirrors why I still coach at least one band a week in my studio, right? Because I like for one, I love it. And but it’s important to me because it’s such a an integral part of what we do at my music school, that it’s important to me that I stay as connected to that process and how everything works in it as possible. And so
Sam Reti (21:14.443)
Right.
John Kozicki (21:35.172)
I will I mean for the you know foreseeable future I I don’t plan on quitting teaching at least one band every every week. So okay that that really segues into your answer really segues into the new features that I want to talk about. So what are the new features that you’ve decided needed to be in this this rebuild of Muse?
Sam Reti (21:38.401)
Yeah. Right.
Sam Reti (21:52.364)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Reti (21:59.778)
Yeah, I think the first thing is not all that flashy or anything, but it’s like a fundamental shift. And it is with Musi currently, the format is you sign up as a teacher, you invite your students to create an account, and then you get linked sort of through the system. And that’s really great for sharing resources and all the other things. But there’s a little bit of a hurdle to get people in. So the main new thing is link.
Lessons. So like Zoom, like Google Meet, you can create a classroom and then you can share a link to that classroom to anybody that you want to join that class. And it’s that simple. It’s click the link, join the call. But what’s cool is we’ve been able to because of Hive actually, we were able to figure out something that was a fundamental flaw with links. And to me, it’s a music lesson is
Also the seven days between your next music lesson, right? So one thing I hated about links was you’d do all this stuff in the room, you’d share the link to someone, you’d have a great lesson, but as soon as the call ended, everything was gone. You’d lose your transcripts, you or you’d have to download everything like onto your personal hard drive and then upload it to Google Drive and then share it across from there. And like you’re creating so much more work for people that that sort of
John Kozicki (23:15.045)
Yeah, yeah.
Sam Reti (23:24.225)
To me, defeats the entire purpose of having like a specialized platform. So one of the cool things is our links are active during the call and after the call. So a student can just click that link anytime and takes them into their classroom. And then inside the classroom, they have the files that you shared, the r whiteboard documents, the assignments, the video recordings, the transcripts, the lesson summaries, the polls, the quizzes, all all the stuff.
John Kozicki (23:35.813)
Nice.
Sam Reti (23:53.428)
is there inside that classroom and all they have to do is click a link. They don’t have to sign in, they don’t have to worry about anything. You know, and it is a little bit like on you to make sure you’re responsibly, you know, handing out links and things, as it is with anything else. You can create you can put passwords on rooms so you can lock them and make them more secure. But the the point is that you cr you knock down like one of the biggest hurdles, which is having to sign up for another thing. And you know
John Kozicki (24:20.504)
Yes, yeah.
Sam Reti (24:21.929)
Most people just don’t want to do it anymore. And and yeah, so why make
John Kozicki (24:23.654)
Sure. Yeah.
That’s yeah, that’s great. And and so the kind of the abridged version is there’s less friction for the student and the parent because again, you’re not creating a new account. The reason to have that that account in the past was so that, yes, after the lesson you could go back and and view all the information, but now you’ve solved that problem too. Just click the link again. That’s that’s brilliant. And and assuming
that these links can be added to say a Google Calendar, right? That link is still gonna be on your Google Calendar a week from now, two weeks from now, whenever.
Sam Reti (25:01.324)
Exactly.
Sam Reti (25:08.169)
Exactly. And that and that fundamental shift is is going to open up opportunities that we couldn’t have before. Like you could trial lessons are gonna become so much easier because you can just share a link to someone, do a trial lesson. If it goes well, keep using the link and away you go. things like workshops and master classes and guest lecturers and things like that become so much easier to do because recitals like we have a whole recital tool inside music, but it’s kind of a pain to use.
John Kozicki (25:21.456)
Yes. Yeah.
Sam Reti (25:37.612)
Because like you’ve got to get grandma and grandpa all set up on an account and or even like a shared account and there’s there’s workarounds, but it’s just annoying. Now you can just be like, hey guys, here’s the link. Anyone who wants to attend, click the link. And all you have to do is like type your name in to so they know who you are, and you’re boom, you’re in the room. And that hurdle is so much lower that teachers can now, like I said, they can do recitals, master classes, you could do like group practice sessions, you could do
John Kozicki (25:46.438)
Sure.
Sam Reti (26:06.997)
webinars, you can do information sessions, like you can kinda do whatever you want. It’s it breaks down a barrier that well again, we fundamentally believed because when we built it originally there wasn’t this workaround that we had created. You know, it took us years to figure that out. And it’s a lot of new technology to to be able to do that. but because we can do it now, it’s sort of like, yeah, why why wouldn’t we?
John Kozicki (26:32.25)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Other new features that that you’ve added to Musi.
Sam Reti (26:37.441)
Yeah. I I think th some of the coolest stuff we’re doing is the MIDI stuff. The the MIDI stuff I know, I know this is the this is the fun stuff ’cause this is this is cool in a few ways. So we’ve always had a MIDI piano and a midi guitar and even a midi violin in musy.
John Kozicki (26:43.964)
Glad you mentioned that, ’cause that’s what I’m I’m excited to talk about. Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (26:57.948)
So okay, I’m gonna break this down though, real like so real basic for any anyone who who might be lost with the the MIDI thing. So MIDI cables, most digital instruments like keyboards, drum electronic drum sets, there’s even MIDI MIDI guitars. They have a MIDI cable, right? That you can go out from the instrument and then go directly into into a computer.
Sam Reti (27:00.033)
Yeah.
Sam Reti (27:04.705)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Sam Reti (27:25.525)
Yeah. And the cool thing is those MIDI cables over the last couple of years have turned into just USB cables. Because years ago MIDI was that I’m sure few of you listening will remember the the thick eight eight pins, you know, big chunky cables that couldn’t plug into really anything. So now with sort of the the the technology shift, MIDI is available in a a lot, especially pianos. Like I’ve got a a that that’s like the cheapest keyboard you can buy at Guitar Center. I think it’s
John Kozicki (27:31.824)
Yes.
John Kozicki (27:35.152)
Like yeah. How many pins? Yeah.
Sam Reti (27:55.168)
$120 or something. You know, it’s got weighted keys. It’s great little, I think it’s a Casio. Yeah. And it has a cable that comes out the back. There’s just a USB cord that sticks right into my computer. And that’s it. I don’t have to install drivers. I know for some people you’d like, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but there’s back in the day, MIDI was a lot more complicated. Now it’s as simple as plug it in. And that’s the end of the story. Is so because of that, you can
John Kozicki (28:16.902)
Yes.
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Sam Reti (28:24.461)
Plug your piano into your computer and a digital piano will show up on the screen, right? So you’ll have the piano there for you to use. And then as you play your piano, the piano lights up on screen. The keys get pressed, they make a sound, and the, you know, your students can see that happening in real time. Because maybe yeah.
John Kozicki (28:30.554)
Yes.
John Kozicki (28:45.648)
Right, so in practice, you’re the instructor or I’m the instructor, I’m playing my my keyboard, which is like, you know, here at a complete 90-degree angle to my my laptop screen or my computer screen. And unless I have an overhead camera focusing on that, my student can’t see my hands on my keyboard, but plug in this MIDI cable.
Sam Reti (28:55.965)
Here yeah, shear, right? Yeah.
John Kozicki (29:13.626)
And there’s a visual display of the keyboard with lights that are lighting up based on what what I’m playing. Yep.
Sam Reti (29:17.963)
Yeah. Absolutely. And and that in itself is great. I mean that that bot alone start there and you’ve got something fantastic. Now right. Exactly. That’s when we were like, where can you take this? Right? And so we did two things that made this possible. The first is again, because of Hive and all this kind of experimenting and sort of answering your first question again of like, why now? Why build again?
John Kozicki (29:28.326)
But wait, there’s more.
Yes.
Sam Reti (29:46.594)
We had we invented a new type of way of sending information from one computer to another. And it’s it’s kind of as crazy as it sounds. It’s it’s it’s so fast that it’s it’s old MIDI was fast already. This is orders of magnitude even faster. And so what that’s allowing us to do now is what’s called MIDI pass-through.
John Kozicki (30:04.24)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Reti (30:12.863)
And so the crazy thing here is in a practical lesson, I, the teacher, plug in my piano, you, the student, you plug in your piano. When I play my piano, it goes through the computer into your cable and comes out the speakers of your piano. Right? And why this is so important is the audio quality in idea.
John Kozicki (30:33.903)
Amazing.
Sam Reti (30:41.281)
Do not use this lightly because we can talk about like lagless and perfect audio and all that gimmicky stuff. I don’t use this lightly. It is perfect audio quality. And the reason is because it’s not audio being processed by a microphone and then going to the other person. What’s actually happening is when you click a key on your com your piano, it’s sending instructions.
John Kozicki (30:59.931)
Right.
Sam Reti (31:09.729)
to the other person’s piano and it’s saying, Hey, play that key. And so it’s actually playing the sound patch that’s inside the piano that the other person has. So Yeah.
John Kozicki (31:23.108)
Like a trigger, right? So except that trigger is is going from the instructor’s keyboard to the student’s speaker on their keyboard. So like the instructor is basically triggering the sound on the student’s keyboard or vice versa.
Sam Reti (31:30.753)
Yeah.
Sam Reti (31:40.866)
Yeah, or vice versa. Yeah. Yeah. Is it the best analogy would be like, imagine if you were in the same room and you could like plug two pianos into each other, right? And like you play, but it comes out of the other person’s piano. And then they play, comes out of it. So just imagine that, but now you can be literally as far away as as you want. You could be ten thousand miles apart. And because of the way we’ve created this this transmission system.
John Kozicki (31:50.137)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (32:01.937)
Yes.
Sam Reti (32:09.515)
The the lag is so insignificant. The the question of can I play a duet with my student, the answer now is actually yes. And and that to me is not only cool, but that is a fundamental change in how online music lessons can actually exist. And I think is the single biggest probably and not to be like, hey, look how cool the thing I did is like.
John Kozicki (32:20.401)
Amazing.
Sam Reti (32:38.323)
it’s it’s fundamentally gonna shift what online music lessons mean. And and to me that’s just crazy exciting because it’s the holy grail we’ve all been chasing for the last ten years. And and we finally now I’m not saying that like if you’re playing a trumpet, sorry, you know like you’re still kinda stuck you’re sort of still stuck with the the old problems. this is exclusive
John Kozicki (32:43.622)
Yes.
John Kozicki (32:48.657)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (32:58.557)
Right. Yeah.
Sam Reti (33:07.021)
To anything that is MIDI controlling. But I mean, it’s not only awesome in practice, but I mean it really is kind of the like, whoa, okay, like what can we now do with that? And and and you you were the one who who kind of pointedly said to me, well.
John Kozicki (33:21.969)
Yeah.
Okay.
Yes, yeah. and this is what like so it’s been a couple weeks since we talked about this, since you told me about about this function. And when we had that conversation, I said, hmm, Sam, if this works on a keyboard, could it work on a digital drum set where the instructor has a digital drum set and the student has a digital drum set? And you were like, Wow, that’s an interesting question. Because I
Sam Reti (33:34.741)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (33:58.522)
If anyone who’s ever done if you lived through the pandemic and you were teaching, drum lessons were the biggest challenge. Like I was lucky that I had one instructor who would just kind of went all in on his drum set setup, and he had a series of like microphones on his kit and different different camera angles. So at least his setup
Sam Reti (34:20.257)
Yeah.
Sam Reti (34:25.516)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (34:28.775)
for the student to view and hear was great. Now, then when the student started playing, he couldn’t always hear. The the drum lessons are the biggest challenge in the online setting. So it’s been two weeks since I planted that seed. Where are we, Sam? Okay. It it works. my gosh.
Sam Reti (34:34.797)
Right.
Sam Reti (34:47.949)
I’m excited to come back and tell you that it works. It works. So I I’ll I’ll show it to you, you know, sometime soon. But it works. So the cool the funny thing is just as a quick aside, the thing I was waiting for to be able to test this is my dad, who also works at musy with me, was a professional drummer. and he just moved. So his drum set, he has a roll in V drum set, an electric kit.
it was all packed away in storage. So I we were just wait, I was like, when are you unpacking the drum set? So a few days ago he finally got the thing unpacked and plugged in. And MIDI is MIDI. So that’s the that’s like when we talked, my brain was like, Well, yeah, I mean, there’s no reason that it wouldn’t work. and and the the logic is true. I mean, it’s just MIDI data. So
John Kozicki (35:22.614)
Ha ha ha.
Sam Reti (35:43.724)
You you the all I’d say the only caveat with the drums is there’s quite a few different ones and they’re not quite as universal as just having like a USB cable out the back. Most of the new ones are. but there’s still a lot of electric drum sets kicking around that have the old like eight prong system. So so that
John Kozicki (35:55.493)
Okay. Yeah.
John Kozicki (36:05.061)
Yes. Yeah. Well I think I think mine, mine at the studio, which is is probably about five years old at this point, it still has that that MIDI cable.
Sam Reti (36:11.019)
Yeah. Right. So in that case you’d need a converter. So you’d need something that can convert that to plug into your computer, which most honestly most people will have already kind of done that. so it’s not a huge, huge ask or a huge overhaul. But yeah, I mean fundamentally it works. So the thing we’ll be working on next is building out the UI so that one of the choices will be drum set and you’ll have a little you’ll you’ll have a little drum set that pops up on the screen instead of a piano.
John Kozicki (36:21.82)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (36:36.045)
Amazing.
Sam Reti (36:40.487)
And when you hit your snare drum, the snare drum lights up. And more importantly, it passes through and it plays the snare sound out of their drum set.
John Kozicki (36:43.975)
So
John Kozicki (36:50.479)
Okay, so functionally, I think the way that this this works for like a drum lessons, drum instructor, drum student, there’s headphones involved. And there may be a little bit of a like kind of a setup challenge when it comes to splitting the audio signal from musy and the microphone so that we can talk.
Sam Reti (36:59.756)
Yes.
Sam Reti (37:16.567)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (37:17.583)
And then also the audio signal for the drum set, right? But I’m assuming the like the drum instructor plays their snare on their side and it triggers the drum module for the student and they hear the snare trigger in their headphones. Amazing.
Sam Reti (37:22.72)
Yeah. It
Sam Reti (37:36.172)
Right, exactly. Yeah. So if they and it the cool thing is because the trigger triggers both the virtual instrument on Musi and the physical instrument that you’re you have. If you are like if say you have your headphones plugged into your computer, the the snare sound you’re gonna hear is just the the snare sound off the musy instrument. so so it actually is okay.
John Kozicki (38:00.867)
Mm. Okay.
Sam Reti (38:04.579)
now it like if you’ve got a very specific like drum setting sound profile or something, then sure it’s gonna sound different. but that’s it’s more like how the MIDI piano works. Is it’s kind of the same situation there because with with the MIDI piano, this applies to both, so but I think this will be kind of an easier visual, is if I’ve got my piano here and the audio is coming out of the speakers of my piano, I don’t also want it coming out of the MIDI instrument on the screen.
John Kozicki (38:33.263)
Mm. Yeah.
Sam Reti (38:33.321)
then you’re gonna have a doubling so so there’s literally just a mute button on the instrument on the on the virtual instrument on the on music so you can just mute that one and then only hear it coming out of your piano or vice versa you can have it you can mute the piano and just hear it coming out of the the instrument so it just depends on how you want to do it. Now the best version is you mute the one on the on musy and you have it come out of your speakers because that’s
John Kozicki (38:40.188)
Okay.
Sam Reti (39:00.715)
You know, that’s sort of the point, is that’s the perfect audio quality. so there will be drums are always a little bit trickier. any drummer or any drum teacher listening knows that, you know, previously you needed an interface, 10 microphones, three cameras, four different ring lights, and you know, a high-powered computer to process all of it. now you can get away with just plug your MIDI into the thing, have your student do the same and
John Kozicki (39:17.574)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (39:22.299)
Yeah.
Sam Reti (39:28.757)
And the cool thing too is like, yeah, you’ll have to figure out like where to put stuff, but you know, if you’re you’re sitting in a drum set and have your laptop maybe like over the hi-hat or like kind of over by the ride or you know, wherever you put it, it’s still gonna light up the drum that’s being hit. So so if you see like if you hear a cymbal, right? So you’ve got your headphones plugged into your drum set and you hear a cymbal if you’re not 100% sure which one, you can just look at the visual.
John Kozicki (39:44.05)
Yeah.
Sam Reti (39:55.116)
And it will have l you know light up which cymbal is being hit on the on the on the display. So those two pieces of information coming in together is is where this becomes a game changer. Cause it’s almost like old school drum lessons where you even have two drum kits sat next to each other and you can see someone hitting a snare drum, and then you replicate the action on your end. Now you can do it anywhere in the world.
John Kozicki (40:13.66)
Yeah.
Right.
This this is huge, in my opinion. And am I getting an exclusive on this, by the way? Are you the first? I was just curious if this is the first time you’re talking about it. you know, our our friend Danny Thompson Thompson is is gonna want to know about this for sure. That is like that alone. I mean the the MIDI function of the keyboard is huge, but like this.
Sam Reti (40:26.877)
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. This hey, it was your idea. So Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yep. He’s gonna go crazy over this one.
John Kozicki (40:46.888)
This thing with the drums, in my opinion, is such a big deal only because I’ve lived through that struggle of like, God, how? okay, so maybe another practical application that that is sort of piquing my interest and I didn’t really think about until now. what about these modern guitar pedals, these modeling pedals? most of them have USB outs for creating.
Any any reason why I mean I guess it would have to have like a MIDI function, right?
Sam Reti (41:22.049)
Yeah, if i if it had a MIDI function, then
John Kozicki (41:25.276)
I’m not familiar enough with the pedals. I don’t use them myself, so
Sam Reti (41:27.659)
Yeah, I’d I’d say it still stipulates around MIDI. MIDI is still like the core thing. So if if it could do something in that world, yes. Now like even even though I’ve seen I know as guitar players there’s always a little bit of aversion to these products, but like the fret light guitar is like a guitar where there’s literally lights on the fretboard and they light up
John Kozicki (41:35.325)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (41:50.024)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (41:54.088)
Sure.
Sam Reti (41:55.422)
usually what happens is you plug it into your computer and you have some kind of like almost like guitar hero-esque interface and and then it like lights up the notes and you just kind of follow the lights and and you cool, you’re playing a guitar. Theoretically, though, if I had a fretlight guitar, you had a fretlight guitar, as I play my guitar, you’d pass the MIDI data straight through, and the lights on your guitar would light up as I play them.
John Kozicki (42:04.764)
Right.
Sam Reti (42:24.661)
So is that’s the cool thing about MIDI is it’s it’s it’s a universal protocol. So it’s you know it’s a universal system and a lot of music stuff revolves around it. now I’m thinking it out loud, like drum pads are a MIDI systems, you know, the the where they’ve got all the little squares and those line up. I I don’t see why you couldn’t have two trigger pads connected to each other that that do the same thing.
John Kozicki (42:24.85)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (42:45.362)
Yeah, trigger pads, yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (42:52.029)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Reti (42:54.485)
And and one just fun example I give people to really kind of explain how this all works is you know when you go in the airport or like a shopping mall and you see the player piano, and it’s like usually a grand piano, but the keys are all moving on its own. typically what that is is there’s like a pre-recorded MIDI roll inside, and they just pick a song and it it sends the MIDI data to the piano and it plays it. Theoretically, you could connect these two together.
John Kozicki (43:09.554)
Yes.
Sam Reti (43:24.405)
And there could be an actual pianist at home playing and it be playing the piano in the airport. that’s just like another fun way of of thinking about what this can do. so yeah, I mean this is it’s kind of the sky’s the limit at this point because we we and I mean this genuine we don’t know. We don’t know what people are gonna do and what they’re gonna come up with. I mean like even just chatting with you, the drums was like a yeah, duh.
John Kozicki (43:30.906)
Right, yeah, yeah.
Sam Reti (43:54.242)
Like you know, so I we’ll probably meet people and teachers that are doing things that we would never have conceived of. But really the fundamental thing is if it uses MIDI, then the answer’s probably yes. Yeah.
John Kozicki (43:54.413)
Ha ha ha.
John Kozicki (44:07.688)
Yeah, that’s it’s so cool. So cool. yeah, I absolutely love that. I think this is this is gonna be one that like, man, drum instructors who have ever taught online or are still teaching in line online, this is huge for them. so okay, to start bringing this one home, how can people check out the new musy?
Sam Reti (44:22.081)
Yeah.
Sam Reti (44:32.001)
Yeah, so so probably by the time everyone hears this, we’ll we’ll either have just released the new Musi or be really close. So in the meantime, if we’re still at that really close phase, we do have sort of a beta program open. And if people are interested in coming in early and taking a look and poking around, reach out to me directly, just Sam at Musi.live.
and I can get you access into the into the beta and you can go in and and see everything that we’re talking about. And all of it works. I mean it’s you know, we’re we’re right at that finish line. we’re just it’s it’s clean up time now. You know, we’re just kind of kind of tying all the the laces together to make sure it’s it’s polished. but I’d I’d say it’s gonna just be a couple of weeks before before this rolls and people are actually actively using it. So you’ll know.
John Kozicki (45:08.272)
Uh-huh.
Sam Reti (45:23.367)
that it’s the new thing because and this is just like a silly thing, but our website right now is all white with kind of fun cartoony styles. When that switches to a dark website with like a and it’s like a black and the logo. if if you see a purple and orange logo, you’re on the old Musi. If you see a pink and blue logo, you’re on the new music. So that’s like the we changed the logo.
John Kozicki (45:46.182)
Okay. All right.
Sam Reti (45:50.965)
and added just some new branding around the whole platform. So if you see the the purple and orange, that’s old. pink and blue, that’s new. So you’ll know where you’re at. but we’re really easy to reach out to too. So you know, like I said, I am very hands-on. So if you email me and just ask me, I can I can point you in the right direction too.
John Kozicki (45:59.24)
Got it. Got it. Awesome.
John Kozicki (46:11.218)
Yeah, fantastic, fantastic. well Sam, always a pleasure talking. this is really exciting stuff. Congratulations on on everything you’ve done with it and what’s to come in the future. And thanks again for for joining me on the podcast.
Sam Reti (46:18.861)
Yeah.
Sam Reti (46:27.361)
Absolutely. Thanks again for having me for the third time. I appreciate it.
John Kozicki (46:30.266)
Yeah. All right. All right, Sam. We’ll see you next time. Take care.
Sam Reti (46:33.792)
bye.
