Daniel Debow: What Is the Canadian Vision? | The Other Stuff #36

Daniel Debow (0:06)

I want to talk about it.

internetVin (0:07)

I want to see a demo. I want to see this thing.

Daniel Debow (0:09)

This is dangerous. Demos on early products is so dangerous.

internetVin (0:13)

Everybody knows.

Daniel Debow (0:13)

Can we talk about it? Yeah. I'll just take it out.

internetVin (0:16)

Yeah, exactly. There you go. That's good. Okay. Wow. Wow.

Wow. This thing looks awesome.

Daniel Debow (0:28)

Thank you, bro.

So why? So it's a new campfire instrument. So it's meant so that anyone can learn how to play music in less than an hour or learn how to play songs in less than an hour. Yeah.

internetVin (0:43)

This thing is really nice.

Daniel Debow (0:44)

Thank you.

And they can learn how to play so that they can sing songs with the people that they love. That's it. And the story behind it is just I'm a musician. I've been playing music for a long time. It's a big part of who I am and part of my life. I have a bunch of projects around music. And I always tell people and they'd be like, Oh, I wish I could play music, but I can't, I'm not musical. It was too hard for me. And I was like, that's so strange because music is a deep, deep thing. And it's been around longer, longer than like we've domesticated animals. People have been building instruments and playing music around the campfire.

And there's a great book called This Is Your Brain on Music makes the case that we like evolved to play music. So why do people have this thing? Why is it that like 12 million people try to play music every year in the States and 10 million quit every year? Why is it that like 90% of the people who start playing guitar quit? And yet it's a big market, like 30 billion people, 30 billion dollars a year. And I think it's a product, it's a design problem.

SPEAKER_3 (1:45)

Interesting.

Daniel Debow (1:47)

Because guitars and pianos is amazing. When I play guitar, they were not designed to be easy to pick up. They were designed to be virtuosic, to play everything. But most people, most of the time, they don't want to play Tchaikovsky and Oscar Peterson and Van Halen. They just want to play like Hotel California and Taylor Swift. And they want to sing with people. Karaoke is a big thing. So how do you build something that is a real instrument?

Because you can't build Guitar Hero. By the way, Guitar Hero, 65 million copies. Like, if you make something that people can feel, yeah, it's a game. It's a game and has a great dynamic about time and playing. And it makes you feel like you're making, creating, and expressing yourself. But at some point, it has a ceiling, right? So it's low entry, low barrier, but a high ceiling. And so we were like, how do we design something that had no ceiling? It was a real instrument. Oh, wow. And that's what this is. It's a real instrument. You can play it. And we already have musicians using it. And it was built by musicians built in a community.

internetVin (2:50)

What's the difference between a toy and a real instrument? Because you've used that. You keep saying like a real instrument, a real instrument. And you also mentioned something about the design of some of the existing things that we know as instruments. You mentioned that they can like the range of, I guess the number of things they're supposed to be able to do is vast, which makes them more difficult for someone to just jump on to.

Daniel Debow (3:12)

Yeah. Well, they're just like, there's no...

When a guitar was being developed, like what, 400 years ago from the Lute, there was no sense of like progressive discovery, like a video game. Like imagine a video game that was like, hey, here's this cool game. It's amazing. You have to play for probably 20 hours before you get to level one.

internetVin (3:29)

Yeah, that's crazy.

Daniel Debow (3:31)

Yeah. People are going to be like, I'm not doing that. Yeah. And that's what we do with people. And by the way, your fingers are going to hurt and you kind of do some math. You got to learn that.

What's the difference? I think there's two parts. There's a part about musical instruments are not just physical objects. They're cultural objects. They exist in our hearts. They exist in where the context of what they do. And a toy exists in a different place. It's like what kids use. It's like sort of maybe disposable. It's not a real thing. It's just a way to it's a path. And that's different from an instrument, which is like a real expressive thing. And so I think where it sits in the culture is incredibly important of what's a toy versus a real thing, right? So that's probably part one. And so I want this to sit in people's hearts. That's why most of the people, even though it will be something we hope millions of people use as an onboarding, kids learn, moms and dads play with their families, people play with their friends.