Successful Musicians Podcast – Episode #43: Crafting Sync Library Hits to Propel Artist Fanbases with Skye Emanuel

Successful Musicians Podcast Episode 43

Interviewee: Skye Emanuel

Interviewer: Jason Tonioli

Hey, this is Jason Tonioli. I’m a piano player that grew up believing it wasn’t possible to earn a living and support a family with music. I’ve proven that idea was wrong and I’ve met hundreds of other people who have found success with their music. This podcast features stories of musicians who have found their own personal version of success and fulfillment in both music and life. This podcast is meant to inspire musicians and help them believe in their abilities and motivate them to share their talents with others. This is the Successful Musicians Podcast. 

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Jason: Welcome to the podcast. Today, our special guest is Skye Emanuel. Skye, you just got back from shredding it on the guitar at a Hans Zimmer concert, I understand. Skye is also a very accomplished not only accomplished musician, but I know you’re working on a lot of projects with Sync and helping other artists connect with people on Sync as well, which is awesome. Let’s dive right in and maybe tell us a little bit about yourself. What did I miss? I’m sure I missed a whole bunch of things there but tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to where you are.

Skye: Yeah. First off, guitar was my first thing ever in music. I’ve been playing guitar for so long. Maybe five or six years ago, I started getting into the sync world and doing tracks for sync for libraries or directly for TV shows and that kind of became my whole life after that. It wasn’t until last year where I really started to play bigger shows on the guitar. I accidentally got into the sync stuff before playing guitar live, basically. That’s pretty much where I am now. I’m starting to play for bigger artists.

A couple of days ago, actually, I just got back from Wacken Festival, which is in Germany, and I believe I could be wrong, but I think it’s the biggest heavy metal festival, and it was about 70- 80,000 people in the crowd, and it just blew my mind for sure. It was crazy.

Jason: That’d be a heck of a stage to be on, right?

Skye: Oh, my God. Yeah.

Jason: When you started out as a musician, as a teenager, did you pick up a guitar or were you a little and your parents encouraged you to do music, or how did that all happen?

Skye: Yeah, I was very fortunate to be born into a family that had musicians in the family. My sister played piano and sang all the time, and my dad is actually a musician and he’s a producer. He’s in the music industry, and I was very lucky to have that. I didn’t actually start playing until I was around, like, 13,14ish, but it kind of just made sense for me. I think my friends started getting into it at school, starting to make bands after school, and I just wanted to be a part of it, and yeah, I just kept going, kind of fell in love with it and started to play in more serious bands a few years later, and yeah, just kept rolling.

Jason: That’s awesome. With a dad that was a producer, that’s an interesting, unique thing. I haven’t heard anybody that I’ve talked to recently tell me that, but did he encourage you to kind of go down in the music industry or did he say man, there’s just no money in music. You need to go be a lawyer or a doctor.

Skye: At first, he was very encouraging of playing the guitar. I don’t know if he at first knew if that’s really what I wanted to do. I think he was just encouraging me, yeah, playing the guitar, it’s fun but I think as time progressed, I think he saw how committed I was and how much I was working at it. Then I think at that point he was like, okay, well, this is what you got to do to succeed. I was so lucky. He really helped me create a path for myself and I can ask him so many questions about his opinions and what I should be doing. He was really supportive.

Jason: It’s probably been super interesting as well to have somebody who’d kind of probably grown up in that analog to digital time period because there’s been such an evolution of tools over the last 30, 40 years now in the music business. Awesome. As you decided, hey, I want to do this, you went to school then and decided, okay, I’m really going to dive in and study to do this the right way. Did you go into business? Did you do audio engineering?

Skye: After high school, I went to an audio engineering school at a recording studio in Nashville, the Blackbird Academy. It wasn’t a four-year program or something. It was like a six-month, seven-month program in engineering, just like every day, showing up to the studio. It was so great because not only we had classes on engineering, but we got to sit in because it was a real recording studio. We got to sit in with the engineer and actually basically have, like, an assistant engineer role, which was basically hands on training at that point. It was fantastic. It was a great experience for me, for sure, with that.

Jason: Is that similar? You’d have to pay just like you would a normal school to go do that then.

Skye: Yeah, it was the same way. I just sent them videos of me playing guitar and then maybe some songs I was working on at the time and then the acceptance thing, and then yeah, it’s basically the same as any other school.

Jason: Very cool. Well, that’s amazing. Looking back now, if you could go back and kind of give yourself some advice, you’ve come up all the way through school, and now you’ve done a lot of sync stuff as well. What advice would you have for your younger self?

Skye: Some advice that I would have liked to have known when I was younger, and I think I figured it out after a couple of years, that 07:02 it’s okay to be like a small fish. I think I was always scared of being the worst person in the room, which I think is silly, but if you surround yourself with better people, better producers, better musicians, better guitar players. When I started doing that, that’s when I really started learning, really looking at what they’re doing, how those musicians are playing in the studio, how that engineer is recording the session. Surrounding myself with better people was like a whole eye opener because that’s when it started going up my skill set for sure.

Jason: As far as it goes for a career in music, I know a lot of people struggle to kind of financially make it as a musician. I think in a lot of ways, I think there’s a lot of families that will discourage people from going into music. I mean, there’s a lot of different careers that people probably raise their eyebrows about, oh, you’re going to do that. Just that traditional school path, make a living with. 

As you look back, you’ve been around a lot of people in Nashville and you’re in LA. What advice would you give to somebody who’s thinking about a music career, and they think, okay, I’m going to have to go be a band and play on stage. What advice do you have for that individual?

Skye: What I would say to someone looking to go into the music career is that there are many different paths, and you don’t need to be the person in the spotlight. If that’s something you don’t want to necessarily do, it’s great if you do. Again, there’s many different jobs in this field and you can make money doing so many different things. One thing that I thought when I was younger is that you always kind of had to be in the spotlight if you wanted to make it in music and quickly realized there’s so many different other ways you can make money. I was introduced to the sync side, and that’s been just fantastic. I would just say there’s so many different paths you can go down and there’s so many different ways. There are so many different paths that you can enjoy. If you don’t enjoy one thing, you can enjoy the next thing. There are so many different ways to make your living doing completely different things in music.

Jason: Regarding sync, because I think there’s more opportunities for sync than there’s maybe ever been in the history of music. You got all these TV shows and there’s so many networks that are popping up, it’s almost fragmented the market. I’m sure there’ll be a consolidation again sometime down the road. How does one, let’s say somebody plays piano or they play guitar or whatever the instrument is. Is there an opportunity for sync for most independent artists that exist out there, they just don’t realize it?

Skye: There’s so many.  I just feel like all genres of music are needed in sync. There’s just anything from jazz, rock, hip hop, classical, everything is needed. If you can find your way in with a sync library or a music supervisor, it could be fantastic. All music is needed, basically in television and basically are you saying there’s so many opportunities now it’s becoming more in the forefront? 11:04 It kind of feels like we were the nerdy kids for a long time and now we’re kind of starting to be the cool kids because now we’re starting to see artists do super well in sync and how that can blow them up like a great sync placement can blow up an artist now, which is pretty crazy. So, yeah, it’s kind of funny how that’s kind of shifted in a way.

Jason: If someone’s wanting to go down that sync path, I’ve heard lots of people say, just be yourself. Don’t try to be somebody else because a lot of times, at least, the advice I’ve been given is, be yourself and don’t try to be another person because your music probably fits somewhere in some show, and you just don’t even realize it. You’ve worked with a lot of supervisors, or you’ve got a lot of connections in there. How does one even get started? Let’s say somebody’s got a couple of albums or even just a couple of songs. Where do they even start if they want to go down the sync path?

Skye: The way I have it is I’m in with a few companies, luckily, who I’ve met out here, and they’ve given me work and just keep doing the work and just opportunities have fallen through me that way. I interned in high school with these two guys who basically taught me how to write for sync. That was their main job. Just like, coming in all the time, I would go in like five days a week to this internship, which are just two guys basically at a studio and they were just phenomenal writers and producers and that was actually the first time I saw it, hands on of them just constantly pumping out great and fantastic songs, too. I basically learned from them, watching them and how it all worked. I would say if you can get in with companies, I’m not sure how you would. I think everybody’s case is different, how they get in but yeah, getting in with certain libraries or music supervisors, that’s the way to go and doing a great job and they’ll call you back.

Jason: I hear a lot about libraries. You’ve got to go to the supervisors directly, or you go to the libraries. What advantages are there with going to those libraries? Or do you end up just getting lost in a flood of thousands and thousands of songs and if you do sign your stuff away to a library.

Skye: From my experience, the libraries have been great. It’s been fantastic. I’ve had so many placements and that’s pretty much the only way I do it is through the libraries. No, it’s great because honestly, I can write a song and then send it to them. I mean, the plus side is that you don’t have to worry about it after you’ve written it. It’s basically in their hands and then I can start the next one, feed it to them, and then I’ll look a year later at what it’s been placed in, and it should be a couple of placements a year for these songs. It’s a great way to do it, honestly.

Jason: I know you’re a producer and you’re starting up kind of a new project coming up here. Do you want to share a little bit about that with us?

Skye: Yeah, it’s very new. Me and my friends actually, free friends who we’ve been doing the sync stuff for a while. We kind of saw that artists have been getting big sync placements. Their streams are going crazy, and their followers are going up too. Basically, what we’re trying to do is make something in between a label and a sync label, where we want to create a library, like a sync label, but we want to up the music quality to have a label standard of music quality on that sync library and our main focus is just to build up artists, build up their fans, build up their followers through these big sync placements. We’re not going for the background music. We’re going for the main points in the television shows where the fans of these shows can see these artists and can hear their songs and then go follow them and now, they’re a fan of that artist as well.

Jason: Very cool. Is getting something like that if you’re an artist, is that just kind of happens by chance and you got to hit the jackpot, or is there a specific process that someone can follow that gives them at least a better chance of having something happen like that?

Skye: Yeah, with us, we’re treating it as a case. If we’re fans of someone’s music, we want to work with them. So normally what we do is we’re like, hey, if we love an artist, we’ll hit them up and be like, hey, this could be a great opportunity for both of us. We would love to write two or three songs with you. If you want to do it, we do it by EPS. We’re releasing three or four songs at a time by different artists. We’re just doing it project by project and then we’re just blasting music supervisors with these EPS and we’re keeping it very concise, like less is more, basically approach. The first year we’re only going to have 20 artists, nothing more than that. So yeah, that’s how we view it.

Jason: Very cool. If somebody wants to kind of see what you’re doing, is there somewhere they can go, a website or somewhere they can go check that out.

Skye: You know what, not yet, but soon there will be. We’re very new. We just started up nice. We only have our first five artists now but yes, soon there will be a website, a landing page.

Jason: I’m going to make sure we put at least an email address in that show notes so they can find you. Kind of last question, I guess, for you. So, the whole idea of this podcast was to kind of feature successful musicians and what’s been interesting is as I talk with different people in different venues or avenues of music, everybody’s got kind of this different version of success. I’m curious what in your mind, at least where you are right now, what would you define as a successful musician?

Skye: Oh, that’s a great question. I have a feeling mine’s not going to be like most people’s. For me personally, 18:44 success is constantly learning and to be able to look at myself, like even a month ago or a couple of weeks ago and be like, oh, I would have done that completely better. For me, that’s a successful month because I’m like, I really got better this month and it just keeps going. It never stops, whether it’s with guitar or with production. That’s what kind of keeps me going because I get to see personal growth.

Jason: I think that’s awesome. One of the people I really enjoy listening to speak, and I love his books, Ed Milette. He talked a while ago. I heard him talk about the idea of I want to meet the 20 years from now me and when I get there, I hope that I don’t disappoint what that 20 year me in my mind could have been and so the whole idea of growing, I think there’s a lot of maturity and a lot of truth to the idea that, you know what? If I want to be the best version of myself, you do have to be growing because if you think about it, if you just stay the same and that’s cool if you can play a chord or play a certain thing on the guitar or the piano or whatever instrument you play or just even just as a human being. If you’re not learning and growing and you’re the same as you were a year ago or even a month ago, man I think that future 20 years from now. If you meet that person face to face, you will hope that the best version of yourself recognizes the version that actually gets there 20 years from now.

Skye: Completely, totally.

Jason: Well, Skye, this has been fun. Definitely for those that want to check out what you’re doing, we’ll put your information in the show notes so they can reach out. I think it’s interesting to see how much opportunity there is in the sync placement. So, if you’re a musician out there and you’re thinking, okay, how can I monetize what I’m doing or actually make a living? Sync is absolutely worth learning about studying a little bit, and I think you definitely have to work hard to do it, but I think it’s one of those that there’s huge opportunities, and it’s a great time. There’s never been a better time for me. So, Skye, thanks so much for sharing with us today and on the next one.

Skye: Yeah, thanks so much.

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