Aaron Sprinkle produced MXPX's debut as a teenager, spent the mid-2000s making records that a Buzzfeed writer would later call the best emo albums of 2005, and has written 648 songs for the Soundstripe catalog under more than a dozen names. He has never taken a music lesson in his life.
In this episode of Soundstripe Sessions, Jeff Perkins talks to Aaron about the Walkman moment that started everything, the job he quit to take a job he'd been told he couldn't have, and why he thinks AI-generated music has a ceiling that most people are not talking about.
Music made by people, not prompts.
Hear the catalog Aaron writes for.
Key takeaways
- The thing that separates Aaron from other producers isn't skill, it's the means-and-end split. Guitar, engineering, mixing, producing: every one of them was a means to a finished song, never an end in itself. Plenty of people have the same job title and are doing something fundamentally different.
- He doesn't think of writing a song as making something. He thinks of it as unearthing something that already wanted to exist. (His words: David is already in the marble, he just has to chisel him out.)
- Decisiveness is the producer's real superpower. Most creative people are crippled by indecision, redo a good take forever, and never finish the song. Being able to say "we got it, let's move on" is the skill.
- The ceiling on AI-generated music is the active listener. Someone who says "Alexa, play cooking music" will never care who made it. Someone who seeks music out for an emotional response will. Aaron makes music for the second group, and thinks that's where AI has no place.
- Chasing what's popular is backwards, because what's popular now wasn't chasing what came before it. The thing worth chasing is whatever upsets the ecosystem.
Growing up on Vashon Island
Jeff: Let's go back. I want to hear the origin story. Can you tell me a little bit about where you grew up?
Aaron: I actually grew up where I am sitting right now, which is on a small island in the Puget Sound called Vashon Island. It's a ferry-only, 16-mile-long island, and the majority of my peers' parents were hippies. So it's a very creative-focused, art-centric community, where marching to the beat of your own drum was highly encouraged.
I discovered my desire to make music at a very young age. Third grade, I think, is when I started actually thinking about how music was recorded and produced. And I had kind of an aptitude for the technical side as well, so I was able to mad-scientist together some ways to record at home with the limited resources I had (finances, and just it being the 80s). The rest was kind of history. It's just one of those things where I was going to do it because I couldn't not do it. The why was because I couldn't not do it. And the how was just, we'll figure that out as we go.
Jeff: Were your parents musicians?
Aaron: Yeah, they're both musically inclined. My dad is a very talented guitar player, musician, singer. My mom plays and sings as well. It was just a very music-centric house growing up.
Jeff: So tell me about some of the early influences.
Aaron: Well, I had this sort of breakthrough moment in third grade. It's a story I've told a few times, but I'll tell you a quick version of it. I saw someone with a Walkman, and I'd never seen a Walkman before, and I was intrigued by it. When I finally got a chance, his grandmother let me listen to it. She sat me down at a table and brought it over, and she just grabbed a cassette and popped it in and hit play. And it was "Lovely Rita" off of Sgt. Pepper's, and it completely changed my entire life. Just those few seconds. I didn't even care about the Walkman anymore.
I had an epiphany. I'd never experienced music that made me feel that way before, and I'd never had so much mystery and intrigue behind it. And honestly, at the root of almost everything I do and have done since then, I've been chasing that feeling that I got from that moment.
Self-taught, and learning only by doing
Jeff: What instrument did you start with?
Aaron: Technically piano. We had a piano in one of the houses I lived in, and it was just figuring out songs by ear, probably like sixth grade. I had started kind of playing guitar before that, but my hands were just too small to really do much with my dad's Martin D-35. Then I switched over to guitar in seventh and eighth grade when I discovered The Cure and U2 and Echo and the Bunnymen and all the bands that formed those really formative records of the mid and late 80s. Guitar was king of all that stuff, so guitar became my main instrument.
But the interesting thing is, I was never a guitar player for the sake of being a guitar player. It was always for the sake of making a song. I would learn how to play guitar enough to be able to realize some idea I had. And that's how I became a recording engineer and a mixer and a producer. All the different things that I do are just so that I can have that finished product. That's the end, and the means are just whatever I have to do to get there.
Jeff: Did you take lessons, or are you completely self-taught?
Aaron: No lessons. I definitely went through periods where I felt insecure about that, and then I also went through periods where I felt like if I were to get lessons it could ruin me. Now I've just landed at, this is just my path. This is just how I got here.
There's only been a few times where it's hindered me, especially when I lived in Nashville and people start throwing Nashville numbers around and I'm like, I have to stop you, I just have no idea what you're saying. If you name a chord, I can play it, but I can't follow along with what you're doing here. But it's all discovery for me. I hear it first in my head, in my imagination, and then I figure out how to play it on the keyboard or the guitar.
Jeff: You're growing up, you're self-taught on all these instruments, you're teaching yourself how to produce music, and then you get into your teenage years and you start producing for bands, right?
Aaron: Basically. I went from having made this hilarious contraption where my uncle had given me an eighth-inch stereo reel-to-reel, and I had this cassette deck, a component-style one. I had cut these wires and taped them together so that I could play one of those things and mix in either a vocal or a guitar and bounce it to the next one at the same time. But no mixer. I just literally taped wires together, and I'd bounce back and forth. That was the extent of my multitracking capabilities.
Then I got access to a studio right out of high school, which is where I really cut my teeth as far as learning on real gear. I immediately started recording bands, friends from high school. I was in a band at the time called Poor Old Lu, and we were recording and playing shows. That's how I found MXPX. They happened to open a show for us, and I offered to record them for free if I could give the recording to my friend Brandon, who had just started this label called Tooth and Nail.
I basically realized that I preferred being in the studio to being on the road. And the only way I could make any money doing that is if I was producing other bands. Then I realized that I really loved that. It was really fun for me to help them realize their vision. As my friend Craig says, to be the rock star to the rock stars is really fun, and it's very rewarding for me. Also, I never made a dime playing shows. Being in a band cost money. Not that I was making very much money producing back at the start.
One thing led to another, and decades later I've produced hundreds of full-length albums and was apparently an integral part of the mid-2000s emo scene. And I was just making records. I was having fun with my friends. I didn't know. But like I said, I can't not do it. I have to do it. So I'm going to figure out a way for it to make sense to do it. That's the only way I can look at it.
Jeff: So you get hands-on with recording equipment and mixing in high school. Did someone teach you that, or is it still all just self-taught, tinkering?
Aaron: Pretty self-taught. Definitely osmosis, absorbing things. The first multitrack recording I did that wasn't on a four-track cassette, I rented a half-inch eight-track from a friend (he wasn't even a friend at the time, he became a mentor to me) and just set up in a room with my band and recorded it. I understood the concept of it, but I'd never practiced it. And it turned out pretty good. Then my band got signed to a label in California when I was 19.
Jeff: Which band was this?
Aaron: Poor Old Lu. So I got to start working with other producers and engineers, and it all happened really fast. It's actually wild to look back on that time of my life. These crazy things that in my memory I think were probably over the course of three years were like three months. Doing a record with someone else, learning from them enough to get in the studio and do this MXPX record, or this other band, or this other band, and started booking studios and doing full-length records.
But I'm definitely someone who can only learn by doing. If you sat and showed me everything, none of it would absorb into my head at all. I have to just do it and figure it out as I go. And I wouldn't say I'd lie to people, but when the labels would be like, "You know how to do this, right?" I'd just be like, "Yeah." Knowing that I would figure it out, but I didn't actually know how to do it. When there's a will, there's a way.
Jeff: That fake-it-till-you-make-it moment.
Aaron: 100%. I have a shirt that says that. It's like my favorite.
Quitting a job to take one he'd been told he couldn't have
Jeff: You're 19, you're part of a band that gets signed, you're doing music for other people. Was there ever a time where you were like, this isn't what I'm going to do, I've got to get a real job, I've got to go get my CPA? Was there ever that, or was it always all in?
Aaron: There were a couple moments where things were rough. I did end up doing some temping in the 90s, which was hilarious, and I'm so glad I did it. And then I got a job (this band I was producing, like three of them were graphic designers at this software publishing company called Sierra Online, that did Half-Life and all these awesome games in the 90s).
Jeff: I remember Sierra. That was a great little gaming company back in the day.
Aaron: Yeah. So I got a job there doing graphic design, packaging, pre-press. That's the only other thing I'd ever done for a living, is graphic design. I still do it now. That was a year of the first kind of real normal job I ever had. And it was still kind of creative, but it was really important, I think, for me. I learned some really great stuff from my manager just about time management and organization.
But from there I actually quit that job. I gave my notice to go run the studio that Tooth and Nail Records had built. And even though the owner, Brandon, who I've been friends with forever, told me no. When I asked him if I could do it, he said no. He said, "I want someone a little younger that doesn't have as many responsibilities." I had a kid at that point, and he didn't want someone that he felt like if he couldn't pay him, he would be ruining their life.
But I quit my job at Sierra anyway, and I just showed up and said, "I work here now." And he just was like, "Okay."
And then that was when things really went crazy. That's when I made all those records and did all that stuff that just kind of blew up. That was 2001. If I wouldn't have done that, I wouldn't be here right now. I know that for a fact. But it wasn't even like I thought it was some crazy thing. I was just like, oh, of course I'm doing this. It didn't feel that weird to me. Now when I tell people that, they're like, that is crazy that you did that. But I didn't even think of it that way at the time.
Jeff: Walk me through that time and talk a little bit about what led up to it. That was kind of the time you hit, right? You broke through. Because when I talk to musicians and artists, a lot of times you're just toiling for years. It's the old, it took 20 years to become an overnight success story. What led up to that, and can you pinpoint anything during that time where you're like, that's the reason it all hit?
Aaron: I had this job at Sierra Online that was really the first time I'd ever made any consistent money. It was not any kind of life-changing amount of money, but I liked the people I worked with. And I had actually resigned myself to the fact that I was not going to do music anymore, at least not anything other than a hobby.
This was way before I was even aware of any sort of mindfulness practice or anything like that, but I'd gotten to a point where I had accepted that, and I was actually at peace with it. I was okay. And within a month, I quit that job and was working at this studio.
It was like I needed to go through that to reorder the priorities. To understand that if I was striving too hard, or too needy, or my head was in the wrong place, it was going to fail. There was no way it was going to work. But if I kept that passion at the forefront, that thing where I can't not do it, if that was what was leading me, then that was the only way I could have anything that resembled success from doing this. This was not known to me at that level until later on, but I do believe that was sort of the mechanism that was happening at the time.
And the funniest part is, literally three weeks after I left, Universal bought Sierra Online and laid off every single person in the building that I was in.
Jeff: Isn't it amazing how that works out when you think about it?
Being "the emo producer" without knowing it
Jeff: Take me into some of those rooms you were in as you're working with these bands. What was the vibe like at the time? You really struck a very unique sound with what they call the emo sound at that time, and you seemed to be the guy that was the producer for the emo sound. What were those sessions like? Take us inside.
Aaron: It's interesting, I've thought about this more in the last few years than ever, because of this nostalgia boom that's happened from that era. A lot of that came from punk, and then pop punk, and then bringing that melancholy melody sort of thing into that world, marrying all those things together.
So I felt like, as a producer, I wasn't really aware of any scene. I wasn't thinking about that. I was thinking, okay, these guys have some really cool melodies and some huge guitars. And punk was a huge part of what I cut my teeth on, too. But I love a good hook. I love a good melody. So being able to bring those two things together.
To me at the time it felt like there were no guardrails, like we could do whatever. The only thing that was sort of guiding me is the bands would bring CDs in and be like, "Hey, we really like the drums on this, or the guitars on this," and I would be like, okay, I want to keep it in that general wheelhouse, because I want them to feel excited about it and feel like they're on the same sort of level as their idols, these people that have inspired them. But it felt very Wild West at the time. Like we could do anything.
It wasn't until, it was really funny, I was doing this record in like 2017 with one of those bands, way later on. And one of them came in and said, "Hey, this Buzzfeed article just came out." The name of the article was hilarious. It was something like, "The 11 Records That Prove 2005 Was the Best Year for Emo." And I had produced three of them. And I literally, out loud, unironically said, "I'm an emo producer." It had never hit me until then, because I wasn't thinking in that way. I was just trying to really do right by everything that was in front of me, and also kind of beat the last thing I did. That was sort of my mentality at the time.
Leaving egos at the door
Aaron: I really value everyone that I'm in the room with. I always think, no matter what your level of experience or the age gap, I can learn from you. And I'm always trying to learn. That's one of the most exciting things about collaboration to me, getting to soak up someone else's talents or views or workflow, or just that they're looking at the whole thing from a different angle.
When it starts out, we're similar in age. I might be a little older. But then as it goes, they all stay the same age. These new bands coming in are young, and I'm getting older. But I'm still learning just as much from them. When I first worked with Eisley, I think Stacy was like 13 or 14 years old. When I first did Anberlin, Nate the drummer was like 16 years old. This band Poema, Elle, who actually did some stuff for Soundstripe, I did her and her sister's band's first record. I think she was 16 when I did that as well, back in the day.
These kids, that youthful thing that they have, where they don't have that jaded lens that they're looking at the world through: we have so much to learn from that. Because the older we get, the more we kind of get stuck in our ways. And I never wanted to do that. I always would tell people, the second I'm a my-way-or-the-highway guy, I'm going to quit doing this, because I have lost. So I try to keep that feeling of learning.
Jeff: So you're taking a very collaborative approach with the artists. What I'm hearing from you, and probably what makes you successful and good at what you do, is that you're not coming in having a bias against the artists, even if they're young, right?
Aaron: No. And there's a thing that I realized too, that all the records that really hit, that ticked all the boxes, are the ones where I was basically in the band when we made the record. Where the egos were left at the door. Everyone was looking at the same horizon. We're all trying to do the same thing. So if I wrote a part on the guitar, for instance, I would just play it. And it wasn't me trying to get the spotlight. I didn't care what the credit was. It was just, why take the time for the guitar player to learn it? Let's keep the flow going. It's all about keeping that flow going. And when I feel that latitude, where no idea is stupid (or at least not so stupid that I can't say it, plenty of ideas are stupid), that's when we're really cooking with gas. When everybody's just in that collaboration mode.
Unfortunately, a lot of people in the music industry do that type of positioning so that they can be seen. "That thing right there, I did that. That's me. I thought of that. That tambourine on that chorus, I thought of that." And I really didn't have that. I never thought of it that way. And this is a little bit of my insecurities probably benefiting me, but I never really saw myself as superior to any of these people in any way. I always felt like I'm so lucky to be in this room with these guys doing this. Wow, this is awesome. Wouldn't it be cool if I could help them, or they could help me, or we could do this thing together? Where the sum is greater than the, I always get that thing mixed up, but you know what I'm talking about.
Jeff: Greater than the sum of the parts.
Aaron: That kind of thing. And it always works the best. As soon as I'm questioning myself, as soon as I'm second-guessing myself, thinking, "Oh, they might not like this, or they might think this is stupid," that's when things kind of go south. You've got to be able to have that unbridled creativity.
But at the same time, and this is something I'm learning as a maturish adult, one of my superpowers is I can also be very decisive. I can be like, "That's it. We got it. We're moving on." Because I think that a lot of creative people are crippled by indecisiveness. They cannot move past it. "That was a good take, but what if I did it again?" And then they do it again forever, and they never even finish the song, and it never gets released, and no one ever hears it.
So I think being able to be like, "Oh, we got it, let's move on," because again, I'm so focused on that end product. I can't wait for people to hear it. I want people to feel something when it's coming out of their speakers. I want that emotional reaction. That's the only reason I'm doing this, is that connection and that emotional reaction. Music is a drug. It's the most powerful drug in the world to me. It can instantaneously and repeatably make you feel something, and you can go back to it again and again and again.
Jeff: And no hangover. It's going back to your Walkman experience when you were young. You want to recreate that experience for everybody with the songs you're working on, right?
Aaron: Exactly. I do like to share beautiful things with people. It's something that's really important to me. And being part of that is the craziest, most incredible, wild thing. Even if I could do one moment of one song that made somebody feel something like that, that's what life is all about. But to get to do that, it's the same reason I love cooking. It's exactly the same reason that I love making food so much. It's that emotional response and that feeling and that community and that camaraderie all around it. It's beautiful. I love it.
Jeff: Does your style work for everybody that you collaborate with, or sometimes are you in the studio with someone and you're like, this just doesn't fit, my style doesn't mesh with their style?
Aaron: I risk coming off as a little bit, I don't know, elitist in saying this, but I don't mean it that way at all, because I'm not dogging any way that anybody else does things. But there are a lot of people who on the outside would look like they do the same thing I do, but when it comes down to it, fundamentally they do not do the same thing I do. They might be a multi-instrumentalist, producer, engineer, mixer, recording artist, performer. But they do not do the same thing that I do.
What that comes down to is the differentiation between the means and the end. That's all it really comes down to. What might be a means to me might be an end to them, or vice versa. Or we might have completely different ends.
So, for instance, if somebody's end is to make a hit song that goes viral. Not only do I think that that's the wrong way to make a hit song that goes viral, I don't care about that. I do care about it. If that happened, I would be super stoked. That would be amazing. I like success. I like money. I like all those things. I'm not an idiot. I'm not saying I'm some hippie person that doesn't care if it makes money. But I truly don't believe that that is even how you do that. I don't think that there's a formula, and I don't think chasing other stuff is the way.
Without name-dropping, somebody that I've worked with, who is one of the most successful people in this world of producers and songwriters, told me that very thing. That all of his biggest songs he just made because he loved them. That's it. Because he thought that they made you feel a certain way, and he wasn't chasing anything. And he said every time he chases a hit or a big thing, he's like, "You're never even going to hear that song, because it flopped."
And then some people are just too close to what they're doing to be able to relent any sort of control over to someone else. Even to the point of, if I suggested a melody, they'd be like, "Nope, I don't use melodies that anyone else suggests. I just do that myself." And every variation of that has happened, and it's fine. I've even made some really awesome records in those environments. I just have to adapt my style of how I'm working. It becomes more of a work in that sense than an artistic expression.
I think some people are afraid to use art even as an adjective for what it is we do, because there's this connotation that art isn't commercial enough. And I just totally disagree with that. I think all of my favorite artists, that are some of the most popular artists in the world, are the most artistic artists. And I think if your vision is clear, there doesn't need to be any distinction between something that's really easily exploited and something that is completely creative at the same time. I think those two things can totally live in the same space.
Jeff: What you're saying reminds me of an episode I listened to of the Broken Record podcast where Rick Rubin was talking about Tom Petty's Wildflowers album.
Aaron: One of the best ever.
Jeff: Tom Petty was coming off of Full Moon Fever. Mega hit, produced by Jeff Lynne. Jeff was a very precise producer. It was the way he wanted it. And it produced a great album, an epic album. And then it wasn't working for Tom. And then Tom went with Rick Rubin for Wildflowers. Totally different approach.
Aaron: Literally the antithesis approach.
Jeff: And produced an amazing album. So it's interesting when you talk about that, different producers for different projects for different artists. It probably all works in some ways. It probably comes down to the collaboration. Do you have that collaboration you need at the time to get the output that you're looking for?
Aaron: Yes. The variables are infinite, of how granular you're going to get in one area and how hands-off you're going to be in another. But that's also part of the appeal to me. Every single record I've ever done was a different experience and looked different. Even if I did two records in a row of the same artist, they're different.
I don't like doing things one way and repeating them. I go out of my way to make sure I don't do something the same way twice. Because texture is so important to our experience as humans, I believe. That's why things that are overly perfect get really boring quickly to us. Because there's no texture. It applies all across the board to film, art, music, everything.
That texture and that human aspect of music is absolutely important, and it scales to any genre, even electronic. I always say this to people: can you picture a human playing that part, or making that part, when you're listening to it? Do you picture a human being doing that? Because if you don't, you are not going to care about that. You will not care about it. And that's not a choice. That's just who we are. A human could have made it, but if it doesn't feel like a human made it, it's probably not going to have a lot of legs.
Jeff: Of everything you've worked on, what's the one thing you point to and you're like, that's the one I'm most proud of?
Aaron: That changes a bit based on where I'm at. And sometimes someone will be like, "I love this record you did," and I'll be like, "Oh, I forgot about that." Literally. I don't have any memory.
But there's a record I did for this band called Jonezetta called Cruel to Be Young. It was actually a flop, technically, which I believe is because it's so different than their first record that they probably should have changed their name. But it is definitely in my top 10 favorite things that I've got to work on. And the way that I judge that is if I can, A, listen to it recreationally and just enjoy it, and B, almost feel like, I can't believe I got to work on that. That's crazy.
Pedro the Lion's Control definitely is in that world. I really like the OneRepublic song I produced called "Life in Color." I think that is a really good song and I am really proud of it. I mixed it and everything, made the whole track, and it was a really awesome opportunity to get to work with them.
And definitely Acceptance's Phantoms from 2005 is a big one for me. That's the one where we just did a 20th anniversary re-record of it, where we got a bunch of cool features on it, including Teddy Swims and some other cool people. That was a really fun record to remake. It was actually more work, I feel like, to remake it than it was to make it in the first place. But that's probably just because I'm old now.
One more that I do need to mention that I really love: I did this record with this guy named Corey Crowder called Gold in the Sand. It's kind of a country Americana thing. He ended up years later becoming a massive country songwriter, tons of number ones. Sweetest guy in the world, lives in Nashville. But that record is special. And that's another one where it came out on Tooth and Nail, which was just the total wrong label for it. Did not do that well. But it's worth a listen. It's really cool. I got to work with some of the best musicians ever on that record too. But they're all kind of my babies in a way. I love them all for different reasons.
Three songs from the catalog
Jeff: Let's talk about songs you've done for the Soundstripe catalog. You've done about 650 songs. They've been downloaded a million times. I pulled a few here. The first one is a song called "Tore Up," and this is a proper Aaron Sprinkle song, so it's under your name. The way it works at Soundstripe is Aaron has different monikers. Sometimes it's Aaron Sprinkle, sometimes it's Neon Beach, sometimes it's Tiger Gang. There's probably 12 of them.
Aaron: It would have been a Tiger Gang song, but I hadn't even thought of that moniker yet. I think that's the only reason it's not a Tiger Gang song.
Jeff: "Tore Up" is your all-time most downloaded song. Let's take a quick listen.
[Track plays: "Tore Up" by Aaron Sprinkle]
Jeff: So do you remember making that song?
Aaron: Yeah, I do. I remember definitely trying to get that glam-rock stomp vibe a little bit, that triplet thing, which is fun. If my memory serves me, I felt like we could really use a song like this. And speaking of Jeff Lynne, there's definitely some Jeff Lynne influences in there as well, with some of those sounds and that kind of 70s fuzzy guitar. But then I wanted the chorus to just be massive.
One of the really fun things about doing these songs for Soundstripe is I kind of imagine this filmmaker person that is using this song. Every time I'm making a song, I imagine a use case for it. Just having it be big, but then hit even harder on the chorus and really open up. With the stomps and stuff.
And that style of song, there's a word that we use in the biz that is hilarious to me now because it's overused, but that swagger thing, it just never goes out of style. It will never stop being something that a good amount of people are looking for. So in some ways, it's perfect.
Jeff: It's perfect. Like Dodge Ram Chevy.
Aaron: Totally. Or your barbecue vlog, or whatever. It doesn't surprise me that it's my number one song. And I think it's a fun song. I think it turned out good, so I'm happy that people are using it and that people like it. Being useful is the best part of Soundstripe pretty much for me. Because I'm basically collaborating with people that I'll never meet. There's a sort of unlimited possibilities of collaboration out there, and just sort of being in the ether in that way is really fun.
Jeff: The next song is called "The Rain." Your moniker here is Midnight Daydream. What's the vibe you're going for with Midnight Daydream?
Aaron: The Midnight Daydream moniker was conceived to put my lo-fi hip hop and moody, hip-hop-based music under.
[Track plays: "The Rain" by Midnight Daydream]
Jeff: Talk a little bit about what you were trying to do with that song.
Aaron: I think the reason I love lo-fi, anything lo-fi in general: before lo-fi hip hop, before the term lo-fi became synonymous with lo-fi hip hop, there was a lesser-known genre of lo-fi indie music that was intentionally recorded "poorly." And it pulls at these emotions, this dusty feeling, this sort of attic-discovery sort of thing in the background. It's almost a sound design approach, even, to an extent. And it's really attractive to me.
I love beat-based music. I love sample-based music, going back to the 90s even, when people were just using an MPC and a bunch of records to make music. And then combining that with this dusty, scratchy vibe, it really is a recipe for massive emotional manipulation. And that's very attractive to me.
Honestly, this was one of the first lo-fi hip hop songs I'd ever made, probably maybe the second or third one. But it wasn't really out there for me to make it. I'd made plenty of hip hop songs and done plenty of lo-fi elements, so it was intuitive for me. And it's very satisfying music to make. I don't listen to dubstep, but I love making dubstep. I don't listen to drum and bass, but I love making drum and bass. There's certain things like that, and this is one of them. I don't really put it on in the background. I do understand why people do. But it's fun just to think about this being used in a video, or someone studying to it.
Jeff: It's always surprising to me that it usually pops as one of the top three genres people are searching for on the platform. My hypothesis around that is it's got kind of a gritty, authentic vibe to it. You kind of hear the record needle on the vinyl. I think people like it because it feels authentic. It doesn't feel overly produced, or like it's just all electronic. There was an artist who actually made this, and you can kind of feel that in the lo-fi songs.
Aaron: 100%. This is a good example of something that wasn't technically played by a human, at least at this point, but you feel the humanity in it. You really do. And I think you're totally right. I also think that it's a genre that doesn't get in the way of whatever picture you're putting it to, or even VO you're putting it to. But it also doesn't take itself too seriously. It's not overly dramatic. A string bed would be, or some piano thing would kind of make you sad or something. It doesn't make you sad. It kind of makes you feel like it might be raining outside, you might have a fire going in the fireplace. It does not surprise me that it's so used, because it's a powerful tool for filmmakers.
Jeff: The last one. This is actually a personal favorite of mine in the catalog. This is a song called "Breakthrough," where you collaborate with an artist named G Smith, who's a rapper, and this is under the Neon Beach moniker.
[Track plays: "Breakthrough" by Neon Beach feat. G Smith]
Jeff: Tell us a little bit about making that song.
Aaron: That song was really fun for me. It kind of goes back to what I was talking about earlier, that kind of crate-digger music production from the 80s and 90s. People like everything from Beastie Boys to Fatboy Slim, as far as taking records, sampling loops from records, and arranging them in a way that you're creating a whole new thing.
Now, because of the fact that I can't legally use records, this is where it gets really fun for me. I either have to find samples that kind of sound like a record, or that I can manipulate to sound like a record, or I play things that sound like a clip or a chunk of a record. And I go through this painstaking process of doing that. I even have plugins that emulate the sound of the samplers that they were using in this era, and that I run everything through. Because I really wanted to have that authentic feel to it. Because again, that music hit me so hard when it came out, and it made me feel a certain way. So I'm really chasing that feeling.
It's a really fun style of music to make. It's something that is used a lot still in the sync world, that kind of music. Even the stuff from back then. So it's fun for me to be able to add to that availability of tracks for people to use, and to add stuff to the Soundstripe catalog that can give people that same kind of feeling as those classic songs.
Jeff: One of our customers, a large technology company, liked the song so much they brought in G Smith, and they featured the song in a commercial and had him actually performing it, which is pretty cool.
Aaron: Oh, that is amazing. That's so cool. He was great to work with. He totally got the vibe I was going for and loved it. We didn't fight at all. And I don't mean argue, I mean there was no resistance from either of us. It was a flow.
How a song actually comes together
Jeff: Talk to me a little bit about the process. At what point, as you're writing, you're in the studio, you're laying down tracks, do you just know you have it? How do you see that as you're working through ideas?
Aaron: I'm going to sound like a broken record a little bit here, but it's 100% emotion-based. How is this making me feel, what I'm hearing out of the speakers? And if I can all of a sudden switch from the person making it to the person experiencing it, then I know I've got something right there. I call it fan mode or producer mode. When I switch over to fan mode, there's something there at least worth chasing.
And then resistance is a huge thing, too. I generally don't think, for my workflow, that fighting through things is very productive. Because I don't see this process as much of me making something as me unearthing something. I'm discovering something that wanted to exist already, and I'm just sort of, like David's in the marble, I just have to chisel him out. It really is how I feel about it. And as long as I can get out of the way of myself and get my brain out of the way, get that imaginary committee in my head to be ignored a little bit (not completely, but a little bit), then I know I'm on to something.
Working for Soundstripe for over eight years now, it has truly been one of the greatest things of my life to do this. Because I get to exercise my imagination in ways that I never got to in the studio with these bands. Like you said earlier, I've got over a dozen monikers across all these genres, and I would have never got to make this music before. There wouldn't have been a reason for me to do it. I could have, if I had unlimited time for fun, just sat down and made some of this music. But now that there's a purpose, and it can be useful to someone, and someone can go, "This is exactly what I was looking for, oh my goodness," that being a possibility to me is enough fire for me to be able to do this.
So getting to work with G, or getting to do Snowbones with Adrian, or getting to do all the Neon Beach stuff, all the Moses Kidd Americana thing that I'm doing now, all these opportunities to make this music that is coming from a really true place of creativity in me. Because I'm trying to pass that baton on. I'm hoping there's someone there to grab it that really gets it, and it can really enhance whatever project. Whether it's their podcast, or their video, or their wedding, or their graduation video. I don't care. It's all important to me. It's all just as important. Because it's that person that gets to experience that feeling where they made something and it's making them feel that way. To be able to be a part of that is a huge honor, honestly.
And I've learned so much about myself and about music. I get to find out about genres that I didn't even know about, because I'll get an assignment about some weird genre and I'll be like, okay, I guess I get to figure out how to make that. And it's awesome. It's just so cool.
Jeff: When you're creating the song, how long does it take? Is it just quick? Do you get in a studio and two hours later you have a song? Or are you coming up with concepts and then leaving them, letting them marinate and coming back to it?
Aaron: It's a little bit of both. The bones of the song come really fast, and then I will step away from it. Before "Tore Up," my biggest song was a song called "Escaping Light," and this was back when I mixed my own songs. It was mixed two hours after it didn't exist. It went from not existing to being mixed in two hours. And that can happen.
But lately, the way I've settled into this workflow is I could finish a song in four to six hours. I could finish it. But if I wait a day or two and come back, I'll do another 15%, guaranteed, that'll just take it up another notch. Because I'll forget about it. I won't even remember how it went until I listen to it again. And then I'll get a second layer of those blink instincts on it, which is very cool to be able to do.
And then some songs take way longer because I care about them, especially if there's topline involved. The Moses Kidd songs where I'm singing, or the Snowbones songs, they might take longer because I might spend three days on the lyrics. I don't have the ability to make a throwaway song. It just is not in my DNA. I can't do it. Some people could say, "Well, it's just for sync, it's just for micro licensing, just phone it in." I mean, cool, bro. I just can't do that. I don't know why. And I'm not saying that to brag. It's probably not the best thing for me that I can't do it.
And then, being sort of your typical neurodivergent ADD person, I've learned to not force things. I need to wait for the inspiration to hit. Otherwise I'm just going to spin my wheels. I cannot tell you how many songs have gotten to the point where you would probably scream if you saw. Every year I will put a folder of 30 or 40 songs in the trash and empty the trash on my computer. Because if they're not clicking, I just toss them. I might even have gotten 80% on these songs, but I'm like, nope, this is not good.
Jeff: It's just your gut telling you that this is just not there?
Aaron: It's the only thing I can go by. I think it's why I'm a record producer, is I can say, that's not done. That's not right. That's not good. We're not there yet. And sometimes it's so not there that it's better to just start over. Because you can always write another song. You can't be too precious about your songs. So it's that weird balance of, I'm not going to phone it in, but I'm not going to be precious about it either.
Where he stands on AI music
Jeff: You've lived through a lot of different iterations of the music business, from the 90s to today. Obviously everyone talks about AI music today. Have you played with it? Give me your sense of your feelings around that. I know there's tons of negative. Some producers like it because it gives them a head start, they use it as a creative thought partner. Where do you fall on AI?
Aaron: If you were to go to my Substack, in my bio it says I am an anti-AI creator. So that's going to inform a little bit about what I'm about to say. Now, that is a very broad-brush description.
I do believe, A, the term AI gets used too much. There's not a lot of distinction between machine learning and LLMs and AI. People used to call NPC behavior AI in video games. It's a little bit too big of a label.
I do not believe that inherently, if a tool makes you able to do something you couldn't do otherwise, or do something faster, that that qualifies it as inherently good. In fact, it could be a sign that it's bad.
I know that I'm going to be a minority here, but I want to disclaimer what I'm about to say. I believe my viewpoint on AI, even if it's not the majority viewpoint, let's say in the corporation of Soundstripe, is an asset. That someone like me is in Soundstripe, I do believe has a value and is important. I don't think you can have just everybody, because then you get an echo chamber. If you have no resistance to these types of things, you get an echo chamber.
But I think that thing where I said, can you picture a person making this? Can you picture a person playing this? It's so important. When the novelty of AI-generated music wears off, I think there will be a use for AI-generated music always. It's not going to go away. I do believe that, unless there's literally an apocalypse or something. But I don't believe it will, at least for a long time, have a place in recreational listening of music. The people that intentionally listen to music.
So this is a huge distinction for me. There are passive listeners of music and active listeners of music. People that seek out music to get that emotional response. And then there's people that say, "Alexa, play cooking music." Those people probably could care less who made their music. And I'm not trying to talk bad about anybody. I'm not judging that. But I don't make music for those people personally. I make music for people who are engaged in what it is they're listening to, who kind of take it seriously, who feel like that's my band or that's my song. That's what I want.
So AI has no place in that for me personally. I have not personally played around with it. But I'm not a Luddite. I'm not afraid of technology. I've always been pushing whatever I do to the brink of what I can do with technology. But when the tool is replacing the magic, I have no interest in it whatsoever. That defeats the whole purpose. I would rather just not do music.
And I'm taming it way down right now for this platform. But I'm not one of these people who's just inherently against something because it's not how we've done it in the past. "This is how we used to do it, so we can't do it any other way." I don't buy that for a second. Not at all.
But I will say the one thing I'm grateful for about this AI-generated music is it's making me re-examine what it is that makes music human, and get back to those things. Really, okay, what is it that really matters? And to focus on that. There's value in that, in this human-made music. And we know anecdotally we can see that professional creators that make movies or music or film, they don't want anything to do with that. They might use AI to do their captions or summarize their Zoom calls. That's fine. That's whatever.
But all the big film studios have a no-AI policy across the board, right? At least they do right now. That's probably not going to last forever, because of greed. And I believe greed is what's propelling the arms race right now, 100%. I think it's ridiculous. But I also believe that it will level out. I do believe that.
We've already been through this massive shift in the music industry. There was a few artists on major labels, and then independent artists, and people were selling CDs or tapes. Now we're in this thing where there's 8,000 subgenres of every genre, and you can find your tiny little subgroup and you can be successful in that little space. And this is just going to push us maybe farther into that for a little bit. But I believe it's just going to be fine, because why people want music, at least in this corner that I feel like I'm part of, isn't going to really change. That's not going to change.
And I have to be optimistic about it, because like I said, I can't not do it. I'm going to keep making music. So I have to be. Will AI replace some of the aspects of what it is I do? Probably. But I can't be afraid of that. Fear never did me any good.
Jeff: I think it's a great perspective. You have to learn these technologies, but at the same time, that's the thing I really appreciate about Soundstripe. Some of our competitors are doing prompt-based music creation on their platforms, and we are not, and we're very intentional. We use AI a lot in our business, but we do not use it for music. We use it to help you find the music. We use it to make smarter search. There's a huge distinction between those two things.
Aaron: Massive. And I get it. Everybody's got to use the tools that are available. I'm not a software engineer. I don't understand. But I can visualize, whoa, if I didn't have to push code ever again, that'd be kind of crazy. So I get that.
But Soundstripe, at least right now, has a pretty clear "we do not tolerate AI-generated music" policy, and that is a huge asset to this company. Because the people that we are making music for also do not tolerate it. We would alienate people if we started using it. I know that for a fact. And we don't want that.
Jeff: 100%. We actually did a survey with our customers, and in the survey we asked a question like, are you interested in AI prompt-based music creation? Just because we wanted to gauge attitudes. Are they interested in it? Are they trying it? And immediately one of the people that got the survey went on social media and took us to task. He's like, "Soundstripe's coming out with AI music." And I was like, no, we're not. We're just asking if you're interested in it, or if you would use it. Just trying to get some market research. But just mentioning it actually created that kind of response. So it was really interesting.
Advice for young artists
Jeff: Aaron, what do you say to young artists today who are coming up in a very different environment than you came up in? Maybe there's not as many opportunities, or if there are opportunities, you have to be really good on social media, you have to build your own audience. What advice do you have for young artists coming up today?
Aaron: A big one. I actually do still mentor as many people as I can. I love mentoring people, and I take as many of those opportunities as I can. And there's some recurring themes that keep coming up.
One is, a lot of these young people are learning the technical side of making music from YouTube. And there's sort of this general message on YouTube that there's a correct way to do things and an incorrect way to do things. And that is hogwash. Your mic is the least important thing. The idea is more important. Does the song make you feel the way you wanted it to? It doesn't matter how you got there. It really doesn't. From a technical standpoint, "Oh, I need this mic, or this computer, or this DAW, or this plugin, or this mic pre, or this compressor." Just stop thinking that way. Figure out your why and really invest in that.
And then I think chasing what is popular, it seems intuitive, but what is popular probably wasn't chasing what was previously popular. It was just someone saying, how can I be a little, I like to use the term upsetting. How can I upset what's happening right now? And I don't mean upsetting like I'm angry about it, but rocking the boat, being provocative, being disturbing in the literal sense. Disturbing the ecosystem. That's actually what you want to chase, more than what's currently at the top.
And then the number one thing is something I've already talked about here earlier, which is to stop trying to be something you're not. Be 100% authentically you. Make your songs for you. Make them so that you feel that feeling when it's coming out of the speakers. And that's going to up your chances of other people feeling that same way. Because if you try to make a song for this imaginary committee in your head, or even someone you know, if you think, "Oh, maybe they'll like this if I do it this way," that's pretty much always a recipe for failure, in my experience.
Jeff: That's great advice, and I think we can end it there. Aaron Sprinkle, thank you so much for joining us.
For people who actually listen.
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Frequently asked questions
How many songs has Aaron Sprinkle written for Soundstripe?
648 songs, which have been downloaded around a million times. He has been writing for the catalog for over eight years as a senior staff composer.
What monikers does Aaron Sprinkle release under?
More than a dozen. The ones named in this episode are Neon Beach, Midnight Daydream (his lo-fi hip hop project), Tiger Gang, Moses Kidd (Americana), and Snowbones. He also releases under his own name.
What is Aaron Sprinkle's most-downloaded Soundstripe track?
"Tore Up," released under his own name. He notes it would have been a Tiger Gang song if he had thought of the moniker yet.
What does Aaron Sprinkle think about AI-generated music?
His Substack bio describes him as an anti-AI creator. His argument in this episode is that AI-generated music will always have some use, but it has a ceiling with active listeners: people who seek music out for an emotional response, as opposed to passive listeners who just want something playing. He does not use it, and notes that Soundstripe does not allow AI-generated music in its catalog.
Which records is Aaron Sprinkle proudest of?
The ones he names here are Jonezetta's Cruel to Be Young, Pedro the Lion's Control, OneRepublic's "Life in Color," Acceptance's Phantoms (which he re-recorded for its 20th anniversary with features including Teddy Swims), and Corey Crowder's Gold in the Sand.
