Interviewee: John von Seggern
Interviewer: Jason Tonioli
Jason Tonioli:
Welcome to the podcast today. My name is Jason Tonioli and I am with John von Seggern, a very seasoned music guy that has done all kinds of things from writing music and working on projects like WALL-E with Disney and doing music school education type of stuff. You’re a jazz musician as well, play bass, John. But you’ve been doing this for a career for a long time, which is awesome. So excited to have you on here.
I’m intrigued by what you’re moving into with kind of a music school, but not in the way that a normal person would think of a music school. So welcome to the podcast.
John von Seggern:
Yeah, thanks for having me on. I’m excited to talk to you, Jason.
Jason Tonioli:
Well, John, before we dive into the education stuff, I’d like to have our guests share a little bit about how they ended up in music. I think the career trajectory that most musicians have is always an interesting story. It’s never what you expected when you start out in this world. So I think for people young or just anybody in the music industry, it’s great to hear what’s that career path and how did you end up where you are today. So maybe start back at the beginning.
John von Seggern:
Sure. Well, at the beginning, when I was a young person in high school, I was looking at all the things I could do and I just liked playing music more than anything else, pure and simple.
I played bass in bands when I was in high school and then I got into jazz. When I went to college, I mostly studied jazz and classical music. Then I went to New York City and went to the New School Jazz Program for a year.
I attended the New School Jazz Program in New York for a year. I got to study with some really heavy jazz musicians like Reggie Workman and Gary Peacock, if you’re familiar with those individuals.
Then I had to start my professional career. I looked around New York City and I thought it’s gonna be really, really hard to start my professional career competing with people here. So I ended up moving to Japan and I launched my jazz career there.
I ended up playing at clubs all over Japan and touring some. Then I branched out into playing other kinds of music and I ended up getting hired by a Hong Kong pop star named Jackie Chung who is one of the biggest pop stars of all time globally actually, if you look him up.
And so playing with him and some other Hong Kong stars, I toured all over the world and played in a lot of major music venues, including Wembley Arena and Madison Square Garden and giant football stadiums in China.
After about six years of doing that, I started DJing and producing electronic music.
That was the next unfolding in my career. I was one of the first computer DJs actually. As far as I know, we were the first in Asia as far as I know, me and my partner. We were on the cover of magazines back then. It was so shocking to see people use computers instead of records back then. That was about in 2000.
Then I did that for a few years and at some point I decided to move back to the States because I didn’t really see the situation in Hong Kong moving in a positive direction in the future there.
I decided to move back to California. I went to grad school and I got a master’s degree in ethnomusicology, which was something I had always wanted to study.
I specialized in the impact of the internet on the evolution of music. That was my thesis topic. I’ve now seen a lot of the things I wrote about come true over the years.
Then when I left grad school, I decided not to go into academia for various reasons.
I then began working in music technology. I got a job at Native Instruments, the software company.
I also started doing consulting with film composers here. They were using complex software rigs and usually using Native Instruments software. So I kind of got a reputation for working with people around town and helping them.
And then that’s how I got to know some of the sound designers in town. They were working on really big projects and that’s how I ended up working on WALL-E. I knew a couple of guys that worked with Thomas Newman regularly and so they invited me for that gig.
Unfortunately, Thomas Newman already had two sound designers that had been working with him for decades, so they didn’t really need a third person to join the Thomas Newman band. But I worked on some other smaller film projects and whatnot back then.
And then I ended up working in online music education.
I remember I was at Native Instruments. I was talking to a friend of mine and I was like, “What are you doing, Steve?”
And he’s like, “I’m teaching Ableton online.”
And that was the first time I really heard about teaching music online. And I thought, “I love that. I love being at home and working online.”
So I started working for a school in New York called DubSpot. It was quite famous back then. And I ended up running their online music production program.
Since then, that was about in 2010, I’ve worked for a few different schools mostly in electronic music production specifically. And I’ve directed and designed these programs where we’re putting together courses for aspiring music producers basically.
From 2017 to 2025, I was working for Icon Collective here in LA, which was very famous in our niche for electronic music producers. It was a school in Burbank. Again, I was the director of the online program there.
And now I am running my own school, Future Proof Music School, which is trying to build a system using AI to help people learn quicker and faster and more efficiently.
Jason Tonioli:
So you’ve seen really the full evolution of it. If you were starting your career back in the 2000 range, the internet was just coming, just being invented at that point.
And then it evolved into by 2010 it’s really starting to take off. You’ve got YouTube and whether it’s marketing for music or learning in general. And I think it’s sped up so much in the last four or five years. That’s been a roller coaster ride for you then.
John von Seggern:
Well, what’s really interesting is the technologies have changed so much.
So when I was first doing it at DubSpot, we had video courses and projects that people would do, but there was no way for us to really talk to them.
I remember I used to have an office hour every week where it was just like in a chat room and people could come. You can imagine that’s not very engaging or popular.
But as the years have gone by, more technology has been invented.
The huge thing for us was the introduction of Zoom because then you can actually talk to people and also Zoom enables you to share the audio from your computer. So that was a huge leap forward.
So then you’re able to meet your mentor and they would share the music with them and they can hear what you’re doing and give you advice and whatnot.
And now we’re using AI as the next wrinkle in that progression.
Jason Tonioli:
I think what’s really exciting now is a lot of the courses are online and it evolved into that where I can Google just about anything and probably pull up some YouTube video of somebody teaching it.
The thing I think is a challenge is the real experts probably aren’t teaching all of it. It’s hard to get true experts that are doing their craft to be the ones teaching.
I think AI is probably something that’s going to help bridge that gap and probably do custom teaching.
John von Seggern:
At the schools I was working at and many schools, you’re taking a whole program, a one-size-fits-all program, and somebody has decided you need to take these 24 courses to go from beginning to end.
I heard it said that in any given classroom situation, about half of the people are behind where you are and don’t quite understand everything you’re saying. Then the other half are already past what you’re saying and don’t really need it anymore. And then there’s a few people in the middle where that’s exactly what they needed to know that day.
So our ambition for Future Proof is to offer people what they need and not make them study things they don’t need and enable them to reach their goals faster and more efficiently and learn the things they need to get where they’re going quicker basically.
Jason Tonioli:
I think it’ll be really interesting if AI eventually gets to the point where for musicians, whether you’re in Ableton, Pro Tools, Dorico, whatever you’re choosing to work in, if it could potentially watch what you’re doing and then if you asked a question, have the teaching thing integrated right in the moment when you need it.
John von Seggern:
Funny you say that because that’s exactly what we’ve built and we’re launching it next week.
We’ve made an AI we call Cadence with a K.
Initially it was a chatbot that you could type and answer questions about the courses, but we’ve built it into an app now that talks to you by voice and you run it on your computer and it works together with Ableton Live.
As you do things in Ableton, it sees everything you’re doing both from reading the data out of Ableton and also by looking at your screen at the same time.
So if you run into something you don’t know, you’re like, “I’m trying to make the kick drum cut through the other bass frequencies, but it sounds all muddy. How could I address that?”
And it can literally say, “I see that you have the bass line on track two and the kick drum on track one and you should use sidechain compression there.”
And you’re like, “What is sidechain compression?”
And it says, “Well, you need to put the compressor on the bass track and trigger it from the kick track so every time the kick hits it’s going to duck the bass track.”
You can ask, “Is that what people do? Is that the standard way?”
And it can tell you, “Yeah, that’s the standard procedure that everybody uses.”
It has a memory of what you’ve done before.
It also integrates with our courses.
So if you’re doing a project in our school, it already knows that you’re on that page and what the project is and what kind of help you might need.
Our goal is to have it be as if there was somebody, a knowledgeable expert sitting next to you watching your work and you can just ask him whatever you need.
I think the voice part is really important especially for music because music is hard to describe in words.
It’s not like answering questions about math or English.
I’ve always found if I’m trying to talk to ChatGPT about what I’m doing in my Ableton project, or even upload a screenshot, it’s very difficult to describe everything you’re doing.
You become impatient very quickly typing away.
I don’t want to be typing paragraphs of text while I’m trying to make music. It takes me out of the flow.
But if you can just quickly ask, “Why doesn’t that work?” or “How can I make that louder?” and then it immediately sees and tells you, that’s much more fluid.
Jason Tonioli:
What’s interesting is you’re not having AI write music for you. You’re using it to help improve the flow and keep the creativity with the artist.
John von Seggern:
Yeah. I don’t want to get too far into that either, but these platforms that generate music by AI have millions of users.
The people that are our students that are really passionate about making music and spending all their time on that, they aren’t really interested in doing that.
If you’re a musician, I love playing music. I love playing music with other people. That’s why I started playing music.
For me to sit and type into an interface to make things, it’s just not fun for me.
What I have found our students are very interested in is using AI to help them with all the other things that musicians have to do.
These days you have to be your own manager and agent and promoter and marketer and everything else.
AI is great for that.
I’m working on a course right now for marketing where the AI can help lead you through the questions you need to answer to develop who is your audience, what kind of music are you making, where are those people, where do they hang out.
I’m also teaching a workshop right now, Vibe Coding for music producers, which has been really popular, and I’ve been teaching the students how to make their own plugins.
One of my students just made a new app that he can load MIDI files into and it detects the chords and harmonic structure and tells him if he has any out-of-key notes or suggests different chords he could use.
We just made a plugin called the Reverbatron.
I think there’s huge potential for AI to help musicians, but it may not be primarily in making the music. 14:41 – 14:49
Jason Tonioli:
I still think there’s something about real players and real performance that’s hard to replace.
John von Seggern:
That is so true.
Even if you’re not a master of your instrument, if you’re an okay guitar player but you still have your own style and your own vibe, even the mistakes you make are part of communicating who you are as an artist.
I really feel like that’s crucial.
I don’t see that going away.
AI might make it easier to make kind of mid music, but making something really creative will still be hard whether you’re using AI or not.
Jason Tonioli:
Do you envision expanding this into marketing and business coaching too?
John von Seggern:
Yeah, definitely.
We’re building courses.
We have a lot of the production curriculum done, but I want to expand it into marketing and business and AI-assisted coding.
I think there’s going to be a lot of scope for people to make their own tools to help them do whatever they’re doing.
The basic concept of the AI we’re using is we have this pool of courses. How do you know what you should study or where you should start?
That’s the biggest question people have.
So in our system, you tell our AI what your level of skill and experience is and what your interests are.
Then it assembles a custom curriculum for you based on that.
While you’re going through those courses, the AI helps you.
We still have videos and written material and projects that you do, but we have the AI embedded on every page.
So it’s very common you watch a video about mixing and then you still have questions and the teacher isn’t there to ask.
So then you can just call our AI and ask it and it can explain all the things that weren’t in the video or apply it directly to your own interests.
The more you work with our AI, the more targeted advice it gives you.
Jason Tonioli:
If you could go back and give your younger self advice about music and career, what would you say?
John von Seggern:
One thing I didn’t expect back then is music changes and the music business changes and the music industry changes.
So if you want to have a successful career for any length of time, you need to be able to evolve with it and change and find what your role is going to be in this new situation.
You can’t assume that “I’m just gonna play bass in jazz clubs for the next 40 years.”
The opportunities that existed for me when I was 22 are totally different now.
The best advice I could give is if you’re going to be playing music for your career, you have to be doing something that you really love.
Because if you don’t, you won’t do it long enough to become successful.
And you’ll just give up because you’ll get bored and hate it.
You really have to have that passion to keep you doing it and continuing to improve and continuing to move forward with your career.
That may take you in different directions and different kinds of music, but I really strongly believe you have to follow your passion in order to be successful.
And it’s not some pie-in-the-sky thing. It’s very practical.
When I started playing jazz, I did it because I absolutely loved it.
Then I started branching into other kinds of music because I needed to make more income.
Eventually I was making really good money as a studio touring musician but playing music that I was kind of indifferent to.
Ultimately I got so bored of it that that’s why I became a DJ actually.
After six years of playing pop music and not very interesting pop music, I had to move on and do something else.
I was at the peak of my career but bored out of my skull.
Touring especially is really hard if you’re not really interested in what you’re doing because it’s very inconvenient to fly everywhere.
When people are doing something they don’t really want to be doing, they just complain all the time.
And if everybody loves what they’re doing, then everybody’s great and it’s fun to be around everybody and you have a great experience.
Jason Tonioli:
I think that’s one of the inspiring things about your journey. You’ve kept evolving with your interests and now you’re using AI in a thoughtful way to help musicians grow.
Definitely go check out Future Proof Music School and Cadence.
John von Seggern:
Thanks Jason. Thanks for having me on. It’s been fun talking.
Jason Tonioli:
Thanks so much.