Interview #23 Andy Unruh - Revolutionizing Music: The Story of the Amazonica

Transcript, Sep. 22, 2025     

Rick Barron (00:00)

Hi everyone, I'm Rick Barron, host, and welcome to my podcast, That's Life, I Swear. 

My guest today is Andy Unruh. 

One day, when Andy was working in his garage, he had one of those light-bulb moments. Now, what was his inspiration? 

What if making music didn't require years of practice, memorizing scales, or playing through various chords? No, he had a better idea. What if anyone, no matter their background, could pick up an instrument and play. 

As someone who had studied guitar for more than 20 years, Andy knew the frustration all too well. People don't want to spend hours wrestling with theory and technique. They want to play music. 

That moment led to the creation of the Amazonica, a one-of-a-kind instrument designed to make music more accessible, fun, and, more importantly, immediate.

In our conversation, Andy will share with us the challenges of developing this creative instrument and the inspiring feedback from people who have already tried it. He'll also share his philosophy of failing fast and the dangers of self-imposing limitations. 

So, if you've ever dreamed of playing music but felt the barriers were just too high, this episode is for you. 

Please join me as I have my conversation with Andy Unruh. 

Andy, welcome to the show, my friend.

Andy Unruh (01:31)

Thank you, Rick, for having me. I appreciate it.

Rick Barron (01:33)

Great to have you. So, for the sake of the audience, could you provide us with a brief overview of your life's journey and where you stand today? And share some moments of that.

Andy Unruh (01:48)

Sure, yeah. I attended the University of California in Santa Barbara and I majored in nuclear engineering and as a graduate student I majored in material science. 

I worked for General Electric Nuclear Energy for about seven years before I really thought about it and said this is not my thing. And I had always loved audio. I was kind of a stereo geek and had a hi-fi system in high school and things. 

So, I made the big jump into high-tech audio. You know, the digital revolution was starting and I got a job as an algorithm developer with absolutely no experience. And later on in that first job that I got, we decided that we wanted to design a pair of speakers. 

And so since I knew I was the only one in the company with a physics background, it fell onto me to design those loudspeakers. And I kind of went from there, kind of working in both the fields of acoustics and signal processing and typically bringing the two together to provide innovative products.

Rick Barron (02:58)

Answering. That is quite a track record you got there. So, what are you doing today?

Andy Unruh (03:07)

Well, I'm retired. And so I had a little time on my hands and I was with a group of people of about 40 people, 30 to 40 people. And we were in the Amazon rainforest studying plant medicine. And there were two of us that had guitars and we would at night, we would play. The other guy was quite a bit better than me, but people still seem to enjoy me playing.

And at one point I asked, well, are there any other musicians here? And nobody raised their hand. And I thought about it and I said, well, how many of you would like to play a musical instrument? Everybody raised their hand. Everybody wanted to play. And then I asked, well, why don't you? And I heard the same things.  

I tried to play guitar. I gave it up after four or five months. I couldn't play anything. And it...

The common theme was it just took too much time to get good and it was too hard for people. And so that got me thinking about, you know, what could I do to remedy this situation?

Rick Barron (04:12)

Interesting. So, what gave you the concept or at least the beginning of a concept of what you created to address those various questions of why people just couldn't dive into playing music and the frustration of learning it? 

it, I guess for me when I saw the instrument, so many questions went through my head. Know, where did you, well, let's just cut to the chase. How did you begin doing this?

Andy Unruh (04:41)

Well, you know, it was an interesting and somewhat organic process. You know, like a lot of people, like a lot of engineers, I immediately started jumping to solutions. But as I started turning the solutions around in my mind, I realized that what I really should be doing is coming up with a set of requirements. 

And so I started to think about the requirements. What are the barriers to entry to music? Well, there's the problem of manual dexterity playing guitar or piano requires quite a bit of manual dexterity and guitar actually requires a fair amount of hand strength. There is enormous amounts of memorization in all the scale shapes and the chord shapes and all of this. There's the affordability aspect and the portability aspect to musical instruments. So, I started coming up, I wanna do something that's portable, I want it to be inexpensive, I want it to be easy to play.

And then I started to think, how can I make something easy to play? And my mind kind of went to the harmonica. Harmonicas are a moderately easy instrument to play, and they're easy to play because they're specific to a key and a scale. So, you might buy a G major harmonica where the only notes on the harmonica are G major. 

But if you want to play, even in the Western modes, they're Western. In music theory, there are seven modes and 12 keys. So, if you want to buy a harmonica for each of those, you're going to spend an enormous amount of money on those. And that doesn't even cover all the lesser-known modes like the gypsy scale or the double harmonic minor scale or any of these other exotic scales, right? So, I said, what if I made an instrument where you could essentially configure it to play any key and any scale type.  And from that, kind of the, and then I want it to be small. And from that, those requirements, the Amazonica just kind of popped out.

Rick Barron (06:51)

Wow. I want to go back to something you said, because I never really thought about this, that when playing music on the guitar, it requires a lot of hand strength. So that said, when you see some of these musicians on stage, like a Led Zeppelin, the way they play the guitar, that type of skill set just doesn't happen. That must take just months and months not if not years to just master that type of a skill to where this looks so easy

Andy Unruh (07:24)

Yeah, it does require an enormous amount of skill. And frankly, I'm not sure that everybody can develop it. And playing the acoustic guitar, which most people are really into rather than the electric guitar, is harder than the electric guitar. Electric guitars really don't require a lot of hand strength. They do require a lot of dexterity. But acoustic guitars require a fair amount of hand strength, especially for something called a bar chord.

Where you're holding down with one finger all six strings simultaneously and you want to get all those strings to ring out nicely, you've really got to crush those strings down hard.

Rick Barron (07:57)

Wow. So, when you see some of these bands on stage and where I said, it looks so easy, that's taken time and, you have to appreciate what these artists are doing on stage, keeping a beat, singing a song and just flowing right through that. So yeah, I can see where that takes a lot of dexterity in practice.

Andy Unruh (08:21)

For sure. When I talk to my friends who have actually made it as professional musicians, and I talk about their childhood, these weren't guys that went to parties in high school, or dated or anything else. They were home practicing. You know, I'm hearing typically between six and 12 hours a day, all the way through high school. And into college. I mean, it is a neat. They make it look easy. But it's an enormous commitment to achieve their level of virtuosity.

Rick Barron (09:00)

Absolutely, and I would think too it's something that they would love because to play that long. 

Wow.  So, getting back to the Amazonica, you talked about the requirements. I guess the one that really intrigues me is the design concept. Did you go through various designs to figure out, like? Okay, this is it now I have what I need to kind of put in the guts of the component so to speak

Andy Unruh (09:29)

Yeah, I mean, I've gone through literally hundreds of prototypes. And in fact, what I did at first when I started building these, because a lot of the instrument is made from plastic, I learned to do 3D CAD. It's not that difficult. And I would send out my designs to be manufactured and then mailed back to me. 

But after a short period of time, it became apparent that that was slowing me down, and it was gonna cost me a lot of money. So, I went and invested in a high-quality 3D printer and purchased it. But yeah, I've gone through on the, you know, the part, the valve part and the part that makes sound probably a couple hundred prototypes.

Rick Barron (10:19)

Wow. So, when did it hit you that, okay, this is it, I'm looking at the final concept? 

Andy Unruh (10:20)

An engineer never has a final concept. It will evolve until the day I die. But, but I would say when it started to sound really good and when the valves were operating in an intuitive way, when it was easy to play, when I got the size down to where children could play it, when I got the ease at which buttons could be depressed so that even elderly people with very weak hands had no trouble actuating the valves. When people were picking it up and just playing music within minutes, I knew I was on to something.

Rick Barron (11:15)

Well, that's interesting. You just said something that caught my eye or my ear here, so to speak, that you thought about a child to play this or an elderly person could play this. So, when you were designing this product, were those some of the attributes or the requirements you had in mind that when someone took this out of the box, anyone could play this instrument?

Andy Unruh (11:38)

Yeah, as much as I could. You know, I'm really not in this for the money at all. It's kind of a hobby. It's kind of a fun thing to do. And, you know, working in the professional world, there was always the bottom line to things. 

You know, even when I worked for Google X, which is very pie in the sky, and you get to do anything, at the end of the day, you had to prove that the thing you were doing could make billions of dollars because let's face it, it's a silicon.

My main goal here is just to spread joy, and you know, I can't make everybody happy. I don't have that capacity, but I know that playing music is something that gives people joy, and so the easier I could make this instrument to play and the more people who can play it, the more joy I have the potential to spread.

Rick Barron (12:29)

That's great. I know when we spoke earlier on, you talked about this philosophy of failing fast and then the dangers of self-imposed limitations. How did those two concepts come into what you were creating?

Andy Unruh (12:45)

Yeah, so failing fast is a philosophy. I did not invent the philosophy, but I've realized when I had heard about it that I've always used it. And it's part of the agile design process, which was pioneered for software development, but it has since spread to all kinds of fields. And the idea basically is what I've seen is there are two ways to develop a

One is to be very, very careful to plan everything. You plan your schedule to the day, and you go through these very intricate requirements, and you price everything out, and you design everything. And inevitably, if what you're trying to do is complicated at all, it all collapses because there are the unknown unknowns. You don't know what you don't know often.

The other way to do things is you look at the design, go, well, what's some, what's going to be the hardest part of this? Let me build that. Let me see if I can do a quick prototype that will tell me whether I'm on the right track or maybe I've missed something that's going to be very, very important. And so, I immediately gravitate towards that sort of design philosophy. 

So, I immediately looked at two aspects of the design in particular, whether I could make a valve that could be, that would work well and be very, very cheap. Trumpets, of course, have three valves on them, three keys, right? And I priced those out and I realized they're $100 retail to buy three valves. My instrument uses 12 valves, so clearly, I can't have each valve costing $33.

It puts the instrument out of reach and puts it more in the category of an expensive guitar. And I don't want to sell a product that's as expensive as an expensive guitar. So, I started playing with various valve designs. And after a few dozen trials, I came up with an idea that was really simple and worked well.

Rick Barron (14:57)

Okay, so as you're creating this design for the Amazonica, the materials, I mean, was it a combination of like, okay, I'm gonna make this all with plastic, I'm gonna make this with plastic and some metal. How did you arrive at determining what was gonna work best to create this?

Andy Unruh (15:15)

Some of that was a no brainer. ⁓ Plastic, of course, is a very versatile material. There many ways to form it. You can do it as a 3D print, but if you go into high production volumes, you can change that over to injection molding easily. So, for the body and valve bodies and such, plastic was just a no brainer. 

For the actual part of the instrument that vibrates, the reed, plastic was...it was equally kind of a no brainer. Plastic simply loses too much energy when it flexes. It becomes hot and that's energy lost. And you really need on a musical instrument like this, things to have what we call a low Q resonance. In other words, they resonate very freely with very little friction. And that meant metal. Now the question was what kind of metal was I going to use? Stainless steel? Was I going to use brass? Was I going to use bronze, various metals I could try and you know again I just prototyped them all and I found that brass just simply sounded the best.

Rick Barron (16:24)

So, I can't imagine the number of hours and days you spent on this trying to figure out the right combination of, you know, like the plastic, the metals, if you will. Mean, gosh, how did you even get to the point where you thought, okay, I'm getting close? I need to tweak this and tweak that. mean, that would drive me nuts.

Andy Unruh (16:47)

Yeah, I bought 20 different springs for the thing and there's a metal part that goes through a plastic sleeve and it's got to go through and be very smooth. And so I looked at four different diameters, six different links for that part and four different materials. 

And I tried, I just systematically tried every spring with, you know, every combination of everything. And I just spent about one month just going through and playing the instruments and seeing what felt smooth, what didn't stick, what worked, what didn't work. And, you know, I took very detailed notes and, you know, narrowed it down to about five combinations that seemed to work well. And then I built five Amazonicas, one with each of the five different combinations. And I played those, and I chose the best one.

Rick Barron (17:44)

Wow.

Andy Unruh (17:44)

Just completely by subjective feel because, you know, it's nice to quantify things, but when it comes down to it, it's the feel of the instrument that counts, not the numbers behind it.

Rick Barron (17:48)

That's interesting. So, what were some of the challenges you came across? Mean, I think you've kind of described some of them, but what hit you during this entire process to go from the beginning to the end, that, wow, I didn't see that coming. So how do I get over that hurdle?

Andy Unruh (18:17)

Yeah, so the instrument is what's called a free reed instrument. it makes sound the same way a harmonica or an accordion makes sound. So, there's a reed that vibrates within a metal plate, and it modulates air passing through it as the reed moves back and forth in vibration.

And initially, I started off using harmonica reed plates, which have, when you buy a set of harmonica reed plates, you get two plates. Each one has 10 reeds in it. And to make an Amazonica, I have to buy four sets of those. And it was, how do I, I need these reeds to be in singles, not in sets of 10. So, I had to cut them. So, you'd think cutting it, that shouldn't be a problem, but I have to cut it very precisely.

And I didn't want to leave jagged edges because those would have to be hand. You know, I'd have to take the, you know, the jagged parts off by hand. So, I tried a jeweler's saw, I tried a miniature band saw, I tried a scroll saw, I tried thing after thing after thing after thing, and nothing was really reliable or doing the trick. The jeweler's saw was okay, but I'd have to replace the blade every five reeds and the blades are $20 each so, that wasn't going to work. Eventually, I ended up buying a metalworking tool called a shear, and then I had to take the shear apart and manufacture new parts and modify it before I finally got something that would cut and leave a nice smooth cut and could ⁓ could cut it with the accuracy I required, which was plus or minus 0.1 millimeters in width every time.

Rick Barron (20:10)

Okay, how did you keep your sanity? Mean, everything you're telling me right now, I just cannot believe. Well, I mean, you strike me as someone who is very focused, has patience, and knows that there are going to be hurdles, but you can't let those hurdles get you frustrated. And sometimes it's a good thing that a hurdle may help you realize, oh, I didn't see that. That's a better idea. How did you maintain it?

Andy Unruh (20:40)

Well, I coined a term a long time ago called strategic myopia. And the idea here is when you're developing something new, because I've been in the R &D field almost my entire career doing new things, and they are always way harder than you think they're going to be always. 

And oftentimes, what I found is you will develop something but if you knew at the outset how hard it was going to be to develop this product, you never would have tried it. So, to some extent, it's actually an advantage to kind of underestimate the difficulties you're going to have. 

Because you get to this point where, well, it kind of works. I know I can make this work. It's probably just a couple more days of work to get it to really work well. And then the couple days turns into a month. But you always think you're just one day away from.

Rick Barron (21:37)

Yeah, I guess.

Andy Unruh (21:38)

It's kind of like when you debug software, right? You're always one bug away from the software being perfect. You say that even after you've uncovered 50 bugs.

Rick Barron (21:48)

Absolutely. So, when you arrive at that point where you feel, when you felt like, I've got the concept, I think it's done and you played it, what went through your mind when you realized I have it, this is it.

Andy Unruh (22:04)

Interestingly, that's really not the time when I felt like I had it. The time when I felt I had it is we had an elderly, well, not that elderly. I'm 63, so I want to be careful. But she was about a decade older than me. 

And she loved, like me, she loves music, she feels music, but she's, you know, she had tried to play a couple instruments and it abandoned the cause and really had no music lessons, didn't know music theory or anything. And I said, well, do you want to try this? And she picked this up. And she was playing Ode to Joy, you know, not perfectly, not fluently, but was playing Ode to Joy within three minutes after picking up the instrument. And, you know, within about 20 minutes of practice, she was playing it, you know, really well. 

And then I said, you know, would you mind I will show you how to play it on guitar. Would you mind trying it on guitar? And you know, about an hour and a half later, she was done with the goddamn guitar. It was like, you know, she's just, I can't do it. And that's when I realized I'd really hit what I was, I really had hit what I was after. I created an instrument that was really easy to play.

Rick Barron (23:21)

So, were you, I don't know, surprised, stunned that a person that age just picked it up immediately? And I'm sure that was probably one of your primary goals that it had to be that simple that someone of that age could just look at this instrument and just dive into playing a song.

Andy Unruh (23:48)

Yeah, well, of course that was my worry. The whole time I was worried if I was fooling myself, that I was just thinking that I was creating an instrument that would be really easy to play, but in reality I was just creating another instrument. 

And now I've had seven or eight people who have never played instruments and they all take to the instrument the same way. And people who have played instruments before will often just pick it up, I show them how it works, and they just start playing music without looking at any sheet music at all. They just immediately know how to play it. It is extremely intuitive. Unlike guitar, the notes just tend to be exactly where you would think they would be.

Rick Barron (24:26)

So, everyone that has played it thus far, and particularly that first lady that you went to play it, I mean, I find that overwhelming that she just picked up that instrument and she just intuitively knew what to do. I mean, was that what you saw or?

Andy Unruh (24:50)

Yeah, it wasn't.

Well, I did, you know, to be honest, I did have the music written out. So, there's a tablature system, you know, don't need to be able to read music. But the way I have it, there are two rows of keys. So, I'll have like four R, which means press the fourth key on the right side three L press the third key on the left. So, she did have that, you know, to go off of. 

But, yeah, it worked out quite nicely. ⁓ And I think the other thing that really surprised me more than that was when I've gotten this instrument in the hands of professional musicians, because I didn't design this instrument for professional musicians at all, or even serious musicians, right? I kind of figure I don't play it very much. I love the guitar. 

The guitar is very challenging. I've been at it for 20 years, you know, and so that's my instrument but I've given it to now several professional musicians and I'm amazed at how much they love it. You know, one guy just sat there and he started playing Bach fugues with it immediately. And it was beautiful and it sounded like a pipe organ. And another professional musician who I've given it to, it's become his favorite instrument. He plays it for hours every day. He just loves it, you know.

Rick Barron (26:14)

So, the feedback, I'm curious, you have the absolute amateur and if you just share with us that you have those who are just, they're kind of the pros if you will. What, let's start with the amateurs, the feedback that you got. What were they saying? Was there ⁓ a consistent theme to, like this instrument because of the following.

Andy Unruh (26:25)

Yeah, that it's easy to play. It's not intimidating. There's not a big learning curve to it.  I dropped one off at a local music shop. And when I went into that music shop a couple weeks later, this young woman who I'd never talked to, and she's not a musician, although she works in the shop, and she said, are you the guy who invented the Amazonica? And I said, yes. She goes, everybody here loves it because you don't have to know anything about music to play it.

Rick Barron (27:08)

That is amazing. And then what about those who are in the pro ranks? What was their feedback? Did they give you any suggestions, or, I mean, how did they react to it?

Andy Unruh (27:18)

First of all, what I was really surprised at is how much they liked the timbre of the instrument. They really thought I nailed the sound. And that really wasn't my primary thing, making it a great-sounding instrument. There are plenty of instruments that I don't think are particularly wonderful-sounding, but people play them anyway for various reasons, like the ukulele.

 You know, it's kind of a plunky toy-like sound, but it has millions and millions of players worldwide partially because it's much, much easier to play than guitar. And also it's a fairly affordable instrument. ⁓ So, I haven't elevated the timbre or the quality of sound as my number one thing, but a lot of people really like that sound. And I think that's what the professionals like, is it sounds less toy-like than, for example, harmonica. 

It's a little richer in its tone than a harmonica. And harmonicas are a reasonably serious instrument, you know. You hear them on albums all the time.

Rick Barron (28:22)

So, for those of us who are not musically ⁓ astute, what is that word? I think you said timbre. What does that mean?

Andy Unruh (28:28)

Oh, timbre. Well, when you see it written out, it's timber. But so you may have seen it. But basically, when you play a note, say a middle A, it's got a frequency associated with it. It happens to be for middle A. I think it's 440 hertz. 

But when you play an instrument, you don't just hear that single frequency, hear double that frequency, triple that frequency, four times, five times, six times, seven times. And it's the ratio of how loud those frequencies are to the fundamental frequency that determines the timbre. And it's why, like an oboe and a guitar playing exactly the same note sounded different.

Rick Barron (29:16)

I see. I'm a bit curious. You shared with us at the beginning of this conversation where you were down in the Amazon and you asked this question about how many people know how to play an instrument. Have you shared the Amazonica with any of those individuals to say, hey, look, remember that question I asked you?

Andy Unruh (29:34)

No, I haven't because, you know, don't, none of them live close to me at all. Mostly, they live either in Latin America or they live on the East Coast of the United States.

Rick Barron (29:46)

You know, just a suggestion. Maybe you might want to, if you can contact one of them and say, Hey, I've got something to show you and then get their reaction, because I think that would be, I don't know. I think it'd be very interesting for them that, you know, you took this concept, this idea, and you've turned it into something. I think they would get a big bang out of it.

Andy Unruh (30:09)

Yeah, that might be fun. That might be fun. I think I'll take you up on that suggestion.

Rick Barron (30:12)

Yeah, I would if you could. So, for someone, I mean, you've talked a lot about going through this creation of something that's really, you know, from what I have heard, you know, it's complicated. It requires a lot of time and effort. What would you offer to someone in terms of wanting to create something like what you did to understand if you want to do this, even if you're an engineer?

Take this into consideration as you are creating it. These are the ups and downs that you may face. What piece of advice would you want to throw their way?

Andy Unruh (30:51)

You know, it partly depends on what they're trying to do, but I think in general, if you're trying to do something new, it requires kind of balancing two different things. One is a sense of audacity. You have to be kind of audacious to say, I'm going to do something that nobody else has ever done before. You know, and at the same time, you have to balance that with some humility. So, you can't just go off and say, I'm not, you know, I've got my vision and I'm not going to listen to anybody because

While sometimes that works, there are the Steve Jobs of the world who can do that, and they don't have to listen to anybody because they are right. Most of us are not that person. And you have to listen to what other people are telling you and learn to take their suggestions because there are a lot of people who are willing to help you along the road and you have to be able to listen to them. 

There's that and just going into it, I think, with an appreciation for the process of what you're doing rather than the end result because the reality of the situation is most of the time when you're trying to do something new It's not a hundred percent success. 

Oftentimes, things are not commercial successes or you know you get down the path and you find out it's just not viable this can happen and having been a founder of a couple companies and gotten overly my ego overly wrapped up in the end result, it's not healthy. So, you know, kind of learn to enjoy the ride. Realize it might be a bumpy ride, but just enjoy it. And, you know, don't doubt yourself just because nobody else has done it. And you know, there are people who will tell you, that's impossible, because we tried it, we didn't do it. 

You need to ignore such people because just because they couldn't do it doesn't mean you can't do it. But at the same time, you have to know your own abilities, your limitations, and when you need to collaborate with other people. 

I talked with a woman recently who has no engineering background, no technical background, but she had a great idea. We just found the right people to collaborate with for her product. And it didn't stop her. 

She's moving right along on it in a great way technical background, but she had a great idea. We just found the right people to collaborate with for her product. And you know, didn't stop her.

Rick Barron (33:15)

Well, good for her. So where do you think you're going to go with this? Now you've got your concept out. You've shared it with people. You've gotten feedback. And from what I can hear, it's doing great feedback. So, what are the next steps in line here?

Andy Unruh (33:29)

Yeah, there's a couple more manufacturing details I have to iron out. And then I'm going to test, try a very small production run of about 100 units and see how well they move and what the feedback is on them. 

And if the feedback's good, I'm going to go into production. they don't, know, if I'm three months later, I haven't sold 100 of them, then I just don't think it's a viable business. And what I'll do is I'll go ahead and put the STL files, the 3d CAD files out, do a YouTube video on how to build your own. And I'll just put it out there for people to build for themselves. I'll probably you know, I will have patent production. So, I'm not going to allow some other person just to start manufacturing them without a licensing agreement. 

But you know, if this doesn't, if this isn't a huge win, then yeah, think I'll just put it out there in the universe and let people build them themselves.

Rick Barron (34:35)

Great. I love the name Amazonica. When you were down there in the Amazon, was this a question that you asked the group about wanting to play an instrument? Did it just pop into your head or was this, how did that come into the conversation?

Andy Unruh (34:53)

I think it just popped into my head, you know, because everybody was clearly enjoying all the music that was being played. And, also, I guess, you know, I had, I took up music playing music fairly late in life, I didn't play anything as a child. But, you know, I've always felt the music inside of me. And it's really easy to think that because you feel it, and it moves you so deeply, and you move to it when you hear it and all this that you're just going to be a natural musician. But as so many of us have found out, that's not necessarily the case, unfortunately.

Rick Barron (35:32)

So, you've come up with an idea here for learning how to play an instrument and just taking your product and like, you can do this and you don't have to learn all of the various chords and notes, if you will. 

I guess for me, I like to see someone come up with an idea for how when you look at a sheet of music and you see the various, I don't know what you would call it, the the tones or the notes, if you will, how one reads that and understands, that's a G flat or whatever. Is that something that, that what you see on the paper, that's the only way you can understand the various chords of music.

Andy Unruh (36:02)

No, for guitar and at least for guitar and ukulele, there's something called tab, short for tablature. And it's an alternate form of writing musical notation. It's not quite as complete as the standard, you know, classical music notation, but it's much easier to understand. most guitar players that I know can't really read, can't sight read music.

I can look at a sheet of music and I can decipher it. That's pretty easy to learn. But to go the next step and just be able to play it as you're reading it, then you're not, you have to get past that point of thinking, know, there's an eighth note there and it's in that position and that is an E flat and the E flat on my guitar is here. You know, it. You need to do it so often that it becomes automatic and not many guitar players get to.

Rick Barron (37:17)

Yeah, I think what you said, and I think that comes with the many hours of practice that you look at a sheet of music and you automatically know, I know what that is. It just kind of flows with you. So I think the instrument that you have now provided ⁓ to the various novices, even the pros, now see something that is ⁓ quite inventive. They probably never thought that something like that could be, as you say, invented. 

No one just follow through with the concept. I'm sure people have, but you brought it to life. So I think, you know, what you've done there, I mean, you have to, I mean, I'm saying this to you and you've got to be very proud of what you've done here.

Andy Unruh (38:02)

You know, I'm happy that it worked. It's not the biggest thing I've ever done in my life. But what I like is that I've been able to do this by myself. you know, I was involved in something very similar where I came up with an invention. This was many years ago for a new type of acoustic transducer. Basically it was a woofer that operated completely differently than the woofers you think of it. It looked different. 

It didn't vibrate. I mean, there were vibrating parts, but if you put it in like a car, it wouldn't vibrate the door of the car at all. ⁓ And we got many millions of dollars to develop this. In fact, I think we got $41 million of venture capital, and this was like 25 years ago. So a substantial amount of VC. 

And we took about two years to develop it and a team, I think we had at maximum a team of 137 people and this device, the Amazonica, is not substantially less complicated than that device. And I've done it by myself in about a year for $5,000.

Rick Barron (39:13)                 

Well, that says a lot. mean, again, when you were taking us through the process of how you came up with the idea of the end result, the materials, I mean, I would think, at least from what you described to me, it's getting the right combination of the various materials to go into this product because the thinking process that you had to go through to make it sound or to make it understandable to you, like, this will work but there's no way this is gonna work. So I can only imagine the many hours that you were at the whiteboard so to speak, it just outlining, you know.

Andy Unruh (39:54)

Yeah, well, I do a lot of bike riding, I do a lot of mountain biking, I run, I do a lot of gardening, and none of those require very much brainpower. So, you know, when you're a single employee, your meetings are really very easy. And so, I would just let thoughts kind of jumble around in my head while I did other things. And oftentimes, I find you've probably had this experience.

Your best ideas sometimes come to you when you're taking a shower, you know? And it's kind of like that. I have learned you can't force creativity, you can't force good ideas. Just sometimes, I think our subconscious brains just have to work on something. And when they come up with a solution that they think maybe is worth it, they push it into your conscious brain and your conscious brain evaluates it and sometimes sends it back and says, that's a stupid idea.

Rick Barron (40:53)

Sometimes.

Andy Unruh (40:53)

But sometimes it's like, yeah, okay, hey, that's a great idea. It's that inspiration, right? When you have inspiration, you never know where the idea comes from. It almost feels like a gift, right? The idea just is there. You don't know where it comes from, oftentimes. It's not that you were consciously thinking about it, but my theory is that your subconscious is thinking about it.

Rick Barron (41:06)

Yeah. Oh, it is. Mean, to share with you, sometimes I have had ideas that they'll come to me in the middle of the night while I'm asleep and I'll wake up and I thought, oh, there's an idea. And I literally get out of bed, come to my office and scribble it down on paper so I don't lose it. But yeah, it'll happen at the moment where you never thought it would. And then I think that's what makes those ideas so inventive to follow through with but no I totally hear what you're so you're gonna go ahead and launch this see where it goes where would you like it to go I mean you say well if it does it doesn't but in your heart of hearts what would you like to see happen

Andy Unruh (41:48)

I would love to see people for lots of people to take it up and just people to play together, not just not just by themselves in their houses, but to play either in unison or for one person to play one part, but really just to have fun with it. You know, the way I went to an AI site recently and I asked it to compose a protest song for me and I gave it the parameters of song. And by God, it did a pretty darn good job.

And you know, so much of music is going to be like this. It's going to be AI generated and it's going to keep perfect time and it's going to be perfectly in pitch and everything's just going to be perfect. And I don't want that to get in the way of people playing music because you, your soul does not benefit by composing music using AI. Your soul benefits by playing music by doing it yourself and by composing things yourself.

Rick Barron (43:05)

Yeah, I like that concept. It's very good. think sometimes we get so caught up with technology being very helpful, but we don't want it to literally hold our hand, you know. 

Andy Unruh (43:16)

Yeah, if you go back 100 years, most families had at least one person who could play a musical instrument, right? And it didn't matter if they were really good or really bad because recorded music was not ubiquitous. And now when you listen even to manmade recorded music, if there's one note that is slightly off, they will go and they'll re-record that. Everything's done to a click track and...

It can sound really robotic. And it also is intimidating to the listener because what they hear is perfect music. And then they try to create music and it's not perfect. And they think, I'll never be good. But the reality is nobody is as good as what you hear on the radio. Nobody. That's all been multi-tracked and repaired. 

And they'll go into their digital audio workstations and they move something three milliseconds one way or three milliseconds the other way. But if you go and you listen to like, you know, the way Jimi Hendrix played, he didn't play to a click track, his beat isn't perfect. It varies. And actually, when you do things like that, it can often sound better. You lead the beat or lag the beat in order to get an effect.

You know, Robert Johnson was another guy who did this or Frank Sinatra was a master at playing with time. And there are still things I think that humans can do better than the computers. And certainly the computers don't get any benefit from composing music, but music, but we do.

Rick Barron (44:45)

And certainly the computers don't get any benefit from the closing music. Wow. No, but I can tell by your expressions, you're really into not hearing the music, but how the singer just inflicts, you know, the various tones, the attributes of what a sound should be in that particular segment of the song itself. Because a lot of these artists just

They don't get out there to sing a song. They put their soul into it, which is not too many artists can do that. So when you find someone who can do that, then you realize there was a master up there on that stage. So I get that. So I typically like to end the conversation with a few speed round questions with my audience. 

And as I shared with you, I've done this with a few other people. And at first, when I started asking these questions, some of the answers were quite simple. But then some of the answers I thought, wow, that really caught me off guard. Never would have thought that would be what they would tell me. So, these are five questions. And I think the first one kind of feeds into this conversation. 

What was your best live concert you ever attended and why?

Andy Unruh (46:09)

Let me think. I think that would be Los Lobos right after they won their Grammy for best Americana album. 

And, I always appreciated when old folks can do great things and they've been around forever. And God, these guys, they played in Santa Maria, really close to where I live, and they were so on fire. They were so tight and it was just the joy through the audience spread was just wonderful. It was the most amazing concert I'd ever gone to.

Rick Barron (46:41)

Wow. And how recent was that?

Andy Unruh (46:44)

Just a couple years ago. Yeah.

Rick Barron (46:45)

Okay. What do you wish you had more time to do?

Andy Unruh (46:51)

Everything!

Rick Barron (46:53)

Well, you say everything, but is there one particular thing you like to have more time to do?

Andy Unruh (46:57)

I would say oftentimes, I will sacrifice practice time on the guitar because I have other so-called more important things to do than work on a guitar, something I will never perform professionally on. But I really do enjoy my guitar time. So I wish I had more time to play. Probably as it is, I probably play on average between an hour and an hour and a half a day. But if I had my way, I would play four hours every day.

Rick Barron (47:24)

Maybe you ought to see if you can pick a day and just do it, you know? Maybe that's what it takes. 

What was your first paying job?

I think that would be cutting fire breaks on Cuesta Ridge in San Luis Obispo County for the Department of Forestry. That was hard work. That was hard work. Well, you may have heard of the California Conservation Corps, and this was not the California Conservation Corps. It was for low-income kids, but not kids at risk. And it was called the Youth Forestry Protection Program.

Rick Barron (47:42)

Whoa, how did you get into that?

Andy Unruh (48:04)

And so yeah, they gave us all hand tools and we were cutting these big fire breaks in 100 degree weather. And boy, we would uncover about a dozen rattlesnakes every day and they gave us the option of what to do with them. You could either kill them or you could get them out of the way. And I always felt bad about killing them. So, I would pin their heads and grab them and take the rattlesnake, swing it over my head and throw it away from the work crew.

And yeah, just continue to cut.

Rick Barron (48:35)

Yeah, that's kind of a dangerous, well, it is a dangerous profession, what, I mean, did you just have the audacity, hey, I'm gonna do this or?

Andy Unruh (48:45)

There weren't many options where I grew up. It was that, remember before that, I had a non-paying gig working on my dad's chicken farm. So, my dad was kind of,  you we did not have money. We were a government cheese kind of family. And you know, it felt like cutting fire breaks was a step up from shoveling chicken manure.

Rick Barron (48:47)

Okay. If your wife wrote a book about you, what would the title be?

Andy Unruh (49:14)

God. Probably something like curious and furious. Yeah.

Rick Barron (49:17)

Really? I like that. 

So final question. And this is where I've gotten a lot of interesting replies on this. What would you attempt to do if you knew you couldn't fail?

Andy Unruh (49:30)

Well, I can think of two answers. One is really kind of very personal, and the other is less so. On the really personal one, I would do the flow drop at Mammoth Bike Park. It's this enormous drop, which is basically a sheer cliff that you drop off of about, well.

At the point you take off, it's about six feet above the landing. By the time, because you're moving forward, by the time you actually hit the landing, it's probably a 15 or 20 foot drop before you hit. And I had broken my neck some years ago doing a drop. And so that flow drop always scared me. I never really had the guts to hit it. It was just so big. And I had watched people wipe out badly on it. And so, if I knew I couldn't fail, I would love to hit that drop.

Andy Unruh (50:26)

And then maybe a more serious answer would be if I could do anything and I knew I wouldn't fail, so I would devote my life to it. It would probably actually be unlocking the nature of consciousness. That is that and the resolving the fundamental incompatibility of general relativity and quantum field theory are the two big scientific questions of the era. And I find the question of consciousness, the more interesting of the two.

Rick Barron (51:07)

Well, again, there's an answer I was not expecting. That is interesting. What intrigues you about that?

Andy Unruh (51:16)

Well, a lot of people make the assumption that consciousness is what's called an emergent property. And an emergent property is like, well, the wetness of water, right? It is a property unto itself, but if you have a single molecule of water, it can't be wet. Wetness is a macroscopic property. 

But my problem with the answer that consciousness just springs up out of complexity out of this complex neural network that we have between our ears is that every other emergent property that I know of is predictable from its more primitive property. So if you really understand the way a water molecule is and you understand the physics, all the physics of water can be predicted from those more fundamental properties. 

But Consciousness isn't that way. mean, how many volts is the flavor of chocolate, right? Consciousness is a subjective phenomenon and there is no physics, not the strong nuclear force, not the weak nuclear force, not electromagnetism, not gravity. None of it predicts consciousness. And I think it's just an absolutely fascinating question. 

And my intuition, is it is more likely that matter, this is gonna sound weird, but I think it is more likely that matter is an emergence property of consciousness than consciousness being an emergent property of matter.

Rick Barron (52:57)

Well, there's a mouthful. No, that's again. That's probably one of the most interesting answers to that question that I have ever heard. Wow, so Andy Unruh, this has been a great conversation and I am really very happy for you with the feedback you're getting on your product and I wish you a lot of success and I hope it takes off for you. 

I mean, I know you're you said you're not doing it to make money, but I think you're more looking forward to just seeing the glee on people's faces that when they get this instrument like, wow, I wish I had this years ago. Now I can really dive into doing what I love to do. So, with that said, are there any final thoughts that you'd like to leave with the audience about what we've talked about?

Andy Unruh (53:44)

Just say, you know, if if you have in your head that you really want to do something, you have some idea, go for it. You don't have to take it to the end, but at least explore the idea, keep it active. Don't just let it die on the vine. So many people just let their ideas die on the vine. There are billions of brilliant ideas out there, and you don't have to be brilliant to have a good idea. Everybody has great ideas. You know.

You may not be able to do the whole thing on your own, but there's no shame in collaborating with other people. You do have to be practical. Don't put all your, don't mortgage your mother's home to pursue your idea. But yeah, look at it, try it, but be realistic.

No, it's gonna be hard you know. Everything is harder than you think it's gonna be, even when you take that notion into consideration. It's kind of a recursive truism. Everything's harder than you think it's gonna be, even taking into consideration that it's gonna be harder than you think it's gonna be.

Rick Barron (54:46)

No, I love that.

Well, that's true. That is so true. So, Andy Unruh, I want to thank you again for taking the time to speak with me. I know the audience is going to enjoy this episode about your concept and the concept of music and how it fits into everyone's world.

And I think your instrument is going to make it more accessible for them. 

So, I want to thank you again. And to the audience, I thank you for joining our show and we'll talk to you soon. Take care.

Andy Unruh (55:21)

Alright, thank you for having me.