This last November 2024, I finally released my first official album: Inorganic Incarnations – Volume I.
To the surprise of my younger self, my first full record wasn’t a Jazz masterpiece, nor a collection of solo guitar works. Instead, it was an electronic album, inspired by some of my student’s lesson, and born out of a lighthearted and almost uncaring spirit of exploration.
I don’t mean “uncaring” in the sense that I didn’t care about what I was doing, but this “uncaringness” was connected to the final result; more specifically, I didn’t really care about the perfection of these pieces. Instead, I was just playing around, exploring, and seeing what I could come up with with the tools at hand.
This is a gigantic leap forward in my artistic process. If you are a creator, maybe you know the feeling – inspiration strikes! You get a flash of a vision for some project, feel an inkling of excitement forming around the seed of an idea.
So you take to your medium, roll up your sleeves and start putting your idea down.
And everything is flowing. It’s groovy, sounding or looking good. AWESOME.
Then suddenly, a moment of self-awareness strikes.
Looking down at what you made, it’s pretty good. But… where does it go next?
And maybe that little piece should actually do this. And come to think of it, the bottom seems a little off.
Before you know it, that initial idea that seemed so cool is now over stretched, out of shape, and a little sad. You’ve looked at it so much over and over, it’s all you can see; in fact, you almost can’t even remember why you seemed so excited.
Obsessing Over Small details dams up progress.
Inspiration
To start, I began using some stock loops built into my favorite DAW, Logic. Turns out it’s super fun to pretend to be a DJ and to line up samples that you can trigger at a touch.
A few months ago, I was lucky enough to have some time playing around with the “Akai Force,” a compositional tool straight out of a DJ’s dream. This piece of Hardware allows you to browse existing loops, or create your own, stacking out columns of music, and launching them with a single touch. Fun. A little clunky for my taste, especially at first, but fun.
Then, in some of my music/composition lessons, I noticed that my student was interested in a DJ app on his iPad, all stacked out similarly to the Akai Force. And Logic too, for that matter. I thought to myself, “If he likes this toy, I bet he’d like Logic’s Live Loops.
That’s when we started playing around in Logic. And as I curated some nice loops for my student to use, watching him work and giving him some gentle suggestions, I couldn’t help thinking to myself, “well wait a second, I should play around with this.”
And so I did. Logic has a DJ-esque Sequencer called “Live Loops,” as I mentioned above. Tinkering around with the stock loops, I discovered a few interesting things, the least of which was a cool finished song.
Progress
I discovered I could build a song in a new way. Instead of crawling infinitely forward in the linear arranger, I was able to conceptualize my songs evolving forward in columns.
A new way to progress.
Triggering stacks of loops was interesting, especially when quantizing them to launch in time. There are preset options to launch new columns after 2 or 4 bars, a single bar, 2 beats, a single beat. I realized I could trigger new sections to start whenever I wanted. For some songs, I never let the full loop play; the toggling between two columns of samples created a much richer contrast together than either did individually. This can be heard in the main dance break of “Extraterrestrial.”
Playing with pre-recorded loops was fun – it took the pressure off of me. Instead of worrying if my recordings and ideas were “good enough,” instead, I could just pick sounds I liked, throw away ones that didn’t work, and just try to construct the best result I could, impartial to the ideas.
Sick
I don’t have to come up with the sickest, dopest, sexiest ideas.
Viewing the whole track from further back, with less of myself at stake, I was able to work for the best possible outcome of the song, not the preservation of MY ideas.
I know I’ve talked about it before, but I still think of the photographer I met in Hocking Hills when camping. He said something like: “I just try to get things at 70%, that way there is some room for the piece to grow. Who knows? You might end up changing something that you obsessed over.”
Impartial is better. Do I want to slave for over hours for 5 seconds of sound that I might not even actually want to use once I see the larger picture?
Sometimes when we obsess over the minutia of a micro-moment, we lose the forest for the trees.
Feels
As I worked, I realized that I could magnify a feeling of nostalgia, especially with the use of audio samples – copyright free or public domain, of course. It started when I realized I had a gap of silence in my track, at the very end of Aerodynamics. Looking through Logic’s loop library, I realized they had a whole category of sound effects. I popped in a sample of a studio audience laughing and thought to myself, “that’s fun!” Riffling through, I found some audio from the Apollo Moon Launch. Suddenly, my dance track was emanating a aerospace theme, which quickly spread throughout the track.
If you listen carefully with headphones, you can hear the pressurized sound of a passenger airplane’s cabin, the whine of the engines, the muffled sound of air outside the hull. Their are some obvious aerospace references throughout, but their are also some subtle things mixed in.
What all do you notice?
I chopped up old car commercials, PSA’s, interviews with politicians, veterans, and defectors from the Soviet Union; I even used a public domain horror film. The process of listening through, curating, and cleaning up sound bytes allowed me to encounter angles of the past I hadn’t considered and helped shape the tone of each of the songs.
Sights and Sounds
In my process, I discovered another useful trick – immersing in visual inspiration to help inform the music.
Chopping up sound samples often includes the original video. This struck me as I worked through hours of footage; something in the sights and sounds of past recordings stirred something inside of me. See below for a glimpse into the visual inspiration of several tracks.
If you want to really get into the headspace, turn the lights down, blow the above image up, and put on your headphones. The above image deeply inspired my songwriting in “Seance.”
Something about this art style. There seems to be a deep sense of struggle and pain etched into these peoples faces. Or perhaps its a sort of stoicism or strength.
Loops to Launch
As I progressed, I found my creative process for constructing these songs had evolved enough that it could support my own compositional creativity. Coming off the loops, I began writing all of the parts and treating them as triggerable loops. “Seance,” “Midwest Skies,” and “Professional Demons,” are constructed of all original material. Everything you hear was written by me. You won’t find any of those loops on Splice or in any soundpacks anywhere.
By the time I had six completed songs, I thought I should do the research I had been avoiding for years and figure out what the process of copyrighting was all about.
This was a little intimidating, but after clicking around through the US copyright website, I was able to find the correct forms and a useful video that practically walks you, hand-in-hand, through the whole process.
I wanted to wait until the album was finished, because it is possible to copyright up to 10 works at a single time, all for a flat fee. I think this was betwen $50 – $80 circa 2024.
Flash! Bam! Ala-kazam!
I got a paper in the mail. Woo Hoo! First copyright of the career!
This may have been unnecessary, but I thought, “If I’m going to do it, well damn it, I’m going to do it thoroughly.”
And behold, A little bit of reading on Distrokid and a bunch of typing in details, and what do you know! It’s scheduled for launch and now available on all major streaming platforms.
Rad.
If only there were some videos of some kind…
Samuel Rugg 