EP 6: Maneli Jamal on Songwriting, Guitar Journaling, Practice Tips, and AI

Jesse Paliotto (00:01.676)
Hello everyone and welcome to the Guitar Journal, a podcast where we love to talk about making music, particularly through the lens of fingerstyle guitar. I'm your host, Jesse Pagliato, and I love bringing the best of the music community to you here on the Guitar Journal podcast. Today, we have Maneli Jamal with us, which is very cool. Maneli's an incredible fingerstyle guitar player, which with a global, very international audience, these two are all over the world, has a massive online presence.

prolific songwriter as well as an educator. So lots of stuff going on. I'm so honored to have Maneli here today. Thanks for being on the podcast, man. I really appreciate it.

Maneli (00:37.82)
Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's pleasure.

Jesse Paliotto (00:40.354)
I thought maybe to open up, it'd be interesting if you could kind of give a couple minutes and just quickly talk about how you developed your own fingerstyle guitar technique. Like where did that come from? I know some folks come from like more of a classical background and then they kind of wander into modern fingerstyle or sometimes jazz. I'm curious like for your own background, like how did you get to where you are today with how you play?

Maneli (00:54.782)
Mm. Mm-hmm.

Maneli (01:02.516)
Yeah, I mean, it started with growing up in a very musical family. I'm the youngest of four boys, so music was always around. My dad's painting is right behind me. Just a lot of art and music growing up. So that was the initial catalyst of being introduced to music and just the love of it. I did play violin for five years as well, like classical violin, because my dad's a violin player. So I just naturally, thought it would be the right thing to do just to get lessons from him.

Jesse Paliotto (01:11.97)
we're done.

Maneli (01:31.723)
then I realized I hated it and didn't quite like it. And then, you know, it's the typical thing. It's like, I actually did it. I even verbalized to my dad, was like, I want to make you happy. Those are my words. And I wanted to play a violin and also, you know, secretly compete with one of my friends who was taking lessons from my dad too. So that was kind of the catalyst of the music world. And then from the violin, it eventually ventured to the guitar. And it was really like, my interest was more like metal.

and rock and more just speed stuff related stuff, very technical playing. They got me interested in that. then I moved to long story short, I moved to Canada a couple of years after learning the guitar. My family got deported and we claim refuge here in Canada. Another long story there. the important thing here. Yeah. but from that, really, a lot of depression came. lot of hurt came from that experience and just

Jesse Paliotto (02:18.538)
Yeah, yeah, there's a whole story behind that. Wow.

Maneli (02:30.402)
going to a shelter and living there for a few weeks was something about that just left a pretty bad impression on my psyche. And yeah, so from there, I picked up the acoustic guitar a lot more seriously. So really that was the catalyst. So if it wasn't for that move, I don't know if I would be an acoustic guitar player that I'm focused on. I probably would still have stuck in that like metal world, because I was really into screamo, if you're familiar with that, like, you know.

Jesse Paliotto (02:55.536)
huh. Yeah.

Maneli (02:56.93)
that scene. yeah, but it was from there that, yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (03:01.378)
So the acoustic guitar was, I mean that's a massive life event to go through. So the guitar became sort of an emotional outlet or a sort of a way to process I guess. Yeah.

Maneli (03:10.529)
Mm.

Very much. Both. Yeah. Yeah. Well said. I think it became my prison, my self-defined prison for myself to feel safe, to put my walls up that nothing can hurt me. Right. So it was just one of those those things that can't seem abstract, but it was a very powerful vision that I had to to shell myself in and just to go deeper into myself.

Jesse Paliotto (03:24.588)
Mmm.

Maneli (03:39.491)
as opposed to asking for help from the outside world, which would have been a much healthier approach. Sometimes we don't realize those things when we're younger and obviously that was like 20 plus years ago. So yeah, I mean, so it really was a way for me to deal with drama. And that was really the main catalyst for me to really push music more for myself before I would venture out into the marketing side and get my music out there for more people to see. But it was always a very intrinsically motivated experience for me.

Jesse Paliotto (04:09.142)
Did you pursue kind of learning how to play more in that sort of isolated environment, like I'm gonna just learn on my own? Or did you go out and like kind of do music school or lessons or how did you get help along the way to get to where you are right now?

Maneli (04:16.291)
Mmm.

Maneli (04:21.155)
Hmm.

Yeah, I think lessons would have been a huge help. But my parents couldn't afford it. Yeah, so we weren't really financially stable at that point. So what do you do at that point? You think of ways to be creative within your craft and watch and learn. And I've always been very curious into imitating certain players and trying to just see if I could copy that stuff. And I was always really interested in that.

Jesse Paliotto (04:26.594)
You

Yeah.

Maneli (04:49.317)
Because I'm a very visual person too and I actually was going to be an artist before I became a musician. So the visual sense for me is, I feel a much stronger sense for me than my oral sense. But it was that whole like watching people play and trying to imitate it that really got me really explored new ventures into flamenco music. So there was a drift between like, okay, I'm doing so much flamenco right now and like, I'm no longer playing the electric guitar. Now then introduce fingerstyle and I saw Don Ross play.

Jesse Paliotto (04:55.349)
interesting.

Maneli (05:18.989)
another fellow Canadian. And so that was like, huh, that's very different from like the flamenco stuff that I'm trying to do. So that really inspired a new potential gateway. And of course, that dichotomy in the psyche, which says, well, if you want to do something really well, you should probably stick with one. And so that was kind of drift. That's where I kind of stopped doing the flamenco more and went more into fingerstyle, got my nails done, used the thumpic from then on. And so like, okay, I think I'm

Jesse Paliotto (05:19.041)
Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (05:36.714)
Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (05:44.513)
Yeah.

Maneli (05:48.11)
I'm dedicated to become more of a fingerstyle player. So that was kind of the venture into that. So that was a huge inspiration to see Don Ross play. And just the technical agility he had was really inspiring. And I've always been very interested in the technical side of things, whereas now my music is really like chill and laid back. So I really write a lot of that. But yeah, that's kind of the history in a nutshell.

Jesse Paliotto (05:56.417)
Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (06:12.95)
Yeah, even I was thinking about, cause I was listening to some of your music and I thought, know, it's your, where your music sits for me is it's a combination of very high, what you just said really, actually it's funny you said that cause this was on my mind earlier is it's very technical, it's very exact, it's very precise, but there's a relaxed, yeah, chill attitude towards it that isn't like, doesn't make you anxious. I know sometimes I'll put on like, you know, jazz guitar, Joe Pass or something, and my wife is just like, I can't take this, this is too much.

Maneli (06:23.723)
So, yeah.

Maneli (06:31.461)
Mmm.

Mmm.

Jesse Paliotto (06:39.65)
As opposed to like when you're me where your music's at where it's a lot more like this actually relaxes me. This is very cool That it's interesting Don Ross I think does kind of the nails He's more of a classical kind of right hand technique. Did you where did you pick up thumb pick from was it? Was he using that? I don't know that I've seen him, but maybe he does that Okay Okay

Maneli (06:44.231)
Mmm, cool. Yeah.

Maneli (06:59.237)
Yeah, it was them. I mean, I've never seen them not use it. yeah, yeah. But he was, yeah, I just saw him. I like, what is that thing? Obviously so awkward to put on first. And so many of my students always like ask me like, how long does it take for that thumpic to become like an extension of yourself? it takes months, if not years to really get comfortable with it. But you stick with it, you know, again, you got your vision and you stick with it and you see it through. And eventually you don't even think about it not being there. So it just becomes so ingrained and...

Jesse Paliotto (07:08.151)
Yeah.

Maneli (07:27.75)
And all the touring that I've done has been 99 % with the thump pick. So that's always been like my safety, you know, to know that I could play with accuracy. And that was a really important step for me. Yeah. So Don Ross, probably the catalyst for that switch from flamenco to fingerstyle.

Jesse Paliotto (07:47.426)
right on. I actually for a long time on the the guitarjewel.com have recommended his course he had one on jam play that for learning Travis picking and stuff which was excellent. He's he had a great course there for anybody. I'll throw a link in the show notes for anybody who might be interested in that. The other thing that it seems that strikes me with with your music is you write a lot. Is that

Maneli (07:53.871)
nice.

Maneli (07:58.917)
cool.

Yeah, sir.

Maneli (08:11.43)
Mmm.

Jesse Paliotto (08:11.944)
Accurate it just when I see stuff on Instagram or look at your YouTube wherever I'm like He just seems like he has a lot of output of writing original music How did you get started in that?

Maneli (08:19.73)
Damn.

That's good. Good question. How did I get started with writing? The first day I got the guitar, I wrote a song. So I kind of vaguely remember it. So I think there's just, I think honestly, the artistic side of like the visual art really helped with that. being able to see, to find beauty in things that might seem dull or boring or mundane and trying to artistically portray that in a way that is interesting for me anyway, and hopefully for others too, but.

Jesse Paliotto (08:29.036)
No.

Jesse Paliotto (08:36.896)
Yeah.

Maneli (08:51.252)
That's the same way that I kind of see music too. And maybe sometimes taking these themes that might seem like boring or just don't need to necessarily be artistically expressed and to express that. So that's always been fascinating for me. And again, because I'm such a visual person looking at the guitar, the guitar just lends itself so nicely to a visual sense because there's a system of frets, right? The way that I think about it, I think about it like I'm drawing on the fretboard. Like my fingers are choreographing certain things.

Jesse Paliotto (09:03.746)
Mm.

Jesse Paliotto (09:14.326)
Yeah.

Maneli (09:21.31)
and at the same time creating shapes or images that get conveyed in my brain anyway. So that's usually my cue to, that's cool. that made me see that, or that makes me feel that. And then run with that and then explore it on and on and on. And so my phone has thousands of recordings of ideas. mean, what you're seeing online is maybe like 10 % of what I've got, but I just don't have enough time and energy to.

sit behind a screen and edit videos because that's becoming another thing. It's like as musicians, we have to wear so many different hats. And one of them is the creation part. And I love the divergent thinking of creating. And it's just such a freeing aspect of it. Improvisation is such an important part of my practice, too. A lot of the ideas happen to come from that improvisational state. So, yeah, I think that probably has got a lot to do with it. Just welcoming failure.

Jesse Paliotto (10:17.154)
Hmm.

Maneli (10:17.195)
All right, at the expense of letting yourself dive deeper into parts that maybe you need to fail enough to stumble upon those parts where you can have some gems, then those gems turn into songs potentially. Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (10:31.502)
Can you talk for a second about that? That's interesting that a lot of your song ideas are coming from improvisation. Is there a time or place or process where you're improvising? Where does that happen? How does that flow? Practice time or?

Maneli (10:41.869)
Mmm.

I wish I could tell you like, yeah, yeah, it's usually nighttime. think a lot of musicians can relate to that. Just there's, it's just still, it's just a little bit more still. The world is different. You've been awake all day, so you have a lot of experience. You can, a lot of experience that you can take the inspiration from and put it towards something. So the way that I usually have done it is I journal with the guitar at the end of the night. Before I go to sleep, instead of journaling on a sheet of paper with a pen, I journal on the guitar.

And I tend to record those ideas. Yeah. So, so it is, you know, this is the guitar journal, right? So, so in a way it's, it is journaling through, through the craft of guitar. And so that is, I think it just puts the day towards something meaningful. I do journal as well. Now this last year I've just been doing a lot of journaling too, but just, I mean, that is just everything's so interconnected that, that it's now, wow, I'm sharing things through words, but I'm also sharing things, through an instrumental guitar aspect as well.

Jesse Paliotto (11:12.779)
Interesting.

Jesse Paliotto (11:17.729)
Yeah.

Maneli (11:42.027)
So yeah, I think nighttime tends to be the best for me, but sometimes, you know, I don't have the luxury of that. So sometimes just whenever inspiration hits, so sometimes just having that freedom to live your day without needing to have certain urgent things that need to be done, it allows you to just like, there's a spark that's coming. Let me see what the guitar can harness or, you know, approach it that way. So, yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (12:07.808)
Yeah, that journaling thing is interesting to me. I don't know if I've ever heard somebody say that before. If somebody wanted to experiment with that, is there any kind of baby steps that you would recommend? Like, just try this and this might become something that's interesting for you. Like, how would somebody take a quick step there?

Maneli (12:20.81)
Mm-hmm.

Maneli (12:24.972)
Yeah, if you're into cannabis, that could be one way that really does help. I used to be a heavy cannabis user, not so much anymore. But that that was a really because it just drops your your walls, you know, anything that helps you drop your walls, whether it's just a self talk, you can even just do as little little mantra to yourself. Drugs obviously work too, but not everyone's into that.

Jesse Paliotto (12:30.038)
Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (12:39.138)
Hmm.

Maneli (12:48.494)
Those are just some of the ways that that either has worked for me anyway Another thing is just like approaching the guitar without the expectation of like trying to accomplish something All right. I think we get to a certain point, especially if you're a professional player It's like everything that I do needs to be productive Everything needs to be a song everything needs to be some sort of like money-making machine or it shouldn't be like that Because it certainly wasn't for me that that that wasn't the initial catalyst the the motivator for me So it was just coming to it

Jesse Paliotto (12:58.86)
Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (13:09.047)
Yeah.

Maneli (13:16.911)
with the expectation of like having a really low bar of success and oftentimes over exceeding that at the end of the practice. That seemed to be a really effective way for me to do it. If you like to jam with people, that's also a really good way to do it because you get to learn and you get to hear different ways, different approaches. But, know, on me as a solo guitar player, I don't really get the luxury of that too much these days. So, and that's part of why I went solo as well. Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (13:32.322)
Hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (13:44.598)
Yeah, that's super interesting. I love that too about not trying to make it productive, but just allowing it to be expressive, I guess, or I don't know what the right word is there. And then do you start with something you've already played before or like you're just like, I'm going to blank slate, just play anything that comes to mind. That's kind of where, is that how it goes?

Maneli (13:49.966)
Mmm.

Maneli (13:53.72)
Yeah.

Maneli (13:59.824)
Mm-hmm.

Maneli (14:03.376)
It's both. Sometimes I want to start with something that I'm eager to play from the day before. And I always like to leave a little bit of inspiration today for tomorrow. Like if I know I'm starting to get burnt out, like, no, let me just have this earworm in my head on purpose to torment me for the next 24 hours while I come back to it the next day. I really like doing that. That really seems to work for me because I don't want to expend all my energy even though I get really excited about some ideas.

I want to be very mindful and procure it in a very delicate way that I know I can harness it over a long period of time. So it really becomes the lifestyle at that point, right? Improvisation, and if you really want to get into it, you need to, I think, do it every day, force yourself to do it and see why stuff sounds bad and you've got to record yourself. That's just some steps that might deter some people from doing it, but hopefully inspire them enough that they're going to be a better...

Jesse Paliotto (14:41.281)
Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (14:48.118)
Mm-hmm.

Maneli (15:00.986)
player and just being able to play with other people is an important aspect of playing guitar too.

Jesse Paliotto (15:06.646)
Yeah, not to overlay a structure on you that doesn't truly exist, but it feels like part of the process with writing for you is this, there's these improvisational opportunities which are very unstructured, but then grabbing little bits and just letting that sit in your mind for a while and kind of develop and maybe percolate or whatever phrase you want to use. And then you come back to those, I assume, at some point and the ones that maybe pass muster somehow you actually.

Maneli (15:22.992)
Mm-hmm.

Maneli (15:30.961)
Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (15:34.686)
spend time on and then develop those. Is that fairly accurate? Yeah. Yeah.

Maneli (15:36.338)
Yeah, very well. Yeah, it's a great summary. Yeah, yeah. That seems to be the approach I think lately and just having so much material, I can always go back to them at any time. It's oftentimes sometimes it's a shame because sometimes it's I get so into a song and I invest hundreds of hours into it, but I just lose the connection to the idea. And unfortunately, it never really sees the daylight. It's just stuck in my phone. But that's just part of it. It's part of it. I'm

I've surrendered to that idea.

Jesse Paliotto (16:07.744)
Yeah, mean, a couple of things that come to me as we're talking through this is I know a lot of people lament the fact that with phones and all the stuff that we do, there's not a lot of downtime for our brain. You can keep your brain consuming stuff all day as opposed to like...

Maneli (16:21.809)
Mmm.

Jesse Paliotto (16:27.882)
What you're describing is like if I'm in the grocery store waiting in line, that's actually a chance for me to be like and just kind of think through where would I go with that and then to be able to use that. So I would imagine like as I listen to you, one of my takeaways is, you know, if I'm writing, creating space for me to just process even without the guitar in hand is valuable. The the other thing with with playing like that is

Maneli (16:34.066)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Maneli (16:48.562)
Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (16:56.578)
You know, there's so many ideas that we get finding time to process them that's outside of the inspiration moment. I struggle with that as well. You get this inspiration, this idea, and like, can make something out of this. But it's almost like you have to have discipline to go find time. Like, I'm going to sit down for an hour. This isn't the sexy part of the process. This is me trying to figure out, you know, should I do this with it or should I do that? Let's record both versions. Do you struggle with that as well or how do you handle that part of the refining?

Maneli (17:04.018)
Mm? Mm.

Maneli (17:10.78)
Yeah.

Maneli (17:17.564)
Mmm.

Maneli (17:21.532)
Hmm. Yeah, yeah, I think...

Jesse Paliotto (17:25.056)
Maybe it still is the sexy part for you. You're like, no, I like that, Jesse, that's awesome.

Maneli (17:27.366)
It is. It kind of is. I don't mind it, to be honest, because I know that leads to the ultimate dopamine hit of getting the song out there and finalizing it. do like the 10-step process it takes to have the song go from catalyst to finished product to a more, I guess, convergent sort of thinking of a product that's out there. Yeah, think every step of that process is an important part.

Jesse Paliotto (17:32.353)
Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (17:37.366)
Mm-hmm.

Maneli (17:56.629)
and integration, kind of like a Gestalt sort of thinking of like it all coming together. that's yeah. And there's no way to avoid. I mean, I could outsource some of those, but also I've just done it for so long, like 20 years, just doing most of it myself that I love. I love it. And it's just such a joy to be able to do that. I don't know. So for me, it is the sexy part. The sexy part is being able to integrate all those.

Jesse Paliotto (17:59.552)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (18:20.321)
Yeah.

Maneli (18:22.687)
those skills, those, those, wearing those, all those different hats with, within the composition to, yeah, to finalizing it. Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (18:28.384)
Yeah, is is a random question just because you mentioned that. Is there a way you would outsource it?

Maneli (18:35.318)
you could. Well, I mean, maybe not the writing parts, but the tabbing parts you could the mixing part, the mastering, the marketing, all of the, the most important steps. Yeah, exactly. But as far as the inspiration stuff, you could, could you outsource that? You could have someone start ideas. I don't know. I don't know anyone who's done that, but it's such a personal, personal adventure, but yeah, maybe not outsource those parts, but I guess I was thinking more like down the line of all the other elements of it.

Jesse Paliotto (18:40.012)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. All the downline production.

Jesse Paliotto (19:02.732)
Yeah, but later on. Yeah, the reason that comment caught my attention is one of the things that I've wondered about lately is there's more tools and tech in the last few years that allow real-time music collaboration. I don't have their names off the top of my mind. I'll throw some links in the show notes if I remember them or find them later. But basically, maybe just within the last few years, you have the opportunity that you and I could set up a feed and actually play together.

Maneli (19:18.271)
Mmm.

Maneli (19:23.231)
Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (19:32.64)
And it would be in as near real time as is meaningful for the human brain. Which means you can actually play together in live online, was just always, latency was always made that so difficult. So was wondering if that's where you're going. It's like, I would actually jam with somebody and work out ideas or something.

Maneli (19:37.046)
Mm-hmm.

Maneli (19:40.79)
Mm-hmm.

Maneli (19:45.046)
Yeah.

That would be cool. I think you're thinking of audio movers as one and Sonobus is another free alternative to that, which is great. So I use both of those. I just got off the call using one of them, but not to jam, but just to go over a mixing of a song. So was more just so we can both hear the audio at the exact same time. I have used it for jamming sessions, but yeah, it's nothing like the real thing. Being in person, there's just a magic there that you can't.

Jesse Paliotto (19:55.659)
Okay.

Jesse Paliotto (20:00.364)
Go!

Jesse Paliotto (20:05.217)
Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (20:09.281)
Yes.

Jesse Paliotto (20:14.423)
Yeah.

Maneli (20:17.738)
Recreate online. Yeah. Yeah, it's anyway.

Jesse Paliotto (20:19.428)
totally. Let me swing the questions back a different way. So we're kind of talking through improvisation, composition, that side of the house. And I'm curious about like actual technique practice. you still spend a lot of time working technique? How does that look? I'm curious if there's any insights you would even have around practice routines that you would recommend for somebody listening right now who's like, I like how Minnelli plays. I would love to play more like that.

Maneli (20:27.818)
Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (20:47.052)
How does he get there, like day by day?

Maneli (20:47.095)
Mmm.

Maneli (20:50.604)
Honestly, I think the most important thing, the edge that maybe you could say I have is that I just I love practicing. So a lot of people don't. So that just right there, there's nothing I could do. It's going to be hard to convince someone to practice if they don't enjoy the sweat, you know, because for me, it's like, I know that with this practice session, I'm to be able to do something just even 1 % better the next day. And that

Jesse Paliotto (20:58.082)
Mmm.

Jesse Paliotto (21:03.009)
Yeah.

Maneli (21:15.649)
gives me joy and thinking more long term, like how can this compound into something that's going to pay dividends in a way that is really explosive growth wise. So, I mean, outside of that though, I mean, if you don't love it, like really deep down love it, there are ways to manipulate it, which I would say is maybe to earn the things that you really want to play by doing the things that you don't necessarily want to do, but that are actually good for your practice.

such as playing with accuracy. I I do have this like four arm system, the four pillars, I call them, of music. And oftentimes with my students, we go over them to identify what is the part that needs the most focus. And I'll just kind of quickly go through it. Sure. Yeah, so the four pillars are, the first one's accuracy. The second one is timing or tempo. The third one is speed. And then the fourth one is dynamics. Now, the reason it's in this order as well is because I find a lot of players

Jesse Paliotto (21:59.744)
Yeah, can you talk through those for a sec? That'd be awesome.

Maneli (22:15.328)
neglect accuracy and neglect the timing and go right to speed. The reason they do that is because, I heard them play at that speed, so I need to replicate it at that speed. Otherwise, it won't sound like them. The problem is that you're not focusing on accuracy. You're not focusing on the timing of the notes in order for that to really come across in an accurate way. doing this, we kind of just really backtrack.

Jesse Paliotto (22:17.378)
Mm.

Maneli (22:42.331)
Can you play super slow and accurate? That's the first question. Without even thinking of timing, that usually reveals a lot of things. That reveals like, okay, staccato, there's too much, or there's not enough, there's maybe too much overlap between notes, or there's not enough where there's staccato and you're really cutting off the note short. That's a good thing to think about. It's like, how long are we elongating these notes for, right? That's something that you don't really notice when you're playing it at 100 % speed, especially when you're interpreting other people's music.

That really is a godsend for me because I use it all the time. It's like, can I play this super slow? Like if I'm learning something new, it feels good. But does it feel good because I'm focusing so much on the fourth pillar, which is dynamics, right? Probably. And I'm kind of neglecting the other three. And there'll come a time in your practice where you kind of do two or three at the same time. The reason I say it's like you want to focus on one pillar at a time is because it's more of a top-down approach. Once you focus on one, all of your energy

Jesse Paliotto (23:17.867)
Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (23:27.647)
Mm-hmm.

Maneli (23:40.45)
is going towards listening, towards perfecting it. And that allows us to maybe now, that will eventually become a lower process in our brain. So now we can focus on, let's now introduce timing. Let's get really accurate timing. And once that's down, those two go down, then we bring speed up and then that goes down and then we focus on the last element dynamics, which is the most musical part of it. So that's been really good just to be able to verbalize even, where are you with the song? Where are you with your practice?

Just that concept alone has, I think, changed a lot of my practice anyway, just so I know what to focus on, because I used to just have a buffet of things to work on, which is nice if you want to take the scenic route. And again, when you ask me about the practice routine, it also just comes down to where do you want to be? Do you want to be like top, top of the top? If so, then we need to really optimize your practice. Your practice session need to be super optimized.

Jesse Paliotto (24:36.844)
Mm-hmm.

Maneli (24:39.396)
and really timed and written down and journaled. A lot of players don't really find, like, don't really want to do that. Just too much work at that point. So I come to the guitar to meditate and to escape reality, not to make it more regimented on things that I already do.

Jesse Paliotto (24:47.147)
Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (24:54.498)
What would optimizing look like? That's a great point. And I agree, like even in my own practice, a lot of times I'm just there to jam and feel good or whatever, which is fine. But if I wanted to optimize, is there any way I would go about that?

Maneli (25:00.348)
Mm-hmm.

Maneli (25:04.508)
Yeah.

Maneli (25:08.606)
Yeah, I would structure it. And again, if you're a structured person already, that becomes very easy. And the structure would look something like this. It'd be like, let's say 10 minutes of running through your arpeggios. 10 minutes, and again, doing it in a way that you're trying to actively pursue 80 % accuracy, not 100%, because if it's 100 % accuracy, you're playing it too slow. It's just going to be boring. So we want a little bit of mistakes in there. So that 20 % margin of error is actually a very good thing. So that just...

knows that, OK, so there's still some work that needs to be done. But 80 % seems to be like that rough percentage for learning anyway. It seems to be a really good number to aim for. And then from there, I would go over sections of songs. Because ultimately, we're leading up to what we want to play, which most of the time is going to be a song, unless you're a technician and you don't really care about songs, which can be a thing too. But then from there, we now structure. One thing that I really like to do with learning a song is to orbit around

Jesse Paliotto (25:38.818)
Mm-hmm.

Maneli (26:04.659)
the parts that need work. Say like bar seven needs a lot of work. What we would do is really isolate two notes that are giving you trouble adjacent to the one that's giving you trouble orbit around it. So then we introduce one more note to the left, one more note to the right. And we keep doing that until we orbit around that trouble area until we really get comfortable with isolating it. Cause a lot of people don't know how to really isolate the area where they might just go from the beginning and to the end and have a broad stroke.

a view of it, but not having necessarily a detailed view of that, which I think if you want to optimize it, we really need to work on the parts that need the most amount of work. That also requires the most amount of willpower too. That's the other thing. It's like how much willpower, which part of the day am I practicing? You want to optimize it? Probably want to practice roughly one or two hours after you wake up, not at nighttime when you're drowsy and maybe more than that, like divergent thinking approach where you just want to create

Jesse Paliotto (26:42.177)
Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (26:54.486)
Mm-hmm.

Maneli (27:02.184)
for the sake of creating as opposed to sitting down and nailing this part. So that's another thing. there's a few, those are some of the tips that I can get for optimizing your practice anyway.

Jesse Paliotto (27:12.192)
Yeah, I love that. mean, even some of the implied things with what you just said where you're really timing stuff and saying, I'm going to do this for 10 minutes. It's not just run through this three times and move on, but I'm getting time to it. The orbiting concept. I'd never heard of that before. That's, that's excellent. Cause yeah, I think, I think like wisdom and I've heard this mentioned by several folks is like, you go to the hard stuff. You don't focus on keep playing the easy stuff. Obviously work on the hard stuff and that when you solve that, actually helps you across the board.

Maneli (27:18.96)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Maneli (27:26.408)
Mm.

Jesse Paliotto (27:41.986)
But that's a very like hyper focused way to do it. Go to the note and then expand around it. That's brilliant. That's so good. I know you have a Fingerstyle Pro course. Is this some of the material you talk about there? Maybe you could talk for a second about that course and even any of your other teaching options. Would love to hear about that because obviously you have such great insights here.

Maneli (27:42.154)
Yeah.

Maneli (27:46.482)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Cool.

Maneli (27:59.986)
Mm-hmm. Sir. Yeah. Yeah, appreciate that. Yeah, no. So the Fingerstyle Pro online course kind of spurred from just having taught a whole bunch of players on Skype. So that was really just kind of being able to see common issues that across the board from all players, from all of my students. So it was just really insightful to see certain aspects that needed attention. And so that was like, OK, well, I should...

And eventually when one person had that problem on a certain thing, I'm like, say a slap technique or something, I would make a specific exercise for that and send it to them and we will work on it together. And then the next student would ask for the same thing. Like, Oh, I already taught that to so-and-so. So then it was really good because then I had this, I was starting to get this just archive of exercises that dealt with specific issues that my students were having. that.

got me to think, it's like, okay, well, at this point, I have like so many exercises for specific issues within the percussive finger style world, especially that, that it inspired me just to, okay, let me see if I can just do an online course. This was just before COVID hit. So was just timing was pretty good too. And yeah, so that was kind of the inspiration of like just seeing my students have commonalities, common issues that where I could just, okay, let me just make this into an actual course.

Jesse Paliotto (29:08.066)
Hmm. Yeah.

Maneli (29:20.547)
helps them out. yeah, so the catalyst was definitely partly COVID, partly stopping the touring. I stopped touring at the end of 2019. I kind of just retired that lifestyle. Just got too burnt out, did too much of it, you know, for really condensed amount of time. And yeah, just had to ask myself if I could pivot somehow and still educate, but in a more impactful way, I guess. I love doing one on ones. One on one lessons are the best because it's mentorship like

Jesse Paliotto (29:42.338)
Mm-hmm.

Maneli (29:50.016)
like one-on-one you can't get from an online course. But for those who can't afford the online, sorry, for those who can't afford the one-on-one lessons, the online course seems to be, and I think a pretty good value because it's a one-time fee, oftentimes for just lifetime access with all the updates too. So yeah, I really try to make sure that like there's enough information and exercises within even the things, the concepts that I talk about here with you.

Jesse Paliotto (29:52.63)
Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (29:57.175)
Mm.

Maneli (30:16.782)
to just give them everything, not just the technical stuff, but the conceptual stuff too. And I love the conceptual stuff because that's like, know, the foundation of like, if we can understand how to verbalize the foundation, our playing experience will be more meaningful because we can verbalize it.

Jesse Paliotto (30:32.192)
Yeah, yeah, I agree. The conceptual stuff for me is, is always a huge unlock. Like every time you have an aha, because especially I think in the guitar world where a lot of what we do is less scripted, we're improvising, we're writing, we're interpreting, you know, as opposed to like classical violin, for example, where it's all on the page or a lot of it's on the page. So the ability for me to have like a concept that I can cut and paste and drop into new situations at will is so powerful. Like, okay, this is how this thing works.

Maneli (30:45.293)
Mmm.

Maneli (30:50.295)
Yeah.

Maneli (30:56.195)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (31:01.59)
I can do this in any song now. This is great. So this is, we'll include some links. This is great for if people want to take that course or if they want to connect with you even for one on one lessons it sounds like. We can throw some links in there, but that is so good. I wanted to ask you some quick random questions. They don't have to be quick. If you'd like to give long answers, that's fine too. But I just had some random questions I thought would be fun.

Maneli (31:03.445)
Mm-hmm, exactly.

Maneli (31:14.371)
Mm-hmm. Sir.

Maneli (31:23.395)
Sure.

Jesse Paliotto (31:28.246)
to ask you one is what are you listening to right now? I don't know if you do vinyl, Spotify, cassettes from the 80s, whatever. What's in your player right now?

Maneli (31:38.105)
Yeah, you wouldn't think, but I just recently learned how to drive, which I know is a late start, but living in the city, really wasn't fully necessary. yeah, so driving really, for whatever reason, it's just inspiring me to listen to a lot of like house music and like trance. again, it's not something you would expect from listening to my music that I would be listening to that kind of stuff. But there's just something about driving and like, I don't know.

that kind of like deep house. It's just, it's so, just gets me in the zone and makes the driving experience like I'm in a video game or something. I love video games too. So yeah, it's just, that's house, house music. Yeah. Different kinds of house, progressive house, deep house, dark house. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. That's right. Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (32:12.416)
Yes.

Jesse Paliotto (32:24.614)
There is something rhythmic or repetitive about the road. I don't know what that is, but you're right. Just like that beat of just like you're in the groove. And I'm building a theory having, you know, starting to talk to a lot of fingerstocked part players one on one. I think there's a lot of guitar players that listen to EDM or in some format house music, electronic music. There's something similar about the construction. I don't know what it is. I'm still building the theory, but it is. It is funny how many people you ask this who play guitar and they're like,

Maneli (32:41.219)
really? Okay. Yeah.

Maneli (32:50.042)
I like it, I like it.

Jesse Paliotto (32:53.642)
I'm listening to electronic music.

Maneli (32:55.046)
Yeah, so fresh.

Jesse Paliotto (32:56.834)
Yeah, yeah, there is that too. There's just so much cutting edge stuff happening there. I was curious if there's any musicians that you have recently discovered that you're super into, or maybe they've been around, maybe they're old and passed away even, but you've discovered them recently. Is there any musicians you're super digging right now? Or bands, if it's house music, whatever. Or DJs.

Maneli (33:01.36)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Maneli (33:12.848)
Hmm

Maneli (33:17.66)
Hmm. don't know. That's a tough one. Honestly, the answer that I can give is not one that maybe the listeners will like, but it's I'm not really listening to a lot of music outside of that, the house music in my car in the car. I'm so involved in my own music. so it's just like a lot of it, a lot of the listening experience goes towards creating the music and usually just the sound of my guitar. And I love live guitar sounds. So it's like

Jesse Paliotto (33:28.418)
Mm-hmm.

Maneli (33:45.947)
So improvising in a way is like allowing me to create soundscapes to how I feel in the moment. So a lot of the stuff doesn't really allow for listening to a lot of other people's music. So unfortunately, yeah, there's not much of that going on.

Jesse Paliotto (33:50.946)
Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (33:56.993)
Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (34:01.312)
No, that's a very interesting perspective, really allocating your own listening capacity to your own feedback loop of how you're developing your own plan. I like that.

Maneli (34:05.883)
Mm-hmm.

Maneli (34:10.483)
Yeah. And that might come back to what you were saying earlier about like how you might just see there's a whole bunch of stuff that I'm releasing. And it could be just that's maybe one of the ways that I am able to produce more music is just that full immersion into the own craft. Yeah. Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (34:22.88)
Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (34:29.046)
Yeah, there's only so much time in the day. Like if you want to do that, you've got to allocate the time. There's no way around it. This is a guitar nerd question. If you could buy any guitar, any piece of gear, money's no object, you could finally get the thing. Is there anything that you're like, I would run out and buy this today? Anything you've been looking for?

Maneli (34:34.322)
Yeah, that's it.

Maneli (34:51.452)
Hmm

Maneli (34:56.74)
I have everything that I need already, if I want, I mean, I, yeah, yeah. I I have great guitars. have like good studios equipment stuff and, yeah, I mean, I feel like I don't need more stuff. If anything, I should give them away. yeah, if any, okay. So, so, but this isn't necessarily guitar related, but more like just microphone related. think having, really high end vintage mics would be something.

Jesse Paliotto (34:58.21)
That's awesome.

Maneli (35:26.579)
Really cool. Maybe that maybe that the ones that are like $30,000 like a vintage you you 47 or something that that would be pretty cool. Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (35:26.601)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (35:37.164)
Do you play electric guitar? Okay, I've only heard you play acoustic, so forgive my ignorance.

Maneli (35:42.358)
no it's okay. Yeah, so I started with electric guitar. Electric guitar was like my first, cause I was really into metal and that kind of stuff. So that was kind of my intro to guitar really is to play loud and annoy the parents. Yeah, it's not really with distortion. It's more like clean, like ambient guitar, really like electric ambient guitar. So I'm working on an album right now that's all that stuff. So yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (35:55.068)
So you can you still do that? I mean, maybe not annoy the parents anymore, but.

Jesse Paliotto (36:06.872)
cool. Right on. You can go as deep on this question as you want or give the very light answer. Totally. Everything's OK. What does recording look like for you? I know that you can go into the weeds on stuff, but the mic comment made me think about that. I believe I assume you record in your own home studio. So be curious like, yeah, what does that look like? Gear process workflows or any any? How does it work for you to do recording?

Maneli (36:23.562)
And I hate that.

Maneli (36:29.0)
Most of it, yeah.

Maneli (36:35.401)
Yeah, so I'd say the last, let's say five years, five, six years, I've done all my own recording more or less. And so the place that I'm living in isn't necessarily big. It's a one bedroom. So I usually have like my desk and stuff in the living room. And then I have my, my, my recording room in my bedroom, really. So I have like, like acoustic panels and everything now. So usually I do a three mic setup. So I have like a space pair of small diaphragm mics.

Jesse Paliotto (36:53.803)
Right.

Maneli (37:02.379)
One of them that takes the bridge, one of them takes like the eighth fret, seventh fret. And then I have a center mic, which is a tube mic, a large diaphragm tube mic to catch just the mono signal or the center image, I should say, with like a lot of warmth and bass. And so there's just a lot of manipulating that. So that's usually my recording setup. And that's going into some really nice preamps. There's a great river preamp, which is I think modeled after a Neve preamp.

Yeah, it lot of nice color, nice saturated color that I tend to go through. yeah, so I'm definitely getting more into the weeds into that, especially with mixing as well. So I'm hiring like a really great mixing engineer to help me out with that. And so I could just kind of really learn that craft because I love that world as well. The behind the scene technical aspect of recording. That's another love of mine.

Jesse Paliotto (37:40.268)
Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (37:49.76)
Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (37:54.538)
In the past have you mixed your own stuff? And so this is kind of a new shift to bring in an outside person.

Maneli (37:57.166)
yeah, yeah. So that's kind of the outsourcing of it. But yeah, a lot, lot of the stuff has been mixed by someone else. and the mastering as well, because that's a whole other art form as well. but a lot, a lot of the, the Instagram stuff, you know, a lot of I'll just do myself, especially if it's like going through my pedal board and, messing around with that. So that's, that's another love of mine. Just, going through the pedal board and recording and see what happens. And oftentimes there's like a few gems in there that, that all release.

you know, on, on Instagram.

Jesse Paliotto (38:27.414)
Yeah. Do you tend to do a lot of your effects and all that stuff sort of in the physical world, you know, in actual gear, or are you using a lot of plugins as well and kind of just mixing and matching?

Maneli (38:37.781)
All plugins. Yeah. When it comes to the actual recordings, like the professional recordings that are going to be albums, it's almost all of it. I'd say 95 % is VST plugins. Yeah, it's all plugins. If it's for the Instagram stuff, it's all physical analog pedals and stuff like that.

Jesse Paliotto (38:56.064)
Yeah, interesting. So when you're recording even like the what you're working on now with some of the electric guitar work, is that still you're doing it all inside the computer or is that bringing in hardware at that point?

Maneli (39:07.652)
Yeah, no, it's all on the computer. It would be better if I didn't do it because there's just certain frequencies that have the amp sound to it that is kind of hard to replicate. So there's certain elements. I'm not 100 % convinced yet, but it's close and it's close enough for me to just take the convenience of that because I know I could record when it's noisy here or I have to worry about being super quiet.

Jesse Paliotto (39:11.01)
Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (39:19.361)
Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (39:30.401)
Yeah.

Maneli (39:36.451)
with the mic on the amp. yeah, generally I just use plugins for that. Yeah, and I like it. It's fun. It's a whole other creative outlet, you know, to knob, twist knobs and see what they do.

Jesse Paliotto (39:38.007)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (39:49.024)
I know it can be overwhelming. You're like, man, there's so many options here. I could spend a lot of time messing with this. It's interesting though to go and do a lot of, or the trade-offs that you have to consider. So you say like, okay, I could do hardware. could do all this outboard stuff. But yeah, noise and where's my studio and do I have enough?

Maneli (39:50.999)
I don't

Maneli (39:56.015)
Yeah.

Maneli (40:04.025)
Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (40:09.794)
kind of money and time to go acquire all that and get it set up and configured versus what's the value of those few extra frequencies. That's an interesting process to sort out. At the end of the day, you're just trying to get music out of your head and into reality.

Maneli (40:09.999)
Yeah.

Exactly.

Maneli (40:16.847)
That's it.

Maneli (40:23.405)
Yeah, and just to add to that, think you said it great. It's like the end user doesn't care how you recorded it, what you did with it. They just care like, did you make me feel something? And listening to music, you could think of it as a selfish endeavor, but totally, of course. Well, why else would you be listening to music? We're listening because we want it to affect us somehow. We want to feel something. So and I've heard crappy recordings, but with amazing performances and those still hit.

Jesse Paliotto (40:28.619)
Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (40:41.836)
Yeah.

Maneli (40:50.501)
Like you listen to stuff from the seventies or the sixties, the quality you might say is subpar to kind of what it is today. Sure. But, the performances were great and it still made us feel something. And that vintage sound, or you can call it vintage or analog sound has a special magic to it that, that is timeless. That's why a lot of the stuff right now, it's like, we're going back to emulate that vinyl sound. Same with film. You look at a lot of, a lot of movies. Some of the best ones in my opinion are

shot with film or they're emulating film grain, which we worked so hard to get rid of in film. then now we're reintroducing it back in because it didn't, it felt too fake to get rid of it. That film grain is what we have associated ourselves with in, with movies, with timeless movies. Same with audio. Audio has a specific saturation sound or a level of that that makes us feel something nostalgic.

Jesse Paliotto (41:22.102)
Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (41:49.002)
Yeah, I just put on for my kids the other day we were driving Led Zeppelin. It was a music education hour with that. the sound, it's so warm and it's obviously from a totally different era of recording and it's all analog and they're phenomenal players and they're a legendary band. But just such a different sound, like you put that next to something produced through All Digital Means Today and you're like.

Maneli (41:54.838)
Nice. Yeah, good dad.

Maneli (42:10.308)
Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (42:16.066)
It's almost like you get a snapshot of an era through just even the... This is such a weird connection. Forgive me for making this. And if you're listening to this, you're like, Jesse's out of his mind. There's this game online called Time Guesser. Have ever seen this? It's a fun game. And so you go on and it shows you a picture, a photo from some time and from some place and you have to guess when and where. So it might show you some, you know...

Maneli (42:24.901)
No, go for it.

Maneli (42:32.818)
Mmm, no.

Jesse Paliotto (42:44.84)
square with people walking and you're like, okay, it looks like it's in New York City and look at the clothes, look at that, you know, it's probably from the 80s. And so, and then, you know, it's, that's the game. But what's interesting is a lot of times the quality of the photo, the, the overlay, what you're describing with film and with what I'm kind of referencing with Led Zeppelin, like just looking at the way the photo looks, you know, what era it is. Like that's early 90s all the way. That's the 70s Kodak. Like you can just tell.

Maneli (42:51.452)
Mm.

Jesse Paliotto (43:13.888)
And so there's some sort of like orientation and time and place value that you get from the physical world. It's the other thought and sorry to connect one more time, but I'll take one third leap here. I think that's part of the value that music will deliver versus AI. This is another, I would say theory I'm working on is that, you know, if AI can make music, which it can, and it can make very good music right now, but it doesn't have any anchor to a person in a place.

Maneli (43:14.311)
Yeah.

Maneli (43:25.244)
Of

Maneli (43:32.688)
Mmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (43:44.04)
in doing a certain thing at a certain time. And the more that, so I would say as a musician, one of the things that we can do to give our music staying power and relevance is make it relevant. Like this is me in this place recording in this way. It's not this kind of faceless digital thing. So there's a lot of thoughts and I'm sure that's a very provocative statement to some folks, but I think that's gonna be part of really.

Maneli (43:46.834)
Mm-hmm.

Maneli (43:57.17)
Mmm.

Jesse Paliotto (44:09.782)
providing something that's unique in an era where AI is going to produce just a flood of stuff that is not unique.

Maneli (44:11.752)
Hmm.

Maneli (44:15.25)
Well said. think, yeah, I like that. I actually agree with that. And plus, I feel like if AI were to be successful, they need a brand, right? So I think with a lot of musicians that you follow, they have a brand, then you're following their sound, you're following their image of their, if they're sharing personal stuff about their lives. It's not to say that AI couldn't fake that. And they very well can, and it will happen. It will happen. It will happen to the point probably in my guess, because I love talking about AI and

Jesse Paliotto (44:37.377)
Right.

Maneli (44:44.7)
and the effects that it has in the long run, especially that AI will find a way to obviously make my job go obsolete. And it will do it in a way that just knows how things can go viral. will understand these things. It will understand what sort of videos are doing well, what sort of pictures are doing well. And it will replicate that and keep learning from itself. yeah. And then it's just a matter of like,

Jesse Paliotto (44:56.354)
Mm-hmm.

Maneli (45:13.896)
Do we choose to follow that? Will there be a movement, which I'm sure there will be, that goes against it? And there'll be those who say, who cares? If they're making good music, it's making me feel something. That should be enough merit for us to continue supporting it too.

Jesse Paliotto (45:17.11)
Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (45:29.154)
I almost wonder like as a musician, if I looked 10 years out, is the recordings or the production I'm making sort of gonna be like the Grateful Dead? I don't know if you ever ran into this, but there was, I feel like for a lot of Grateful Dead's career, people would trade cassettes in the parking lot. This is then when they were playing in Frisco back in like 83. This is this one jam session. And it was like.

Maneli (45:41.492)
Mmm

Maneli (45:48.972)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (45:55.446)
That was the value of that recording, is it was from a time and a place and a real person was there. know, is that, you know, live albums basically from a certain place start to become like the uniqueness of the thing as opposed to this, it could have been made anywhere and at any time.

Maneli (46:04.691)
Mmmmm.

Maneli (46:09.558)
Interesting. I like that. I think to add to that is that I mean, Grateful Dead is a live band. It's like, it's one of those bands that you have to see. But I guess not all bands are like that. And obviously they have a niche within that, probably those people of all those Grateful Dead fans, how many of those are actually collectors to the point where they want to create maybe. And then, yeah, that brings up a great question though. It's just like, how many niches within niches can you make? It's pretty meta, but that can be a very...

Jesse Paliotto (46:28.13)
Yeah.

Maneli (46:37.97)
important aspect if you wanted to become a successful musician or any successful anything I think but yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (46:43.746)
Yeah, any creative field at this point, that's kind of a lot of the existential questions people are asking. My saving, just to take us off of the fear train there, my saving thought right now is I was sending my brother an AI picture as a joke that I made really quickly based on a thread we were in. And my daughter, my nine-year-old daughter looked at it and immediately she's like, oh, that's AI. And I'm like, how do you know? And she's not super on the computer a lot or anything.

Maneli (46:45.739)
Yeah.

Maneli (46:52.906)
Yeah.

Maneli (47:00.313)
Yeah.

Maneli (47:06.584)
She knows.

Maneli (47:11.905)
Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (47:11.98)
But she's like, it's just too smooth and glossy. That's not a real photo. And I'm like, right on, So there is like, you know, some still detectable level of either human or not human going on. So I'll just rest in that for the moment.

Maneli (47:15.128)
All right.

Yeah.

Maneli (47:26.236)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And just out of that, because one extra thing that just kind of came up is, if we think about the time it took for the car, from the first car to be like in New York Times, in New York, and then how many years it took for all those carriages with all the horses to be replaced by cars. It took about 10 years. So about a 10-year gap, which is crazy to think about.

And then now we're thinking about kind of what you're talking about, how like you can tell it's AI. You can kind of tell it's got just this like animation look to it. But I can guarantee you in 10 years time, it's going to look photorealistic. We will have no idea what is what. And it's exactly what is meant to happen. we can't stop it. It's just one of those things that is going to naturally happen. We can now surrender to it kind of in a way and welcome it and see how we can live with it, coexist with it.

or we can have a negative approach too and just really be pessimistic towards and cynical towards like what it will do for society. But I believe we can live in harmony somehow. There's always something that will shift the balance of that.

Jesse Paliotto (48:36.384)
Yeah, I'm optimistic that whatever's come along tech-wise, people have found a way to still be meaningful, be expressive, and connect. And that's kind what we do as musicians at a high level. So we will find a way to do that. Well, that's probably a good place to put a comma on things. Is there anything that maybe you didn't get to mention or you wanted to share? Any final comments or words that you wanted to hit? And if not, no worries.

Maneli (48:44.772)
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Love that.

Maneli (48:57.974)
I do have a... yeah, no worries. I have an album coming out next Friday. That could be something. I know that you... because you do album reviews too, don't you? Yeah, so I could send that to you as well and maybe do a little cross promoting thing if you're interested in that. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Next Friday. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think this will be out by then or...?

Jesse Paliotto (49:12.236)
Yeah, yeah, let's do it. Love that. Next Friday, it's coming out? Awesome. Yeah, I'm actually gonna publish it pretty quickly. Just based on, I'll cut this little section here, but based on workflow, I had kind of like preloaded a bunch of episodes through December, and then now I'm sort of caught up into real time. I actually need to get back to like front load a little bit so I can give myself a break when you get up on some,

Maneli (49:23.044)
Nice.

Maneli (49:28.281)
Mm-hmm.

Maneli (49:34.394)
Mmm.

Maneli (49:39.108)
Nice.

Jesse Paliotto (49:40.77)
time out of office here in a weeks. But I think I may, if I can get through it, may release this as soon as Saturday. So three days.

Maneli (49:42.116)
Yeah.

Maneli (49:48.277)
nice, amazing, Cool.

Jesse Paliotto (49:52.46)
Cool, all I'll cut back in. Awesome, so thank you Manoli so much. Appreciate you being here on the podcast. It's been a pleasure meeting you, getting to chat, talking through some ideas, and even some very practical advice, I think, for folks. one last question. Is there any good place or preferred place for folks to connect with you online? Should they just hit your website, or what's the best idea?

Maneli (49:54.17)
Let's do it.

Maneli (50:15.794)
yeah, website or any social media. I'm pretty much on all social media sites too. So yeah, just look up Manali Jamal on any of those and yeah, it should be there.

Jesse Paliotto (50:24.714)
Okay, awesome. And we'll drop links in the show notes. Thanks everyone for joining us. I'm your host Jesse Pagliato and I love talking about making music and guitar here on the Guitar Journal podcast. Thank you, Manelli. Have a great week everybody. See you all next time.

Maneli (50:37.339)
Thank you.