The Gigging Musician Podcast

The Future of Electric Strings and Being on the Music Career Dartboard with Tracy Silverman

January 15, 2022 Jared Judge
The Gigging Musician Podcast
The Future of Electric Strings and Being on the Music Career Dartboard with Tracy Silverman
Show Notes Transcript

In this episode, Jared interviews Tracy Silverman, an award-winning author, composer, and 6-string violin performer. Tracy has been featured on a Tiny Desk Concert, Performance Today, CBS Sunday Morning, A Prairie Home Companion, and many others.

Hey gigging pros. It's Jared and welcome back to the Gigging Musician Podcast. I am so pumped today we've got an amazing musician joining us as a guest today, we have Tracy Silverman. I'm just going to read a couple highlights from his bio, but you are not going to want to miss this interview. So, Tracy has been lauded by the BBC Radio as the greatest living exponent of the electric violin, which is huge accolades there. You created the strum bowing method. He is former first violinist with the Turtle Island String Quartet. And he has had some concertos composed for him specifically by Pulitzer Prize winners like John Adams and Terry Riley, Nico Muhly, and he's also composed three electric violin concertos himself. Just a couple more highlights. And then I want to welcome him to our show. He he's a big advocate for post classical string playing. He believes that strings must evolve or they will perish. Podcast hosts have For The Greater Groove the future of string playing podcast and very active creator of the Facebook group by the same name. He's played on Tiny Desk. He's played on CBS Sunday Morning, Prairie Home Companion and many others and is currently on the string faculty at Belmont University in Nashville. Tracy, thank you so much for being here. I am so excited to hear your story. Oh, thanks, Jared. Thanks for all of those great, great bio. Appreciate that man we have all the time you like when it comes to reading bios, you know? Yeah, for sure. You've got a very impressive resume. Um, so let's tell it tell us a little bit about what you do presently. And then we'll kind of dig deep into your backstory. Sure. Well, you know, I'm, I'm a concertising musician, you know, I perform still. And in fact, we are in the midst of working on a new commission from composer Roberto Sierra. So continuing my mission in life, which is to get great music written for this somewhat new instrument, this six string electric violin that I've been playing since the 80s. But it's now kind of really starting to get some recognition and one of the first big pieces of recognition came in 2003 when John Adams wrote the doormat Big Sur for electric six string violin, which is, you know, really one of the first major works for the instrument. And, you know, then I got Terry Riley commissioned and now we have a commission from Roberto Sierra, as you mentioned, Nico Muhly, Kenji Bunch, a few other composers who have been, who have commissioned to write major works for the instruments. So that's one thing we're working on now. It's going to be premiering on June 5, in New York City with the American Symphony at Jazz at Lincoln Center Rose Theatre. So that's, that's happening. But what I've really been occupied with for the last couple of years is this educational initiative, which revolves around my strum bowing method. And my whole sort of post classical, as you mentioned, approach to string playing, which I also kind of put under the umbrella of progressive string playing, because some people don't like the term postclassical. I tell you what getting string players to agree on the name for whatever progressive string playing is, it went from alternative strings, to eclectic strings, to multi style strings, postclassical strings, getting a bunch of string players to agree on anything, it's not easy, but I was just about to mention that. So that's incredible. Congratulations on the premiere as all of your educational work. Um, quick question. We have a lot of people who listen to the gigging musician who are string players, and then we have a lot who who are not string players, some of whom, you know, aren't even in the classical world. Just from the ground up, tell us about a six string violin. And, you know, electric string playing is general in general. Yeah. So my six string electric violin has a C string like a viola added. So there are a lot of five strings around a lot of, you know, a lot of especially gigging musicians may be familiar with five strings, they're getting to be quite ubiquitous, which is a violin with a viola C string. So it's like a violin Viola combo, and this adds an extra fifth below that to go down to a low F, which is the low F on a cello a fourth above the low C So it gets almost to the bottom of the cello range. But what's really significant is that it gets virtually to the bottom of the guitar range, which goes one's half step lower to a low E. So it's like the first fret of a guitar. And the reason that I say is really even more significant is because the instrument was designed was, you know, invented basically to be able to do what guitars do. That's how I approached it. Me and Mark Wood, who were both starting to build these instruments in the 1980s, with six strings. And our reason for doing that was so that we could do what guitar players do, we could basically substitute for a guitar player in a rock band, there had been a lot of jazz, not a lot, but a handful of jazz string players over the years going back to guys like Stephen Cappelli, Stuff Smith, Joe Venuti, all the way through Jean-Luc Ponty and Micha Urbaniak, and people like that. No Pointer, if you will, you know, going more recent. But Mark and I were really interested, we were sort of a younger generation than Jean-Luc, and really interested in being rockers playing rock on violin, more so than jazz. And we and this was really new territory, because nobody had really done that and rock, and few people had done it in jazz. So one of the main things we needed to do in order to achieve that and was to get that low string on there, and to get it to work, effectively, which took many years of research with D'Addario strings, by the way, to we could get a good solid low, we could, so we could play power chords on our lower fifth, or to lower strings, and do everything that a guitar could do. Mostly, which means having that low register, having that extra octave of base register is critical. Because without that a violin can never really be a rhythm instrument. It's kind of like what a ukulele is in, in the pop world. I mean, there are a few now you know, a couple people doing singer songwriters with ukuleles. But it's limited, it doesn't have that bass range that a guitar has. And a guitar by having that extra octave of bass is enough. It's not the further octave below that that a upright bass has. But it has enough of a bass register for us to hear that in a singer songwriter context as being able to cover the courts, they can play strum a chord on a guitar and you can hear the bass note and the upper part of the chord just like you can on a piano more or less. So that was why it was significant to have six strings to be able to treat the instrument like a chordal instrument. That's the short answer I should have. I should have led with that. That's awesome. So who were some of like the the rock musicians that influenced you in the 80s that led you to want to do this? Well, there were a lot of them were from the 60s like Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Frank Zappa, Carlos Santana, all the great guitar players, you know, all my friends when I was in high school. I was really into the Sibelius violin concerto Tchaikovsky Mendelssohn, I was playing practicing five hours a day on that stuff, you know, but none of my friends had any idea what a Sibelius violin concerto was, right? They knew it was old fashioned, and, and, you know, nothing that was cool to them, that they were sure of. That's the only thing they didn't know about it. And to in order to be able to sort of bridge this gap between being a musician and having a bunch of friends. I, you know, wanted to reach out to them with the music that they liked that they listened to. And I realized that in in that process, not only was I struggling to try to be cool, you know, as the guy who played this Sibelius Violin Concerto I really what I realized I was doing was trying to find a way to play my instrument in a contemporary way that was relevant to my friends. And instinctively I knew that it had to sound like a guitar because everybody had a favorite guitar player back in the 80s when rock and roll was king you know, 70s Whatever. Everybody had a favorite guitar players like a sports heroes like you know you had a favorite basketball player or quarterback or whatever. You know, you had a favorite guitar player like kids do now with rappers because rock was What'd you listen to basically, if you were, you know, suburban white guy, you know, which I was. So, um, so I wanted to play music my friends would get. Mm hmm. So that's awesome. Yeah, playing through not just the six string instrument that had that range, but more significantly pumping it through Marshall amps and trying to distort it make it sound like a guitar. Because, you know, an electric violin does not sound like a guitar unless you work on it. It sounds like screechie, loud, horrible stuff, unless you have the right amp and the right instrument and the right pedals. And that's where Mark and I started in the 80s was oh, screechie horrible sounds that took us years to figure out how to control untain. Yeah, so did you work with a luthier to add on that six string? Or how did that work? Originally, Mark and I actually did the craftsmanship ourselves, we built a lot of instruments ourselves, and Mark kind of kept on that, on that train, and now has his own company that builds them has been doing that for years, and is one of the premier electric violin builders in the world. I was using a few few different guitar makers, you know, you'd find somebody who would be foolish enough to agree to a project like this, that would involve way more time and effort than they ever thought it would for way less money than they should have, you know, spected out for. And now we kind of go through one luthier after the next like this, yeah. Because people would never agree to make the next one. And then you know, I would have another one that I'd want to change. And I want to try this one, semi hollow. And I want to make this one curved top. And I will use a different wood. And this went on for you know, it's still going on for 35-40 years later. Now. In fact, I have an instrument here that was just sent to me a couple months ago, that's a replica of another one of mine and slightly different. It's a floating tail piece. You know, there's like all these little slight tweaks that we're trying to make, to try to because it really is new territory. And I'm very sensitive to the fact that a lot of electric violins don't sound very good. And I think it's really important. I discourage people from buying cheap electric violins or from not knowing how to use their gear, because it makes us all sound bad when somebody shows up to a gig with electric violin and it sounds like crap. And everybody goes, Oh, no, electric violin player, plug your ears. It's not really good for business. Yeah. That's cool. I mean, that's so fascinating to hear that. Honestly, as a classically trained violinist, myself. electric violin. They don't talk at all about that in music school. Yeah, no. So it's so cool to hear that this is such an evolving industry. It feels fresh and exciting. It is it is and there's new stuff going on all the time. There's 3D Various doing 3D printing of instruments, customized 3D printing, and, you know, there's all kinds of stuff like that. Yeah that's awesome. Yeah. So you mentioned this was in the 80s. When you started to think about this. You mentioned playing Sibelius and Mendelssohn and all the classics, what is your formal quote unquote, formal musical training and, and background? A graduate of the Juilliard School? studied with Ivan Galamian amazing, you know, and his last couple years of teaching gives you an idea how old I am. This was in the late 70s in New York and then immediately took a left turn and joined a rock band on violin or something else on violin i You know, if I could have played the guitar better. I very well may have pursued that. But luckily, I couldn't. You know, I did start to teach myself guitar. In my last year at Juilliard, actually, I broke my right wrist and jumping off a stage. Oh, wow. And pretty much couldn't play all year. It didn't do a senior recital didn't do any of that and taught myself how to play guitar basically, because I could strum and got more into songwriting and kind of started taking that turn out of classical music. But I you know, I did not after graduating I did not take auditions for orchestras for I didn't do competitions and all of the stuff that I had been basically training to do. I just kind of kept passing On as my parents kept saying, So when are you taking this audit? When are you going to do this competition? Or when are you going to, and I'm like, Well, I'm just going to kind of, you know, maybe next year and kept hoping that my rock bands, I had rock bands all this time, we're going to take off and be successful, I was sure that it was just going to be a matter of months until we got signed by a major label because here I was an electric violin player who could play pagg in any level playing and, you know, playing rock and roll, but a little did I know the world was definitely not ready anywhere near ready for that. At that point. I was not ready for that I was playing and in a very classical kind of way. That was not I had much to learn about how to play the instrument, how what rock and roll, you know, how to write tunes and record and all of that, and how to get good sounds out of the instrument was still years away as well. Yeah. So this was at the end of your Juilliard experience. How did you get quote unquote, good enough? Or, you know, how did you develop the technique that you needed? Well, I basically bumped around New York in the rock clubs of New York for about 10 years, beating my head against the wall of rehearsing in a little closet of a studio, in Manhattan, in the music building for 10 years and writing songs and try and recording demo after demo and playing at two in the morning at CBGBs. And all of that. And getting absolutely nowhere I couldn't get arrested. Nobody was interested in an electric violin rock'n'roll violin. Uh, so what I was doing all through those 10 years after Juilliard was I was being a gigging musician. Yeah, I was playing weddings. Two or three every weekend, especially in June and then December. And I was on the, the synagogue circuit of Long Island, playing with the Steven Scott band. The was the other one Hank Lane band. I don't know if these companies are still around. But back in the 80s. They were thriving, doing these lavish parties really expensive parties out on Long Island in Manhattan. I was in my here's my thing about gigging because this is how I supported myself for 10 years of living in New York, which is, you know, expensive, expensive. Even back then it was expensive, living in a basement apartment in Yonkers, first of all, to keep my overhead down. putting any money that I made whatsoever that I didn't immediately use to pay my cheap rent, or the cheap food that I was eating, went into my rock band, mostly to pay for that tiny little closet of a studio that that we rehearsed in. Yeah, which was twice what I was paying for my apartment. But I was playing gigs all the time, and would say yes to anything. I was basically playing a lot of classical gigs, connected with a guy who was a contractor, you know, had a small company and basically contracted a lot of recent music school grads from Juilliard in Manhattan, and Manus got us all to work cheap. Because we were fresh out of school and hungry, and would do, you know, weddings all over the place, doing classical stuff. And then I was also a singer in one of their wedding bands. So and then, because I could play jazz and I could improvise, which is something I really started working on. While I was at Juilliard. I was often thrown into the, the cocktail hour band. So I would frequently have these six hour hits, where I would do a wedding ceremony, a cocktail hour, and then for our band hit some sometimes as like the strolling violin player during the breaks of the band, depending sometimes in New York and these big affairs they would hire for violin players to just be in the band, and we would just sit there. And basically, I was the only one who generally could improvise it, all the others would just sit there and just fake it completely. They were turned off, nobody could hear anything they were doing. And then we would get up during the breaks and play a little, you know, the classy part of the night. You know, get the players up there. So anyway, I did that for years as a classical player, as a jazz player as a strolling violence because I learned the whole strolling gig from a guy who when I was first came out of Juilliard had no work. A guy who was a stroller who I'd met through Um, I think a family relation or something, had a regular Sunday brunch gig at the Yale club in Manhattan down to a very, very snooty, you know, Sunday brunch. We weren't allowed to even look at the food don't even look in that direction, you know? Wow. And, and we would do the strolling thing. There was like a two hour three hour hit or something like that. So he brought me in as his harmony guy, you know, to play the harmonies, and then learned all his stuff so that he could finally leave that gig he'd been doing for years. And I took that over, after a little bit, did that for a few years. Every Sunday, I learned all that stuff. The French Waltz is the Italian rumbas. There's a whole continental kind of repertoire that went with that strolling stuff a lot of operettas and Victor Hugo nontidal what's his name? Kurt Vile, and, you know, stuff like that? Yeah. Anyway, um, so I would do that I would sing, I play classical, I play jazz, whatever, any, any gig that the way I was able to make a living was by diversifying by able to do a lot of different things. And largely because I had a good year and could fake and play harmony. Well, so that got me through a lot of spots where people just went like, oh, we can put him on a gig. He'll be okay. Yeah, that's awesome. So you spent 10 years doing the whole gigging scene. Words, did you ever sort of act as like band leader at that time, or was it mostly playing in other people's bands a few times, I was, you know, put on as the leader after being the singer in that band for a while and really learning how it works. And watching all these big bands from the big agencies. How they operated, you know, I knew how to do a dance set how to call the tune so that they started from slow and gradually got faster, and then you go back and you start do a ballad, and you pick it up again, and you do the 50s set, you know, for that crowd that wants to get up and dance and you do the pop, you know, the top 40 stuff for the kids. And, um, you know, just how to how to do all that, as a leader was, you know, something I learned how to do and definitely did dozens, dozens of gigs like that. Yeah, for sure. Did you ever have to handle the business for any of those bands? Uh, not really, I did a few times, you know, where I would get calls myself to put something together. And that definitely happened more and more, you know, the longer I was around on the New York scene. And, you know, often was the leader on like, wedding ceremonies where I had to interface with the, with the family with the bride or with the parents and get the list and get coordinate what music and what, you know, do all of that kind of stuff was typically my job and to call it as we're running it and go okay, and out. And now here comes the broad, you know, that kind of stuff? Yes, as you know, very well, I'm sure, for sure. And for those of you who are listening and can't see us, you definitely just mimic to the raising your violin to take you. That's awesome. I learned how to do all kinds of stuff I never thought I would know like, in New York, and this is different in other parts of the country. But in New York, the band leaders call the keys with their fingers by holding one. One finger up is the key of F for one flat. Two is flat three is E flat four is a flat. Which do you think flats, why are you holding fingers up and sharps were down. That's strange. G major is one finger down two is two fingers down. Only because most of the keys were flat keys for horns. That makes sense. So nine times out of 10 You are in the flat key. For sure. And many string players get get a little gun shy about flat keys. Yeah, but but I love flat keys. Yep. Awesome. So it sounds like you know those 10 years, you know you were gigging while also building up your rock bands and everything. At what point did the rock bands start to show signs of of progress or never, never happened? Of Fine. What ended up happening was finally after years of this my wife and I, we were married for quite quite a number of years and my wife was she's now my ex wife was the keyboard player in the band even at one point, she was in the band and very dedicated to the to the dream. But finally at one point we went you know what, let's get out of New York. She wanted to start a family We're about 30 years old now. And so we moved to Minneapolis because her brother had lived out there she visited out there. It was a really good indie rock scene. This was right around 1990. So we just picked up and moved to Minneapolis without no one. So except her brother who just left actually and started trying to gig out there freelance. I got a gig teaching at Macalester College actually had just gotten a gig teaching was trying to get my band off the ground, was out there already for like two years or so kind of starting to get a little bit of attention. Got into kind of a different band. The thing I was doing in New York was kind of was kind of 80s, rock hair, metal kind of stuff. And when I got out to to Minneapolis, I started doing much grungier odd, neater, super distorted kind of grungy thing that was more popular at that point. And just kind of really invested in all of that. And got this teaching gig at Macalester, and then the phone rings, and I pick up the phone, and this guy goes Hey, JC it's Danny Seidenberg you remember me from? We did a wedding together in West Orange New Jersey six years ago. Oh my dad. Sure. Danny How you doing? It's like, but you know what? I'm not in New York anymore. I'm not doing weddings. So you know, sorry. If you're calling about you know, hiring me for a wedding I was not calling about have a freakin wedding. It's Danny. I'm not I'm not a guy. I'm not getting married. I'm I was playing on the wedding with you. I'm a viola player. I'm in the Turtle Island String Quartet. Now when we're looking for a first violin player. And we were actually halfway through a bottle of champagne because we're celebrating that I just gotten this gig at Macalester, my wife and I, yeah. And also, we had a new baby and we were buying a house moving out of the Dumpy place that we were in and buying our first sort of place out in the suburbs. Right? We're sort of settling down and having this bottle of champagne to celebrate our newly settled life. And then the phone rang. And so Danny Says, so we're looking for violence. We're in Oakland, California. Are you interested? I was like, Danny, man, if you call me last week, I just agreed to take this teaching gig. We're closing on Tuesday. It's Thursday. We're closing on a house. I can't do it. It goes Are you sure it's California man, Minneapolis. I like Sorry, hang up the phone. We finished a bottle of champagne. And I like just gonna call United Airlines and see, you know, this is before the internet. This was 1993 Wow, I had no computer and no laptop at that point. I call United Airlines and just just and the answer and for some crazy reason they were having like a special round trip fare that I could buy. That was Thursday night, for Saturday morning. For $99. I'm like, Oh man, that's just too crazy. Even back then that was a crazy cheap fare to be able to do two days later, I was like, I got to do this. I just got to do this. So went out. Do the audition. Got the gig, came back. And my wife was like, No, we're buying the house out there because who knows? This gig is gonna work out. Those guys are like to hire you. They fire you who knows. So I commuted and kept my gig at Macalester, flew out to California started immediately recording who do we think we are the next record? And yeah, it was just insane. So that's kind of how my my first big break happened because of a wedding that I had done six years previous. In West Orange, New Jersey. That's crazy. At one of the things that I always sign off every episode of The Gigging Musician by saying, Remember, you're just one gig away, right for for you that that gig was a wedding six years prior? Yes, it was. That's his saying. I love hearing your story. We are on a little bit of a time schedule here. So I want to just rapid fire asked you a little bit in the future. And these stories probably can go on for an hour each. You have since then performed on some of the largest stages in the world. How did those come to me? Well The other big break that I'll try to tell the short story is dharma at Big Sur with John Adams. So, you know, I was in turtle island for years, I met Terry Riley through my very first solo gig that I did, which was in Europe, in Europe and Terry Riley, the famous, you know, legendary American composer is sitting in the very front row center straight sitting in front of me with his big white beard just kind of smiling up at me, I'm like, Oh, my God, this Terry Riley, this is my first solo gig ever. And terrified me. I played the gig. And Terry came up to me afterward and said, Hey, do you want to play in my trio with me? So I started playing with Terry Riley through that and was playing with Terry when John Adams happened to see me playing with Terry in Oakland, California. And John said, Hey, I'm writing this commissioned la fille just commissioned me to write the opening of Disney Hall there, you know, big commission, and I've done the piece, the big commission, and I've been writing it and I just realized that your six string violin is the instrument that I want to use to folk, you know, I want to write a electric violin concerto for you. Can you imagine somebody John Adams saying that to you after a gig, I was like, for real? And he said, Yeah, I'm gonna call you and a few months, I didn't hear from him for months, and then I heard from him a lot. So um, so that's how I ended up on on Disney Hall. You know, it was just a crazy, crazy fluke, again, another situation where I was playing a gig, a different gig and got a big break, because someone seeing me on that gig. And I guess the point I'm trying to make, like the first break at a wedding gig, is you never know who is on that gig? Or who's listening to that gig. Yeah, you know, you think you're exhausted, you're tired, you don't feel like you don't want to be there. You don't like them, the bride and groom, whatever you whatever the circumstances are. Get over it. You're a professional, you show up and you do your a number one work every single time. First of all, because that's a moral imperative. You just do good work. That's part of what what, you know, Garrison Keillor told you to do. And if anybody's heard Prairie Home Companion or his whatever be will stay in touch and do good work. Do you do good work because you for the work for the inherent, you know, quality of that. And because you never know who the hell is listening to you. And, you know, as it turned out, John was listening and just happen to like that particular weird blend of rock and Indian and jazz and classical that Terry, that's Terry Riley. And the way that worked with this instrument that's like a guitar, but more expressive, expressive like a violin, but could go to all these different places. And anyway, that's how that that happened. And then, you know, years later, I was able to get Terry Riley, a commission with the Nashville Symphony, and they premiered that at Carnegie Hall. So that's how we got there. You know, just kind of a slow a slow process. I've listened. I've played on many a small stage. I've played on many a thing that was not a stage at all right? Including in between tight tables in a restaurant. So you know, pretty much everything from from CBGBs to Carnegie Hall and everything in between. Yeah, it all leads you where you you never expect Yep. I love what you said about you know, even treating a gig that may or may not be what you want to be playing like for some people. I do hear a lot of times like playing weddings is not what I want to be doing. But like you said, you never know who's going to be listening. It's also a way to support yourself with your art and you should treat every situation as a professional situation. So I want to kind of round things out here. Yeah. What what other kind of rapid fire pieces of advice could you give to the gigging musicians listening to this? You know, one thing I tell students a lot is to think of their career like a dartboard. Sort of concentric rings you know, because a lot a lot of people who are freelance musicians are kind of their goal is maybe elsewhere, you know, some people are are you know, are intend to freelance and are working you know, their business as a as a lifelong career. to rear and and that's great. But for other people, you know, it may be a stop along away for them to maybe a performing career of one kind or another an orchestral career, a teaching career, and in the meantime, or along with other, those things that maybe aren't paying as well. They're freelancing. So the dartboard idea is in the center of that dartboard is your dream gig, right? You want to be a rock star. That's the center of the dartboard, let's say, or you want to be a concert soloist. You want to be Asha Heifetz around that, you know, there are varying circles of closeness to that gig. And, you know, just outside of that, maybe being in a chamber group, a really, you know, prestigious chamber ensemble, or being in an orchestra maybe right outside that or, you know, and as you get further out, you may hit rings that are playing weddings, or teaching or whatever, open mic night, you know, and then off the dartboard are things like, you know, Starbucks and, and Cheesecake Factory, you know, and and, you know, having a day gig being temping in an office, those are not on the dartboard. And so what I tell students is anything that's on that dartboard, you take, that's how you start, because you move, it's like, you start on one ring, and then you can hop to the next ring in. And then you meet people who are in the next ring. And and you you network your way closer, and you get closer and closer. But if you a lot of people out of conservatories are like, I'm not taking any of those outer rings on the dartboard. I'm not doing, I'm not teaching Suzuki, or I'm not doing whatever. If you're playing your instrument, if you're doing something musical, you're on the, it's on the dartboard you take that gig until you got something better. And that's how you work you work your way in and you know, you don't just stand around and wait, you know, with your musical integrity for your dream gig because that's not how you don't, that's not how you get there. You very, very rarely through bull's eyes, you kind of it's not really a dark game, you know, you sort of throw your way onto the board, and then you can keep moving your dark, closer. That's kind of how it works in real life. Yeah, that is incredible advice. I wish that I got that advice when I was in music. That my teacher told me exactly the opposite. He said, Don't be a freelancer don't because then every time the phone rings, you're gonna jump. And you know, he said, like, you know, have your have your integrity and you get a good paying job. And I was like, You know what, that's great for maybe the 5% of people who can make that work. But the rest of us have to pick up the phone. A lot of us, you know, or at least that's a choice, you know? Yeah, for sure. I'm definitely gonna steal your dartboard analogy now. Awesome. Tracy, this has been an incredible interview. Thank you so much for sharing your story. How can our listeners find you and you know, consume some of your stuff? Yeah, you can always find me at TracySilverman.com, my website's got all my stuff. From there. My teaching stuff is strumbowing.com. So I have this book called The Strum Boeing Method. And I've got a Strum Boeing Groove Academy on teachable.com, which is where I'm doing all my courses. These are online courses. I've got a bunch up there. Now I'm just working on a whole new set of, of smaller mini courses that are going to be little three lesson sort of $25 ish. courses on more specific things like chopping or ghosting, or how to teach grooving, stuff like that. And so that's, that's where you can find that stuff. Or Instagram, Facebook, like me, subscribe, YouTube, all of the usual awesome plus, you got your own podcast the For The Greater Groove if you ever matter of fact. Thank you. Yeah, for sure. I just know people who listen to podcast like to listen to other podcasts. Thank you. That was the obvious marketing thing that I directed that I should have followed up on and did not. But I am here to say that I am about to interview you for my podcast. So we're doing back to back interviews here. And that's, that's one of the ways it works in the podcast world and I'm looking forward to to swap in and getting your wisdom in my world is awesome. I am so excited and I'm gonna go buy some of your courses. Those sounds exciting. But thank you so much, Tracy. And remember, thanks again for listening to the Gigging Musician Podcast to our listeners. Always remember just like Tracy said, you are just one gig away. Yes.