Producer's Chair
Producer’s Chair exists to showcase underground music producers and hobbyists from around the world who have passion for their craft.
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Producer's Chair
Consistency Is Key - Interview with Ripley Sterling
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Had a great conversation with producer, Ripley Sterling.
Check out Ripley! Bandcamp - Instagram
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Welcome to the Producer Chair. Thank you for listening. I'm your host, Steve Swisher. On the show, we interview people making music in their bedrooms, basements, and home studios. We're going to talk about hardware, software, tips and tricks, everything that goes into their creative process. Our guest today is Ripley Sterling. He makes music and records with vocalists from all over the world, and we're going to listen to a couple of
Intro
SPEAKER_05his songs and have an interview with him. His first song is called It's Your Medicine.
Song 1 - It's Your Medicine
SPEAKER_03Where you send the night right in my back. What's the best call?
unknownI tasted the ball out of beautiful. I don't know where you're going to do this.
SPEAKER_05So I decided to tell me how to be a good and that was It's Your Own Medicine by Ripley, and we have Ripley today with us. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Awesome. Thanks for joining me on the show. This has been a lot of fun. Absolutely. Is Ripley real name, stage name? How'd you come up with that?
SPEAKER_00Uh, it is definitely a stage name. It's kind of funny. A lot of people have told me that they think it's my real name. I'm pretty private
Interview Part 1
SPEAKER_00when it comes to all that, but I've kind of joked for a long time that it sounds a lot like a bad guy in a James Bond porn parody. I just wanted something kind of bombastic and ridiculous.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Yeah, it works. It's good. How long have you been producing? What got you started?
SPEAKER_00I'm like roughly a thousand years old now, and I've probably been recording music since I was like ten, maybe? I grew up in a pretty musical kind of household. My dad had like uh one of those Tascam porta studios that everyone wants now. Oh yeah. So I yeah, I learned how to like record myself and friends or whoever, basically on cassette tapes. Yeah, I must have been 10 or 11 or something like that. And uh like I remember when Garage Band 1 came out.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Oh, that's awesome. I had a Porta Studio that I think it was like the 424 Mark II or something. I can't remember if those were the right numbers, but I've always regretted selling it. I wish I would have kept it around. That sounds about regarding it, it was the blue one.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I had the blue one, uh, the one I learned on was like one of the big old black ones with like real VU meters and everything. It was a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, cool.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, a lot of fun. Awesome. Yeah, those got super sought after in the last like 10 years or so. Those are real expensive now. Yeah, they're more expensive than they were brand new. Yeah, all of them are. It's it's crazy. I mean, they're a lot of fun, but they're not like six hundred dollar machines.
SPEAKER_05Right, yeah. I sold mine maybe around 2010 or something for a couple hundred bucks, and uh, you know, they've tripled in price since then.
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah, totally.
SPEAKER_05So what made you first want to create music instead of just listening to it?
SPEAKER_00You know, when I was probably 14 or 15 or whatever, and I was like playing in simple rock bands with my friends and stuff, and you know, just doing covers, messing around, and I was never super great. I played pretty much everything. I played guitar, I played drums, I sang. But at some point I realized it was e it was more fun to just do it myself. I pretty much just started kind of recording my own stuff, and then I would say honestly, it took me a long time before I thought I could really like make music. You know, most of it was just either covers or just like little riff kind of things or open-ended kind of things, not really song-oriented arrangements or anything like that. It took me a long time, and there was even a period of time where I was kind of fed up with it, but I, you know, I was like a teenager or whatever, I was really young. I took a while off and I kind of got back to it, probably when I was like 19 or 20 or so. You know, early on playing in like rock bands and stuff, it was a lot of fun, but I knew I always kind of wanted to make more weird electronic stuff, but I didn't really have the chops for it. I w you know, I wasn't good enough, and I wasn't a songwriter, and I'm still a pretty lousy songwriter, but um I started making dance music, really, which is also how you get a ridiculous name. And I got pretty good at like electro house stuff, but I I always kind of didn't like house music despite making all of it. And uh I decided I was gonna have to kind of step up and really make the weird industrial sort of rock stuff I wanted to make all along.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. I've really been digging your music since we've been talking. You know, you got a real nine-inch nails vibe to to you know, that's what I would compare it to.
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_05Electronic sounds in there, but then also mixed with some distorted guitar and kind of a haunted vocal. And uh yeah, I I really like what you're doing.
SPEAKER_00Thanks. Yeah, it's very much, you know, I'm trying very hard to be nine-inch nails. Uh there's no uh there's no question about that. Yeah, I I always wanted to make music like that, but I knew I wasn't I I just didn't really know what I was doing well enough to really make music like that. So I settled for dance music, which I thought I could pull off. Which is funny because now I'm basically making dance music again. But I try and make as much different stuff as possible, really. Because you don't want to get bored, I guess. Right, sure. And so, like, you know, with something like It's Your Own Medicine, stuff like that, the rock stuff that I used to do kind of helps. But it's kind of also funny because I grew up on like blues and rock music, and I'm like an okay blues guitar player, but it completely does not apply to any of the music I really try to make. But it's a lot of fun. And I've done a lot of doom metal stuff, I've done a lot of alt-rock stuff, kind of like that one. I tried to do a little bit of new metal stuff here and there. We might try it again. And actually now I'm I'm talking with someone and we're probably gonna be working on kind of like a drum and bass thing, which I'm think I'm kind of terrible at. I sent them some like drum and bass stuff I was working on just to try and get better at it, and they're like, This is great. Can I do something over this? And I was like, Yeah, probably. I think it's terrible because I never do drum and bass, but sure, if you think it's cool, we could try it.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Oh, that's awesome. The first episode I did was a guy named Gorilla Fist from Canada, and that was a drum and bass featured episode that that was real fun to learn about.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm gonna have to check it out because I I really know next to nothing about drum and bass. I've always been bad at it. I'm bad at editing breaks. I've just wanted to get better at it. So yeah, I mean, sure, I'll check it out.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah, he's a real talented guy. You should definitely check that episode out. Uh, how do you get started making a track? Is it a melodic idea in your head, drum beat, chord progression?
SPEAKER_00Well, kind of like the genre thing, I do try and change it up a lot. If I've got a melodic idea in my head that's pretty lucky, those ones usually turn out pretty well, but that's pretty rare for me. Lately, what I've been doing, I'll just open up a synthesizer with a million presets and I'll go into their like atmospheric or weird effects section in the presets, and I'll just start going through random ones until I find something that kind of has a vibe that I like, and I'll just listen to that for a while and build a song off of that, which I think is it's been going really well for a while now. I used to start off just doing like drums or just doing like a bass line, but if I start with something a little more abstract, I I find it's easier to set the tone of what I'm kind of going for as opposed to trying to just like structure it immediately. Sure. And are you in in the box, out of the box, hybrid? I'm almost entirely in the box. I used to do a lot more out-of-the-box stuff, but after a lot of experimentation and a lot of trying different workflows and stuff, uh for me, I'm just so fast in the box, and I I it's just so much faster for me to bring something up and know exactly what it is that I'm looking for and and get it. I still have a decent selection of outboard stuff. I I tried to get into the whole Euro Rack thing and it was just so it's fun. It's ridiculously expensive. That's right. We all know. Yeah, it's a lot of fun, but trying to do like melodic synthesizer-y stuff with it, I it got to the point where I was like, I'm spending 40 minutes just building this. I can just open a synth in the software and it's just ready to go. So my Eurorack now is pretty much all just distortion boxes. Yeah, it's it's all effects. Um, so I'll still I'll still run stuff through that. I've got a couple of synthesizers I still use every once in a while. You know, it's hard to beat a Mogue base, so you might as well just have one of those if you can. But almost entirely in the box. The flexibility and the speed for me is just it's unbeatable. Pretty much nothing I do is live performance based, so I'm not worried about how to actually perform it or anything like that. I'm all about editing and tweaking and taking way too long on things. Sure.
SPEAKER_05What DAR are you using then?
SPEAKER_00It's at least three versions old of uh Studio One, which isn't even Studio One anymore because Fender bought it or whatever. Now it's like Fender Studio or something like that. Yeah. Um but you know, it it it works fine for me. Sure. The tech is is just fine. It doesn't really I can't think of anything it doesn't do that I wish it does, so I'm fine not upgrading for a while.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, very cool. Yeah, that that's one doll I've I've never checked out.
SPEAKER_00It's very straightforward. I'm fine in anything that's pretty much logic pro tools. It's it's all very similar.
SPEAKER_05Yep, absolutely. What's your favorite software, Synth? What are you using in Studio One?
SPEAKER_00I use a lot of the uh shoot, what's it called? The Yu He Hive? Okay, yeah. You know that one? Yeah. Yeah, I actually why am I doing it? I can just open my favorites right here. Yeah, Hive is awesome. It's still even a little bit above my head. You know, a lot of the routing in it and the programming of it, I still I should really refresh myself on. The really great synth, the OBXD, it's like a it's a free Oberheim emulation. Okay, yeah, I think I have that one. I use that all the time. Awesome. The uh OS Tyrus, do you know that one? I don't. It is a perfect software recreation of uh an access virus. Oh, okay. So it's j it's just is a virus. So it's great. Sure. Of course, everyone has vital. That's all over the place. Yep. And honestly, a lot of the stock synths. Like, if I just need a straightforward base, like I'll just use the stock to oscillator synth. It does it great, it sounds fine. Sure. You really don't need more a lot of the time. Plus, everything I do gets so freakishly distorted that it doesn't really matter too much. Right. It can be about anything. No one's going Did he use a real mini mogue on this? Or is that the end like it doesn't matter. It's going through like eight distortion pedals, so did you say just synthesizers? Because uh going through my things, uh huge shout out to um XLN Audio XO. Okay. You know that one? I don't. What what is that? It's basically like a sample organization, drum sample organization plug-in, and it has a sequencer and and all kinds of stuff built in, but it's just if you're tired of going through folders of samples, just get XO. Or I think there's also one called Atlas that's really good.
SPEAKER_05I do have Atlas. Yep, I'm familiar with that one.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah, okay, yeah, it's it's it's similar to Atlas. Cool. It took me way too long to find one of those. Just the days I've spent going through folders of drum samples is like mind-numbing. And then you finally get something like that, and it's just so much more creative and fluid.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, it's fun to be able to put together a kit and then just click a button to swap everything out and see what it sounds like.
SPEAKER_00Super fast. Yeah, it's great.
SPEAKER_05That's fun. What's a plug-in that makes it into every song?
SPEAKER_00That is without a doubt, the Devious Machines Infiltrator plugin. It's sort of like a shaper box sort of plugin, if you know. It's um it's basically a multi-effect plugin. Okay. That lets you put together effects chains that are very complicated and automate the parameters of the individual effects in the chain in a pretty intuitive way, and sequence it, and you can MIDI trigger it, and it it's just really, really great for creative work. And it has one of the best things, which I think every plugin should have, which is a random preset button. Oh yeah. I will grab a group of instruments, or sometimes I'll put it on the entire mix, and I'll just hit the random button and see what I get, and I'll just keep hitting it until it gives me something cool, and then I'll bounce that back into the track and I'll cut it into some other thing. It's great for making little percussion loops, it's great for glitching out anything.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Between that and uh another one called DS Tantra, which is a similar multi-effect kind of thing. If you're missing an intro for a song or like a post-chorus, just run your whole track through one of those, get some cool ambient effect thing for two bars, and it's incredible. It would, you know, it's something that would take ages to do meticulously. You can just hit the random button until you get something cool and it's great.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. And quick pro tip for our listeners make sure you put a limiter on the track before you go hitting random buttons.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah, absolutely. But yeah, sometimes it can get real out of hand.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, you can you can get your speaker squealing pretty quick. Yeah, for sure. If there was a hardware or software engineer listening to this right now, what's a plug-in or a piece of hardware that you would want that doesn't exist yet?
SPEAKER_00I've had an idea for one for a while, actually, and I need to test it a little bit better with some things that already exist. I haven't really tried it well enough. We all know what a D-esser is. I want a re-esser. Okay. Basically, what I want is like drum replacement software, but for sibilants. So you could take a vocal track and instead of taking a drum track and replacing the snare drum with whatever sample you want, you could replace all the siblings with a sample of an S or whatever that you want. Like I said, I gotta test it more. You probably could do it with drum software, but it's probably not really fine-tuned enough for that. I tried it a while ago and it was, you know, it's expecting percussion and whatnot, not a sustained vocal sound. So I don't know if the algorithms or whatever, yeah, there's a million of them, but I tweak every single S in a performance, and sometimes that means replacing every single S in a performance. And if I could just hit a button and do it like they do with a snare drum, that would save 40 minutes. I don't know.
SPEAKER_05Sure. Yeah, that's that's an interesting idea.
SPEAKER_00You know, I tell people all the time when it comes to audio software or even technology or whatever, I'd be hard pressed to find something you can't do already. Audio is so lightweight that the software processing for it these days is so incredible. These days, if you can think of it, there's pretty much a piece of software that'll do it for audio.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. What's a skill you're trying to improve right now?
SPEAKER_00I'm always in flux with where I'm at in terms of mixing. I go between like wanting to be a better producer and then wanting to be a better mixer, and then, you know, in a perfect world, one or the other one would be uh all I need, but I really do enjoy mixing pretty much as much as I enjoy producing. Lately, I would say in terms of mixing, I've changed a lot of stuff. I think both of the songs, they're pretty much how I would have done them now, but the techniques I would use now were pretty different. Yeah. I've definitely stripped down my my mix bus stuff a lot. I used to be pretty crazy with stuff on there. Now I'm real simple, real laid back, unl you know, unless it needs it.
SPEAKER_05You know, my mix has improved a lot, just stripping a lot of the stuff out and simplifying it, focusing on uh a lot less instruments and giving them all their own space and the frequency spectrum and kind of fixes itself.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. You know a good mix, it all just starts with good production. Obviously, the better the production is, the easier it is to mix. It's just that's just how it is. And I think when I was really, you know, early on, especially with software and now, it can easily be like way overwhelming with how many options you have in terms of production and mixing. But I think once you yeah, once you strip things back a bit and you just kinda you hear people say it all the time, but I think it takes a long time to realize what they mean about it a lot of the times. But just use what the song needs. Like it doesn't need all the bells and whistles you want it to have most of the time, I think, at least in my experience.
SPEAKER_05Sure. Well, let's go ahead and listen to the second track you sent, then we'll jump back into the interview. Sure. So I am here with Ripley, and this is a song called Self Surgery.
SPEAKER_02You know me better than I know myself. Everything I've tried to be lying open left blame,
Song 2 - Self Surgery
SPEAKER_02but I can do this better than anybody else. Everything I'll ever leave, I don't wanna talk about it. So I reached with a fist and here I don't know.
SPEAKER_05With Ripley. Ripley, what's the hardest thing about producing from home?
SPEAKER_00I gotta say, it's really not that difficult for me. It can be a little difficult to kind of get in the zone and avoid distractions, but if that's all I have to complain about, that's really not all that bad.
SPEAKER_05Sure. That self-surgery
Interview Part 2
SPEAKER_05track, that's that's another really fun one. Look, really creative stuff you're doing. What part did you do in that? Uh what was your piece? And you mentioned when we were talking that you had someone else doing vocals.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I pretty much never do my own vocals, uh, if I can help it these days, especially. Sure. Yeah, self-surgery, Evie Heller does the vocals on that. She rocks. I produced the instrumental, I mixed it, so I did a lot of it. Yeah. I'm pretty hands-off when it comes to singers performance and writing, so I don't really I don't think I really had anything to do with the lyric writing or the the vocal performance or anything like that. We might, we probably, you know, we I'm sure we went through plenty of versions of it, but the vocals are probably pretty much exactly what they were out of the gate. And this is pretty much how I work with anybody. I would send her a handful of demos anywhere between like a minute and three minutes. Sometimes it could be like a finished song, sometimes it's just a cool idea or whatever. And if she is into any particular one of them, I'll either make it into a whole song and send that out, or if it's already a song, whatever, she could start writing for it and send me vocals whenever really, and we go from there. It's a pretty laid-back, kind of fluid process. It's definitely not like, here's the song, go for it. It's it's very open-ended.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Sounds like really good collaboration going on there. What's a goal you're currently chasing with your music? Is there something that you'd like to accomplish?
SPEAKER_00Right now, I'm really just trying to work with a lot more singer-songwriters. I talk to a lot of vocalists, as many as I can try and find. I send singers a lot of demos. I talk to just about anyone I can, because I would say the last, I don't know, 10 or so years, I have collaborated with very few people, but I was also in a place where I needed to really kind of get my chops up. And now I think I'm in a place where I have a little more confidence in myself and I can say, like, all right, I know if I go into this, I can produce something decent enough for a singer. Now I gotta find the singers. Sure. For a long time, I've just wanted to produce for artists. I'm not much of a performer myself, really. So and and I just enjoy doing it. I I love getting into the super nitty-gritty stuff of production, and a lot of singer-songwriters, that's you know, that's not their thing, which is totally fine. It's it's very tedious, annoying work. And if you just want to be a singer-songwriter, do it. Um, so yeah, I think my goal right now is just to work with as many people as possible, try and finish as much music as possible.
SPEAKER_05Very cool. What's your favorite part of the creation process?
SPEAKER_00There's probably two. It's probably a handful. Um, if I'm working on something and like I'm really in the zone and I'm like, this sounds really good, I'll send it to a couple of singers or I'll send it to a couple of producer friends of mine. It's always it always feels good if if they also think it sounds good. But there's also a part way later on in the process, after who knows how long. Sometimes it's weeks, sometimes it's years. There's always like a point where I'm listening to it or I'm listening to it with whoever I'm collaborating with. If I am, you kind of get this moment where you're like, huh, this sounds like a real song. And I don't really know when I think that point always comes at different times, but that's usually a pretty satisfying moment when I'm kind of just like, you know, sounds like a real producer actually made this.
SPEAKER_05Sure. Yeah. What's your least favorite part?
SPEAKER_00I would say the flip side of that is when you're getting a little too confident and you think your stuff sounds really great, and then you go hear something, and you're like, oh damn, my stuff is not on par.
SPEAKER_05Sure, send you back to the drawing board a little bit.
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah. I mean, I I was working on some stuff for a few days and I I was feeling real good about it. And then I heard a clip of a billboard top 10 producer was working on. It was just a clip out of his doll. He was like, Yeah, this is just some work in progress stuff. And I was just like, Yep, that's I was asking for it. This sounds incredible, and this is just, you know, his afternoon exercise.
SPEAKER_05If someone asks you what's your secret trick to get your sound, what would that be?
SPEAKER_00It's a lot of distortion.
unknownOkay, yeah.
SPEAKER_00It's just it's just a lot of distortion. I mean, there are like synthesizers and stuff that I come back to often. There are sounds that I come back to often, but I do try and change it up a lot. Before I used to chase a lot of very specific sounds, and I still do use sounds that I've like bit from other things from other people, but not a whole lot. Now it's really just a ton of experimentation and finding what little tiny things work for each song and trying to really just do what I think sounds cool. And I did a couple of Doom Metal albums a while ago. I had different guitar amps on every single song. I didn't I wasn't like, let's make a sound and stick with it. I was just like, whatever. I've got a thousand guitar amp plugins, I might as well just try all of them. Sure.
SPEAKER_05It's good to experiment like that. What's the weirdest thing you've done in your creation process?
SPEAKER_00Oh boy. I mean, I'll try whatever. Something I've been meaning to try again. I've got these microphones that pick up like a strange spectrum of the electromagnetic frequency range or whatever. I don't know exactly how it works. They hear weird things in electronics. I've been meaning to try out some of those again.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, that's interesting.
SPEAKER_00I yeah, I've been meaning to use my chaos pad again. That thing always makes cool noises. Yeah, yeah, I guess.
SPEAKER_05I've been meaning, I think.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. KP3, that's the one. Yep. I've been really meaning to get back into some no-input stuff. Do you know what that's about? Uh just using the feedback over something, yeah. Yeah, basically just taking a mixer and plugging it into itself. Yep. Yeah, all kinds of fun noise music stuff I've really been meaning to get back to. Lately, I'm just so software oriented though that it's just a lot of resampling and bouncing things out or putting it in a sampler and messing with it. And that's actually something I've been meaning to do more of, which is such an old school technique, is just taking a bit of a sound and putting it in a sampler and then replaying a melody with that, which I feel like not a lot of people really do anymore because you just don't have to.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. What's your biggest distraction in the studio?
SPEAKER_00Probably outside noise.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_00Um, you know, it's not an acoustically treated space, it's not a soundproof room or anything like that.
SPEAKER_05What do you got going on outside there?
SPEAKER_00You know, just typical stuff like traffic or whatever. Nothing crazy or or intense, but to really get in a zone, I find it takes time and it takes not having distractions. And I I remember I was reading, and I gotta keep reading it, the uh the book by Rick Rubin. There's tons of great advice in it. And one of the main things he says in it is something like, the only way to really work is in like absolute solitude. And so and I was just thinking, well, that's not gonna happen. So yeah, good luck. Yeah, if I'm yeah, when I'm working with you, we can go work in absolute solitude, but for home gamers like me, probably not gonna happen.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I got a neighbor, I swear they can read my mind that they start the mower every time I'm about to record.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah, sure.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, there's a leaf blower or something or if music is your main thing, what's number two? Do you have another hobby?
SPEAKER_00I worked in video for a long time, and I worked in photography for a long time, and I still enjoy doing a lot of photography, which definitely helps because someone's gotta make the art for all this stuff. Yeah. Yeah, I would say probably photography is a pretty big one. But other than that, yeah, I spend a lot of time doing music.
SPEAKER_05Sure, yeah. Okay.
SPEAKER_00I do play a lot of pool.
SPEAKER_05Okay, yeah. You got a local bar there you go to?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_05Very cool. That's fun. What advice do you have for someone just starting out in the production world?
SPEAKER_00I would say don't worry about stuff. I see so many people asking about A, whether it's okay to do something, which is always like by the time you get the answer to that, you could have tried it already. Just try stuff out. But also, I've seen so many people say things like, I don't know what genre I want to make, or I don't know like what my sound is supposed to be or whatever. And none of that really matters in the grand scheme of things. It matters in terms of like what direction you want to go with yourself a bit, but thinking like I have to produce a rock song, because that's you know my style or whatever, don't even worry about that. Yeah, sure, make a rock song, but make a dance song, make a hip hop song, make whatever. Who knows what you're gonna find is gonna be what you enjoy making. Sure. Like I keep harping on. There's just endless options in modern technology. You could do anything. When someone asked me if we could do a doom metal album, I said, I've never done that. I don't know how to make doom metal music, I don't know really what goes into it, I don't know any real doometal bands or anything, but I knew we have the technology to do it, and I know how to play guitar and I know how to play drums, and I was like, how hard could it be? Yeah. There's really nothing stopping you from trying stuff out.
SPEAKER_05Absolutely. Do you have any musical opinions that get you in trouble?
SPEAKER_00Ooh, if I had known that was coming, I probably could have given you some really good stuff. Because I I am a very opinionated person. I I would say not really. I I really hate to like I do my best to not talk smack about other producers or anything like that. You know, everyone's trying their best, they're trying to do their own thing, everyone's got their own thing going on. I do find remixes and covers very unimpressive.
unknownSure.
SPEAKER_00I appreciate a good remix and a good cover, and I've done plenty of them, but I I find often people are like blown away by remixes and covers. And in the back of my mind, I'm always like, well, you know, like the hard work's already done for them. I I can make stuff sound pretty good if I'm already working with chart topping and work, you know. It's it's it it's mine to screw up an amazing song.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, you know, it's the same reason why the most successful local bands are always cover bands.
SPEAKER_00Well, yeah, sure. I mean, take take your pick of whoever. Nirvana wrote a great song. I'm not gonna make it any better. It's gonna sound pretty good when I do it too.
unknownSure.
SPEAKER_05Yep. If someone made a movie about your producer journey, what would the title be?
SPEAKER_00Uh, probably something like 999 in a thousand. I I don't think anything I'm doing is is super crazy or or super, you know, unique or storied or anything. I I think I'm my my story is pretty much the same as so many other people who are just taking it easy and producing, you know. I would say what I'm doing is kind of a glorified hobby. I I do take it pretty seriously, but it's nothing groundbreaking and it's not lucrative at all. And it's not you know, it's nothing revolutionary. I'm having fun and I'm happy to be having fun with a lot of other people. Oh, okay. I don't think I don't think it would be anything terribly unique.
SPEAKER_05Sure. That that's fine. If you could master one production skill overnight, what would it be?
SPEAKER_00I need a much better understanding of actual music theory.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_00If I could actually sit down at a keyboard and really understand what I'm doing, yeah, it would be very beneficial. I'm an okay musician. I'm a much better editor than I am performer. I can play okay piano, but not really. You know, I I took some piano lessons actually only a few years ago, really, because I was just thinking, I should really know this better. It's such a foundational, fundamental kind of thing. And I've been playing instruments for a long time, easily since I was five or six. And I did take the theory side of it pretty seriously when I was younger and in school and all that, but I've just about totally forgotten all of that. So I would like to just have a little bit better understanding of the actual foundation of music theory and all that. Yeah, that's that's always a good thing to learn though. Yeah, and it would totally speed everything up.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, absolutely. What's something else that you would like people to know about your art?
SPEAKER_00I think a little bit of a misconception that some people might have is that I am taking this ridiculously seriously. Because it is, you know, the music sounds kind of serious and it it's dramatic and edgy stuff sometimes, but you know, the reality is I'm really just having a lot of fun with it. Awesome. I don't think any of it should really be taken all that seriously.
SPEAKER_05That's a great answer. You're having fun with it, and don't take it too seriously and enjoy it, hopefully.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's all I could ask for, and I think uh I'm I'm very grateful to be in a position to do that.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Oh, that's awesome. What are you trying to get better at outside of music?
SPEAKER_00Besides time management, which couldn't we all be better at that? Um I've been trying to learn more visual software, I've been trying to learn Blender, I've been trying to learn Touch Designer, I've been trying to learn another one that's very similar to Touch Designer. A lot of my job used to be using like After Effects, editing video and all that. So I'm I'm pretty familiar with the visual side of things, but with things like Touch Designer or Blender or so many other options now are so good and so powerful that things where I used to have to either hire someone or have a friend do something or really try and figure out a way around it. Now, with things like Blender and Touch Designer, it's just so possible to do your own visual stuff really well. Sure, yeah. It's free. You know, Blender is just free. It's this crazy powerful 3D software that anyone can have. There's really no reason why I shouldn't be a little bit better at it. And obviously that goes hand in hand with the with production and releasing stuff and doing the art for it or visuals, videos, or you know, lyric videos or whatever. It's all so possible that there's you know, it's the same thing as working in a DAW these days. There's really no reason why you can't do pretty much anything you want to do.
SPEAKER_05Yep, very cool. If you could have a creative session with any other producer in the world, who would it be?
SPEAKER_00I mean, it's a pretty easy answer. It would probably easily be Trent Reznor.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, that'd be a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_00Who wouldn't want to sit in on that session?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, that'd be awesome. What about a vocal artist? Any anyone in the world that could jump on one of your tracks and do some singing, who would that be?
SPEAKER_00Oh, right now, it would definitely be Slater.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_00I've been a big fan of hers for a long time, and her new album is everything I've been trying to do for a long time. Also, you know, a Lady Gaga or uh an Ariana Grande or a Dua Lipa kind of artist, uh Charlie XEX would be super cool.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Lisa from Black Pink, absolutely. Um, I'm a big Kylie Minogue fan. I would kill to have Kylie Minogue on a song. Sure. You know, lots of classic pop divas would be super cool. I've I've said for a long time that I I kind of just want to do Lady Gaga meets nine inch nails, which a ton of stuff has kind of been heading in that direction lately, which I'm happy for. I love to listen to all of it. It's great. Yeah, you're here for it. Um, absolutely. And you know, if it sheds a little light on weird industrial production like my stuff, that's fine by me too. Absolutely. But I'd love to work with some huge pop diva.
SPEAKER_05Sure. What would you say is the single most important thing in your life right now?
SPEAKER_00Ooh, I don't want to give too deep an answer. Um, probably really committing to like working on a lot of stuff consistently has been really beneficial to me in a lot of ways. Not just getting better at production or mixing or whatever, it just having a little more structure in my life has helped a lot. Okay. So yeah, just being able to just sit down at my desk and get to work on stuff, it's it's been really great lately for a long time. And not putting a ridiculous amount of pressure on myself to be able to pull off some thing, whatever it is, and getting to a point where I have a fair amount of confidence in myself and my work is extremely relieving.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, that's awesome. This is the first episode that I'm doing listener questions, and I have listeners send me a question that they want to ask uh whatever producer I'm gonna be interviewing. And uh this week our listener Colin from Chicago wants to know if you have any pets and how much do they weigh.
SPEAKER_00Uh no, I do not have any pets. I think No pets, okay. I'm yeah, no. I I think I'm I I think I'm too selfish a person to have a pet. Maybe a goldfish or something? Nah, I don't know. Those don't need a whole lot of handling. Yeah, I don't think I can handle it. It's funny though, because uh every once in a while I'll take care of my friends' cats if they go out of town or something like that. I can kind of handle a cat because cats leave you alone and they're not terribly entertained by me. You know? Yeah. They're kind of just smug and do their own thing. So maybe it's a coming out at some point. Yeah. No, no, no. That's that's that that even just the a lot of my friends have cats, and even not owning a cat, enough of my stuff is covered in cat fur.
SPEAKER_05Awesome. Well, the show's called Producer's Chair, so I always ask, uh, do you have a special chair you sit in when you're making your music?
SPEAKER_00Um, I well, I I do actually, but not really. You know, it's just like a a pretty typical office chair. For a long time, I was just using an IKE chair, which there's nothing wrong with. And when COVID happened, somebody got a pretty big check from their office to buy a chair because they had to work from home. And so they bought a pretty nice chair. I don't know who makes it, but you know, it's one of those nice ones. But they came over to my place and they sat in my IKEA chair and they loved it. And they were like, Can I trade you chairs? And I was I was just like, of course, I will take your, you know, $600 office chair, and you can have my IKEA chair. So that worked out great for me. So it's it's a very com it's a very comfortable chair. I would say my only gripe with it actually is that the armrests kind of get in the way if I'm trying to record some guitar, but boo-hoo.
SPEAKER_05Awesome. Uh, where can our listeners connect with you online and hear more of your music?
SPEAKER_00My bandcamp is just Ripley Sterling. Uh, my Instagram is just Ripley Sterling. My Instagram has a lot more kind of stuff on it. My bandcamp is pretty sparse. My Instagram has a lot of examples of my stuff
Outro
SPEAKER_00and even just like random stuff I'm working on that sounds cool, that'll never go anywhere. So more up-to-date stuff is definitely Instagram.
SPEAKER_05Okay. Yeah, we'll get those links put up so everyone that's listening to the episode can can click on those and go check you out. Sweet. It'd be awesome. Well, hey, I really appreciate you joining me on the show today, Ripley. This has been a lot of fun. Get to know you a little bit, and yeah, I'm excited for our listeners to be able to listen to this. And you got a lot of great things. Well, great tips to share.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, it's a lot of fun. I I like talking about it, and I'm definitely gonna have to go check out that drum bass episode because I really need some work on that.
SPEAKER_05Absolutely. All right, that's our show for today. And go ahead and keep sending those emails in with your questions for the producers that I'm having on as guests. Those are a lot of fun. And if you're interested in sponsoring or being a guest on the show, use the provided email. I have another great episode coming up for you in two weeks. So until then, I'm Steve Swisher, and you've been listening to the producer's chair.
