Q. Hi Eduardo, can you tell us a little bit of yourself and your work history?
Hi guys, thanks for the opportunity :) I'm essentially an audio/music post production educator. I got into MPP area after falling in love with the Trance and Techno electronic music from 1998-99, I remember sitting in my room with headphones listening to the music and dreaming about how to make those sounds, and this motivated me to get into music production.
I took courses in Acoustics and Pro Audio in around 2002, and my plan was to understand everything about sound and music by studying and working in this field, so I could make my own music someday.
During this path, I worked in different areas like Live Sound, Studio recording and Sound to picture post production, always bringing that experience home to try to understand the software and hardware involved in electronic music production.
Around 2004, I had an opportunity to teach music production in Cubase, and I created my teaching method called "2600Hz Criações Musicais" which evolved into a school later.
As a second branch, I got into the retail business at around 2012, when we created "Sweetspot's Steinbergshop", a shop that was made initially only for Steinberg software products, but grew into offering more brands and technology hardware like interfaces and monitors. About 3 years ago, we took the experience from Steinbergshop and evolved it into "Sweetspot Music Mark!" a portal for selling music software and related hardware.
Today, I take care of many operations in both 2600Hz Criações Musicais and Sweetspot Music Mark!, all related to Audio and Music education and technology.
Q. Are you a musician? Are you working on any personal music right now?
I don't consider myself a real "musician". If anything, I am a "music engineer" in the studio. I do compose and make lots of music in my day by day, but I always make music "offline", in a DAW, with a lot of post production techniques along with the musical parts.
Q. How are you involved with the worldwide audio community?
My work has always been focused on bringing content for the MPP scene in Brazil, and I had a lot of opportunities to connect with software and hardware brands since I began. We did events for RØDE Microphones, Novation, PreSonus, Steinberg, Arturia, Ableton and other brands at 2600Hz, so in business I have been supporting the Audio scene by bringing the news and information to the local MPP scene.
I worked at Yamaha Music Brazil, where I learned a lot about the industry and how big companies work, and they gave me the opportunity to go to the Musikmesse and Steinberg headquarters, and in that occasion I got in contact with a whole world of Audio and Music equipment that we didn't have available in Brazil, and got to bring some of that info back to the scene here too.
As a professional, I am member of AES, IMSTA and NAMM, and I am a certified trainer for Steinberg, Ableton and Waves Audio.
Nowadays, I'm involved at a higher level with the worldwide Audio community through selling the Music software, dealing with manufacturers and distributors every day. This has been an opportunity to show the world more about the Brazillian ways, and to open a new ground for the music software trade here in our country.
Q. How did you start your own business at 2600Hz?
It all began with a the love I developed for electronic music when I was a teenager. I started messing with music production software in senior high, and decided I wanted to learn PRO Audio and to work in the field, to take that experience home and make my own music.
After some time studying and working, around 2004, I received an invitation to teach Cubase Music Production at a DJ school in São Paulo, and created my teaching method, based on what I had been learning in the Audio field and my experiences at home with synths, VST and music technology.
About three years later, the school closed down and I was called by some partners to teach at different places in Brazil, and went travelling to different States teaching music production.
When I came back to São Paulo, I had a dream where I was talking with an audio shop owner, Paulo Silva from Technoaudio, and in this dream he said he had a free space on top of his store that I could rent to give my courses.
I was so certain that I had this conversation with him that I went to his store to talk about the space, only to hear: "we never had that talk Eduardo, I don't know what you´re talking about, over the shop is our stock, there is no place to give lessons here."
I was leaving the shop somewhat disappointed, he suddenly called me back and said: "You know, I just rented a music studio nearby, and maybe you can rent the basement and build your classroom there!". We closed the deal that same day, and that's when I began with 2600Hz Criações Musicais.
It was a nice area going around the back of the house, with an open door to a garden, I cleaned out that basement, bought the first two copies of Cubase (model "Cubase Studio 4" at the time), an extra midi controller and an interface, and got everything I had at home to build the first two student stations.
And the 2600Hz courses began in 2007!
From then on, each semester I would buy one more full station (computer, interface, midi keyboard and software), reaching where we are now, in our own house with 2 separate classrooms, 15 complete music production workstations and lots of cool gear and software for the students.
Q. What makes 2600Hz different from other online music schools?
I believe the main thing is our attitude at the services we offer. Our conduct is to be loving and always honest. We work to give all attention we can to the students and prospects, focusing much more on the better education, than the profit.
Our courses are well structured, and we have a very well-defined teaching method, that has been improving in the last 13+ years. We began a with a modern mindset based on electronic (software-based) music production and recording, and now that is the reality of our field.
Our method and our attitude towards the customers, both in pre-sales and in the delivery of the service, are what makes us stand out from other schools or shops around here. The dedication we have for giving the best service is always clear to the customers, and although we are not perfect, they usually feel that there are real people making an effort to give them the support they need to reach their goals with Music and Audio.
Q. How has COVID19 affected your business and how are you adapting?
It had a big impact in our school. We had about 30 students starting a course in March, and a whole year ahead of us planned for the normal school operation. We re-negotiated with the students and most of them opted for online lessons, which turned out to be a big challenge. Our courses are long, each class is 3-hours long and to make these in recorded/edited video is a lot of work.
So we spent 2020 just building the online school and courses for these students, learning the best ways to give them lessons online and struggling a lot during the process. Luckily, we had the opportunity to broadcast live during the IMSTA Festa RIO2020 event, and that was a huge learning experience for us. Now, we are giving our lessons in a live format online, using the streaming setup we made for the IMSTA Festa, and it has been a wonderful experience so far.
In the end, the COVID-19 pandemic moved us toward an evolution we already knew that was coming to the school, which is the online school and a better contact with our customers using the internet. For a school in our field, I believe this is the best way to go and a necessary move now.
Q. Can you mention any recent accomplishments of 2600Hz?
In December 2020, we hosted the IMSTA Festa RIO2020 Purple Room, where we gave live streaming lessons and workshops on Music Production, in an international event with major brands.
This was very nice for the school, and our educational team was also responsible for finding and instructing the specialists who participated in the event. Now we have contact with 15 top specialists based in Brazil who we can work with, both for 2600Hz and Sweetspot's activities.
Also, I became an Ableton Certified Trainer recently, and that was an experience I will never forget. It prepared me to be a better teacher, and a better product demonstrator, paving the way for what we did at the IMSTA Festa. along with Music Marketing Inc's instructions on how the video demos should be made. Both Ableton and Ray had the same vision on how you should demonstrate a product, and they are absolutely right about how this should be done.
I must confess that after these two experiences, I became a much better talker and demonstrator than I was before, and our courses and methods have improved from this "upgrade" I got from the international industry.
So the biggest accomplishment I can think of is being a much better school now, more aligned with the current worldwide vision, than we were two years ago.
Q. How did you hear about XCHANGE?
I was invited into XCHANGE by a business partner. My company was definitely not ready for the business, we began building the system to process the software sales the best way to suit our capacities.
It took us more than one year to actually become ready to start selling, and when we were finally ready, our XMP account was actually disabled, because it had gone dormant for so long!
Cindy was key in helping us start again and, since then, we had a long path until we began selling more.
With the whole COVID situation, we were all really caught up with the new online school's activities, but we were not making any new income for months. That's when I decided to put more focus and into the XCHANGE business, we improved our marketing tools and website content, and were blessed with fine results that actually enabled us to go forward during the pandemic.
Q. Was it difficult to integrate your business with XCHANGE?
Integration itself was quite easy, we had support when we needed and XMP has it all figured out for resellers either manually or via integration.
The real difficulty is localizing product information and sometimes keeping up with pricelist changes and promotions, new and dropped SKU's, etc...
To translate thousands of products to our language is hard work, and there were moments where I had 75% of the staff working just on that. We have an employee working with translations and product registration every day, pretty much all day, for about two years now.
Q. Has XCHANGE improved your business?
There are many ways that XCHANGE improves my business.
Firstly, as a school, we have access to educational information and tools that we didn't have before. I would not add a McDSP or Kilohearts plugin to our courses if it were not for XCHANGE. They were too far away from Brazil before Sweetspot began selling them here.
Commercial and financial-wise, it has been a beautiful solution for the debt we have from not selling courses since March 2020, and in special times like Black Friday it really made up for the loss we had in the months before.
When all comes back to normal with our courses being sold again, I would say it will have doubled our gross income, although it takes a lot of work from our side to it sell. Our net profit will have raised about 25% with the software business, when school begins selling again.
Q. How could we improve your experience with XCHANGE? Do you have any criticisms?
One challenge we had to resolve from our side is that SKU changes are not communicated to resellers. Sometimes, vendors don't do a good communication when they remove a SKU, or add new ones, and I believe XMP can help both sides with their service.
So, I can see a few improvements in the data we get from API's, mainly for stock and price management, but overall the service is really good.
Q. How was your experience running IMSTA FESTA RIO this year? Is there a high amount of online piracy of music software in your country?
It was a huge experience for us. First, the fact that we had to connect with 15 different demonstrators, and make these demos happen in the right format, was a big learning experience for us.
We got instructions from Ray Williams on how to make these videos in an interesting way, and that was a big upgrade for us as product specialists, too.
On the event side, bringing all these brands close to the users in Brazil was great, we had a lot of positive feedback during the show, in the chatrooms, and after the show at our shop. We made sales with the event, and the fact that these video demos are now public for the Brazilian and other Portuguese-speaking users to watch is just awesome!
Yes, there is still a lot of piracy in our country, but this has changed dramatically in the last couple of years. We now see a lot of talk in forums and social networks about using original software, communities that don't allow piracy speech and we also see customers buying products that I had no idea that would sell, and I accredit part of that change to Sweetspot's work of bringing all these brands into the Brazilian market using Xchange.
Q. What is your outlook for the music software market in South America over the next 10 years? Do you ever plan to work outside Brazil?
I believe we will see a big growth in software sales in the next few years. Now that we have an online portal to get all the professional software instantly, on demand, at Sweetspot, and a company working hard to help the customers with the best products, there is a lot of growth to see.
In the next 10 years, I can see a bigger growth in the first two or three years, and then a more mature market in Brazil following the changes and trends of the worldwide software trade. If we continue to do actions, promotions and incentivize the users in Brazil with a closer presence of the actual brands here, we will see amazing results.
I hope to see the manufacturers investing more and supporting the marketing activities for their products in Brazil. Localization of the marketing activities and material will be crucial to make the software sales stronger here, and we can do it all online now which is awesome.
I also hope to see IMSTA spreading out the piracy education message better in Brazil, and as we saw at the IMSTA Festa RIO2020 the music production events are a fantastic way to do this.
Q. Since you’re a teacher do you have any words of advice for aspiring musician students or special mentions to your mentors?
My advice for aspiring Music or Audio students is to take a course with a good method, and be prepared to study the inner concepts of Acoustics, Audio and Music to support your work.
There are lots of information available on the internet to support our studies, but having a good school to take you through the learning process will help you to get the best out of all the content that is available nowadays.
Also, I didn't know anyone in the Music or Audio fields when I began studying, and today I have a lot of contact with top specialists, brands and other people from the industry, so don't doubt yourself because if you really study hard and learn what you want to learn, you will find more and more open doors as you go.
