Tyler. + Xan | "So Far Away"
Local musicians Tyler. + Xander Waldrop sit down with rBeatz.com Host, Greazy Keyz to discuss their recently released single, “So Far Away”, here on Local Music Somewhere.
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Live Interview with Greazy Keyz Thursday, May 30.
Hey, what’s going on rbeatz.com music fans? This is your host Greazy Keyz here with some some fantastic rising musicians here from Charlotte with this segment we call “Local Music Somewhere.” Joining me today, we have Tyler Weaver and Xander Waldrop, welcome boys. How you guys doing?
Pretty good.
Doing great.
Very cool.
Thanks for having us on.
My pleasure. We’re looking forward to hearing about your music and some of your influences and where you guys plan to go with your careers. So, you guys have gotten some tunes going on. You’re writing some music. What are some of your inspirations for some of your songwriting style?
So personally, I have a pretty wide range of things that I’ve listened to growing up and currently that have influenced what I do. I’m a huge Post Malone fan. He’s kind of known for breaking the mold on that one. And, you know, his first stuff was very hip hop. And then he kind of moved to pop and now he’s I think he’s planning on releasing a full country album.
Really? Right on
Yeah, so my influences kind of span from like I tend to lean towards hip -hop but I do have some like rock influences. My dad listened to a lot of Van Halen. Been to a lot of Van Halen concerts. So that’s probably why I like rock. But I’m actually working on a track right now that’s a blend of like hip -hop and like a pop punk type song,
You know, yeah I’m just checking out some of your tracks that I’ve heard already I was gonna say exactly I heard a lot of influences like hip -hop, you know trap, R &B, but then also with the acoustic guitar and like like rock and roll so that’s really cool to hear that. That’s how to come out. How about you Tyler?
I’d say I’d say the same cuz like you just it varies a bunch of different ones different genres, but also like In most some of my songs I have like that kind of the Weeknd (style) like electronic, and I also like sometimes I do like some beachy stuff because I used to listen to a lot of Surfaces, I don’t know if you heard it.
Yes, absolutely really.
I mean I just like making anything. That’s groovy and just groovy. Yes, I dig it.
Absolutely 100 %. So when you’re coming up with a process, you know you have all these influences, what is your creative process when it comes to composing and writing songs?
So I’d say sometimes very rarely, sometimes like I’d be driving or something, and then you just get, sometimes I get lyrics and ideas of like a beat or something, but most of the time that rarely happens. Most of the time, I just sit down, make a beat, maybe start with drums, right? And then add whatever I’m feeling for that instrumental and then just freestyle something.
Right on. Yeah, very cool.
For me, there’s a bass player who put it really in a really good way. He said that when you get an instrument, there’s usually a song or several songs in that instrument, and they come out. And Tyler Joseph from 21 Pilots, I’m pretty sure has said before that the songs kind of write themselves. And that’s kind of my creative process. So what’ll happen is I’ll be in bed really late or in the car, like he said, and I’ll just hear a melody, or I’ll hear like lyrics and a melody at the same time or I’ll hear a guitar part or a bass part or just some part of a song. Some little part and I’ll go home and I’ll lay it down like on a track and then after I get that one part, then I’ll start adding other things. So I’m working on a song currently that is probably gonna take a while to finish, but that one started from just a vocal melody and a lyric that I came up with while I was in class one day. And then I put like some overdriven guitar on it and then I ended up blending that one with hip hop. That’s the one I’m talking about but that one started as like just a vocal melody, but the song that we just released that one. I think started as a bass track.
Yeah, we just play the bass. I would say like that happens a lot too for me. Like I’m working on something too and it’s so cool to like have an idea, then like a few weeks or however long it takes to make it listen to it and be like that was my idea. Yes, exactly what I wanted it to sound like.
I can definitely relate to that, you know as a musician myself, you know I come from The beat and the instruments to me are foundational and lyrics and melody usually kind of come secondary. But you guys are able to kind of you know, you might find inspiration from either one, right lyrics a melody and Oh, yeah, here’s a cool bass line. Let’s build around that.
I would agree with you that it usually starts as some sort of instrumental Right, and then the lyrics come afterward or melody comes and then you write lyrics to that.
So would you guys consider yourselves multi -instrumentalists? Like do you guys play keyboards and the bass and the drums and the guitar yourselves.
Yeah, I know you’re a big bass player. (To xan) I play guitar a little bit of piano a little bit because I mean it’s I all kind of taught myself yes I did play violin for like eight years but drums because we got drum set and stuff.
So, live drums you guys play some live drums?
Not on my tracks right now. I have recorded some that I haven’t released yet.
That’s great, very cool
For me, I do play, I play bass guitar, electric and acoustic and so the music we make has pretty much everything in it. Because we understand how it works. So when we go into Logic, like we can create a drum track and I know you can play drums like to some extent, but I can hardly play drums at all, but I know how to put a beat together. So a lot of it is just a general understanding of music, but yeah, physical instruments, bass, electric and acoustic.
So with your understanding of music, what’s your background? I know you guys, you know, high school and college, did you guys take lessons? Are you classically trained in anything or are you just guys just kind of vibing it and just doing it yourself, figuring it out as you go?
I’d say just like vibing it. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I did play violin, but like, I don’t remember any of the music theory. Maybe that helped my ear, I don’t know. But, I mean, I have a lot of musicians in my family.
I was gonna say, family?
Played music, you know, grew up singing in church and stuff, like with my family and stuff.
Just immersed in it.
Right. Exactly, yeah. For me, it’s kinda interesting, and I think I talked about this the last time I was on here, but it started out as my friend Jackson was starting and he was on guitar. Yeah, and he was like, hey, you kind of know drums, right? Because my dad has played drums since he was a teenager, right? And I was like, I can kind of play, I can practice and maybe I’ll get good enough to play. And so started on that, didn’t really like drums very much. I loved how electric guitar sounded. And then one day I went to Guitar Center and I picked up a bass for the first time and fell in love with it. And then later I found out that bass was like a blend of like percussion and that rhythm like on a rhythm guitar whatever absolutely that’s kind of how I got into bass right and then after that it was just hundreds of hours of YouTube videos on music theory and how to play bass and electric guitar.
I never knew this you never got lessons on bass? You’re pretty good.
No, just YouTube videos.
That’s great man, so obviously technology plays a role in in your music making process. So tell me more about that like you see Logic you’d like to use and obviously YouTube videos to tell maybe learn how to play, so tell me your process when using you know technology and or how important is that to your music? It’s very important.
I mean for recording and everything of course is important sometimes though Just I mean you can just jam on a guitar and you might not make a song but it’s just fun to just play around and sing, I don’t know.
Yeah. I would say that technology is a huge part of what I make mostly because I don’t have access to like good drum mics and like a professional understanding of like EQing and stuff. So I can do my best based off of what I’ve taught myself how I use Logic and of course a lot of the drums I use that sound real and aren’t just like hip -hop samples are from Logic. So it is a huge part of it for sure. The song I’m working on right now does have real guitar in it and I plan on putting real bass guitar in it right but it would definitely be really hard to get the sound we have without Logic and and the stuff.
Logic is awesome.
It is amazing. I use Logic too at home. You know I do a lot of tracking for other artists, you know remotely that way and I don’t see myself as a songwriter So much but more of a collaborator a side guy, but yeah Logic has just been you know a huge part of my Music making as well. So with that, what are you guys thoughts on like say you know with technology obviously very important for up -and -coming songwriters just to get plugged in recording your own music. What is your take on like AI and things like that within within music creation?
I mean there’s a lot of already there’s a lot of like plugins if you don’t know what plugins are real quick they’re like plugins are like effects or or sounds some like sounds that you can use. So say, like, autotune is a plugin. So instead of just singing, if I want like that electric kind of feel, you put in autotune, which is a plugin, it’s like an effect. But there’s so many like other that have heard of like AI plugins already happening where it can like make a melody for you. And I mean, I’ve seen a lot of videos on that. I just think that’s pretty cool. And it’s It’s definitely gonna take over and, yeah, be in the music industry more, you know?
I was thinking about those, I saw a whole bunch of them on TikTok a while back, but they’d like deep fake voices where they’ll take artists’ voices and they’ll like, I don’t know how to explain it.
Like make it sound like Drake or something.
Yeah, they’ll take a song like, I don’t know, like Stevie Wonder. And then they’ll take the vocal track and they’ll somehow use AI to make it like Lil Baby here. It’ll be Lil Baby singing a Stevie Wonder song.
I think it’s really fun. There’s a lot of Instagram accounts for they use some AI music and for me for the entertainment value there I think it’s great. You know, It’s hilarious, honestly. It’s fun. But as a performing musician, it’s a little scary to think about. Because people, with a general audience, they can’t discern. They don’t have a musician’s ear. So they can’t tell, “Maybe that sounds a little off or maybe the quality isn’t quite right because it’s AI generated.”
I would say it’d definitely be sad if AI completely took over in that regard because music is like a piece of art exactly when you have something that’s synthetic and it’s making that art, then it’s really like not genuine and that would I think that would bother me a lot.
Even if it like did get easier in the future to make music with AI just like in a few seconds Yes, I still wouldn’t do it. You know, it’s just so fun the process. It’s not recording and adding stuff and making it your own.
The human element I think will always be there. And I mean, eventually I think there’ll probably be sort of a, I can imagine there’d be sort of a pushback to, you know, a live musicians or, you know, let’s have real instruments on the, on the tracks. And so that’s, that’s kind of neat to hear your, your perspective of that. Cause me, you know, I’ve been a musician for like 30 years. So it’s totally, it’s totally wild. Blows my mind to see it. And again, I can enjoy it and on the entertainment value. But yeah, when I think about it as far as who could it put me out of a job, you know, then it kind of gets concerning. So, the songs that you guys write let’s talk about some of the themes or messages that you aim to kind of get out. I mean when you have say an inspiration of a melody and say a song lyric, is there meaning behind the lyrics when just once you kind of get the song rolling or is it just more about? You know capturing something that rhythmically works?
I say it’s a little bit of both yeah like some of them are just like freestyles but then we’re like hey that actually makes sense and sounds good I don’t know what do you think?
I’d say personally when I’m working on stuff it kind of is like I drop the the background track. I make the song itself without without lyrics and then I write a melody and that is kind of like the feeling that I’m feeling like the actual music and then once I have the melody I can put lyrics that match the feeling I was making so for me a lot of my lyrical themes have to do with like isolation or like being separated. I’m working on a song it actually comes out next Friday at midnight And it’s called Lighthouse, and I wrote it about not necessarily about, but it’s like an analogy. There’s a lighthouse in Charleston called the Morris Island Lighthouse, and it used to be on land and it kind of like drifted out into the ocean because the waves like break down the sand over time. So now it’s like a few hundred feet out in the ocean. And so this song is kind of about that lighthouse. But like I’m talking from the perspective of the lighthouse.
See, that’s very cool.
He’s a lot better at writing lyrics. But I’m getting there.
He’s got a couple of years on you.
But my themes tend to be more sad. Or just like from a deeper..
An introspective kind of thing. Are you guys out playing shows or are there places that people can catch you at currently or do you aspire to perform, be live performers or do you like being just sort of the studio guys?
I would love to perform. I don’t have too much experience and I’ve played like I’ve said, like like for church sometimes. Yeah. Just for friends, but I’ve never like really performed.
I know in Charlotte, at least there’s a lot of really good open mics that are very receptive, you know, actually help post one on Tuesday nights at a place called Smokey Joe’s, which you might be a little bit need to get a little bit older to get there. But but also the evening use has a fantastic Monday night open mic that, You know, I definitely encourage you guys, you know, if you want to aspire to perform out, you know, those would be great places to plug in where people are always really receptive to new music and already established artists hang out that you guys could get plugged in to more.
Yeah, I’d love to. Because there’s like, there’s some songs that I probably couldn’t perform live because like how electronic they are, but there’s some acoustic songs that feel like we could both definitely do like that.
So how do you guys approach collaborating with each other you know I’ve seen you know on your Instagram like you’ve maybe collaborate with a couple different artists and I’m sure you have too so what’s your approach to that? Is it some of you guys just kind of got together and like hang out and also you’re creating a beat or is it something like you guys like intentionally decided hey you know what let’s collab.
Yeah, so almost everyone I collabed with is like a close friend right he is close friends with my older brother and that’s kind of how I got to know him and then he actually had Logic before I did. He was making music with my older brother and that kind of got me I was making stuff on Band Lab. I don’t know if you know that is, I was doing some really cheesy singing on there but then I did get logic and I’m making stuff and that’s why I wanted to because he was you know release stuff and I was like yo let’s do some so just usually we just get together and just have fun and make something cool and that’s just how it starts.
And now he’s the genius on Logic now. I’m texting him questions like hey How do you how do you do that?
That’s brilliant. That’s great.
We help each other out.
I mean, you see there’s a lot of cool accounts on accounts on Instagram that share, “Oh, this is how you do things on Logic.” You know, I don’t know if you guys follow Sides, the young lady who does some, but she’s always dropping really, really cool Logic Pro tips and things like that. So that’s really cool. So I know you guys are young and starting out, but do you have any advice for even younger or even, you know, less experienced musicians who might be aspiring to create their own beats, you know, you have any advice?
This might sound very like simple, but like just like do it because I do it. Yeah. Like I said, start out in Band Lab, even just singing with autotune. I was like, okay, that’s fun. If you like it. Just, just why not? Like either you could have it for yourself or you could release it like on SoundCloud is what I used to do and just start There and if you want to learn how to make music YouTube.
Right on. Yeah, great. It’s amazing.
I love YouTube.
YouTube is limitless information. So we got about 10 minutes left. We’re gonna take a break here in a minute and have a word from our friends and sponsors. We’re gonna have a chance to listen to one of your songs that you guys been working on called So Far Away, which you guys have a really cool reel on Instagram was you guys are literally creating the beat right
there. So can you guys talk more about that and how that kind of came about?
That song, didn’t you mention it how we started with the bass line? Yeah. Yeah. We started with the bass line that he played. So basically I went inside logic and I just chose a bunch of random sounds that I were kind of synthy that I thought would sound cool. He started with like this really cool bass line you’ll hear in it and then I think I added this little lead and we just went back and forth. Yeah, I think different things. Yeah, and we’re like, okay, that’s pretty sick added some drums. And then we just started free styling.
It’s really interesting how it comes together like that because I think the inspiration for that song I was hearing something in my head and it was from a song I think by The Neighborhood called Softcore. It has this so typically with our music we use a lot of like more complicated like 808 patterns and hi -hat patterns and stuff, but the song I’m referencing is just like a boots and cats type song. Like the whole song. I really felt that for some reason. And I was like, I want to write a song like that. And so sometimes when you hear a song and you’re like, I want to write a song like that, it’s scary because you’re like, I don’t want to accidentally write the same song. You might be like this is sick, Oh, wait a minute. Yeah. Interesting how this song came together. It sounds nothing like the song that I heard originally, but it’s like everything I wanted it to be. And we did change the Hi -hat pattern and like I said songs kind of write themselves. So it started out like you can kind of tell how it could sound like that song but then how the song is structured is so much different and unique. There’s just something about that, that beat pattern and I was like, I really like that. I want to see that.
As an observer, at least, you know, from my perspective, it was really cool to watch you guys, especially when each got on a different keyboard and one was playing one synth part and then was playing the other, you know, it’s like, wow, that’s a really cool approach because, you know, usually in the studio, you know, you have one guy who’s going to come and do all the keyboards, you know, or maybe one guy is the songwriter, maybe have a basic piano or 10th part but then have someone else come and do the other part, so that was really cool to see you guys really create that and in collab in the moment.
I feel like my idea like my ideas get so much better when I’m with someone yes it’s just so much more fun.
I was a private teacher for a long time but one of my biggest advice to anybody, you know, whether they were going to pursue music or not, is, you know, find ways to collaborate, you know, whether it be like in a group, a band, or, or just, just with your friends. I think one of the best ways to collaborate and make music is, you know, you could bring an idea, but to have someone else’s input on that idea, you know, is, it always makes it better. Yeah. So that’s really cool.
Found some good ideas off of each other and stuff.
So you have guys like you with very common backgrounds and just sort of, you know, very common style. So that’s really cool. Cool. Well, we got about five minutes left. You guys have any more information that you guys would like to share? Like, I know you have the songs out there, but where can they find those? Are you guys on Spotify, SoundCloud, tell us about that. Pretty much everywhere. I’m not sure if I’m on SoundCloud anymore. I have some older stuff that I won’t mention, I’m sorry about that. But, right, let’s see, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora.
We use DistroKid to get music out there. It’s a great, like, independent artist distribution.
So if they’re searching for you, would they search by your full names?
So my artist name is TYLER.
Tyler, period.
People say Tyler Dot.
Mine is just xan, all lowercase. And if you’re on his Spotify artist profile, I’m one of the similar artists near the bottom. I actually haven’t released anything solo. I’ve done collabs with him and then I worked in a band called Windsor that has some music out and a band called Cloud Zero. But the song that I was referencing that drops next week will come out on my own individual profile, which already exists because I’m featured in some of his songs. So after Friday there will be a Spotify profile for me and it’s xan.
Awesome.
He got that coming out tonight. I got a song coming out tonight actually.
Yeah. With just one of my other friends that want to be on a song. Yeah. And then I have a lot of stuff that will be coming out.
He’s like a full -time musician. Every time I come over, he’s always in the studio.
He’s got something new, right? Well, that’s awesome. Well, I really appreciate you guys coming into the studio and telling us more about yourselves and kind of introducing us really to your music. And I look forward to hearing more of what you guys have coming out. Anything else you’d like to add before we listen to one of your tunes?
Just thank you so much for having us on.
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it’s an honor.
Oh, man, it’s a pleasure. Well, cool. We’re going to take a quick break with the word from our friends and sponsors and be right back to listen to a song from Tyler and Xan called So Far Away.
Welcome back again, my name is Greazy Keyz organ is for your Charlotte Checkers hockey team here with my buddies, Tyler and Xan and we’re going to check out a song that they just collaborated on and released called So Far Away.
*song plays*
Amazing way to go guys what a great track. What a great track.
Thank you so much.
I mean honestly musicianship aside, I mean the production fantastic. That was really cool, I said using plug -ins and stuff is to me, the production is just as important as the instruments. You know, you can play your instrument well, but if it doesn’t record well or doesn’t get processed correctly, it doesn’t sound professional. So way to go to make that sound top notch.
Thank you so much.
Primo tune. So congratulations on that. Very cool. Again, my name is Greazy Keyz. Happy to be here for rbeatz.com with Local Music Somewhere. Give these guys a follow and keep up with them because they got a long future ahead of them. Thanks, guys.
Thank you.