“I think success for me is being comfortable with the final output… being happy with it. For me wanting to listen to my own music is form what success is. When I think about success, it’s not material things, as much as I love wasting my money on synthesizers and electronics and the like, but I really think making myself happy is the best, that’s how I gauge success. – Seth Haley aka Com Truise
About Seth Haley
- 100,000 followers on Spotify
- Project started in 2010
- Grew Com Truise as a side project in New York to full time persona
In 2010, Seth Haley, a creative director in New York finally gained traction with his synth wave project Com Truise. Called one of the best musical artist to code to, the Com Truise project has become popular with both engineers and the general public for its 80s style, synthetic, and rich beats.
We met Com Truise in San Francisco and discovered a strong connection in the habits, routines, and interests that help both create great music and durable code, including
- Focusing on the most important thing to get done in the day from 5:00AM to 1:00PM without interruption from email, social media, or the internet.
- How simple the music actually is despite sounding complex
- Completing the body of a new tracks in one sitting by surrounding himself with silence.
We covered many topics, including:
- Early beginnings working as an art director in NYC
- Sneaking as a drum and bass DJ back in the day 1:45
- Where “Com Truise” came from
- Downtempo vs synth wave music 5:00
- Inspiration behind the music from Neon Indian, Prince, Michael Jackson, and others 5:30
- How the first mix tapes started with Block Rocking Beats by the Chemical Brothers, a casio keyboard, 8:00
- Starting “Elite Radio” online radio station 9:30
- Finding success in music 10:30
- Waking up at 5:00AM to get stuff done 11:30
- Probiotics, coconut water, and coffee to charge the batteries 12:00
- Sitting for 20 minutes in the backyard 13:00
- How focusing on producing a track from start to finish in one sitting helps to him to focus and get things done 17:00
- Gear that he uses 18:00
- How the space around him influences the output of his music 18:30
- Impact that music blogs in early 2010s influenced music discovery and 20:00
- How posting authentic content over instagram is more valuable than explicit promotional content and twitter 22:00
- Overstimulation of content 23:00
When Seth isn’t on the road or producing music, he’s actually an avid fan and learner of grilling and baking. You can find him on all social media:
- Twitter – @comtruise
- Instagram – @comtruise
- Facebook – comtruise
- Spotify – comtruise
- Website – comtruise.com
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Full Transcript
Cameron Peron: Alright, Com Truise, welcome to the Podcast.
Seth Haley: Thank you for having me.
Cameron Peron: It’s great to have you on. Tell me when did you feel that you were really on to something?
Seth Haley: I think, basically, when I released the first EP, Cyanide Sisters, the first version of it, on the blog. It was called “All Everyone United” and it was a little net label called Aim Discs. I think they were based in Prague. I remember putting it up and kind of wondering, where is it gonna go? And they had asked if I could host the files on my server and I did. When I went back a couple days later to check if people were downloading and accessing the files, it was a pretty astronomical number for what I really expected and it hit Hype Machine and that boosted it and it was pretty wild to see how it took off.
Cameron Peron: And which year was that?
Seth Haley: That was 2010, I believe. I’d have to double check, maybe late 2009. It’s been awhile.
Cameron Peron: That’s awesome. So, what brought you there exactly, what were you doing before? Were you doing that as kind of a side hustle, were you doing other kind of work before?
Seth Haley: Yeah, I was working in advertising at the time as an art director for a pharmaceutical company and basically – I went to school for advertising and I started working for that firm because of a friend who was also into music. I had started out way back as a drum & bass DJ and through drum & bass I met these guys in New Jersey and Philadelphia and we became buddies over the years. I’d go down and play shows when I was too young to get into the bars and they’d sneak me in and I’d play my dj set and then I’d have to leave. So just working with these guys and we became buddies and then I started working in advertising. The whole while I had been writing music, different kinds of – I used different pseudonyms for different projects. Then I started this Com Truise project but it wasn’t called Com Truise at the time, I was calling it Synce (S-y-n-c-e). It had a totally different name which is funny to think about.
Cameron Peron: What was the – where did Com Truise come from? When I looked at your music, I remember when I began to listen to this kind of genre your name popped up with a few others and I saw Com Truise and though this has got to be good.
Seth Haley: Yeah, really it was a joke between the guys I worked in advertising with. We had a group of four of us that would go to lunch everyday and I remember we used to go to this sandwich shop and we’d sit there and eat lunch and one of my friends, Matt, he had accidentally said Com Truise, he screwed up the words on accident. It stuck with me for some reason.
So basically he had said that and it stuck with me and so that’s when I went home and found this blog and it was really very poorly designed – the background image was so busy you could barely read the type – and I was like this kind of fits my sound, it’s a little weird and so I sent them an email and the ep and they were like, wow we want to release this like now, as soon as possible. So I finished it up twas like, we’ll just call it “Com Truise.” I called my mom and asked her about it, what do you think of the name Com Truise and she just laughed, oh that’s hilarious. She still calls me Tom Cruise sometimes which is really funny.
Cameron Peron: That’s awesome.
Seth Haley: Yeah, so I just remember seeing this blog and it was so weirdly designed I feel like my music just fit there. Seemed like overnight that it gained enough traction to get noticed in other ways.
Cameron Peron: Is your music classified in a genre that you’d point to?
Seth Haley: That’s funny, I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last two years, just from, you know I live in LA now and I go to the airport a lot, loading up the Pelican cases full of gear and drivers are always asking do you do music, are you a dj? And I’m like yeah and then they ask oh what kind of music and I’m like, well…. then I start to think well if I start to throw out subgenres they’re not going to know what it means. These guys aren’t going to know what chill wave is, etc. In its simplest form it’s down tempo electronic music, but I like to consider it “synth wave”. That kind of embodies what I do.
Cameron Peron: What is your inspiration for this music? I can hear a few things that sound familiar, but for you, who were the people or the performers or the people that really inspired you wth your music?
Seth Haley: A big thing was the band Neon Indian. I just remember hearing how he treated his drums and being very like ‘i’ve never heard that before.’ But, inadvertently I did, on a multitude of 80s music, they used certain drum machines. But I just remember hearing how he took it and it had the sound of 80s equipment but didn’t really feel like an 80s song. Then it really kind of spawned into trying to capture the sound of the sound, you know, in the 80s for me. I’m not trying to write 80s music or 80s pop music, or synth pop or anything like that, but I’m more interested in recreating, not the same sounds, but the tonal quality – I liked how thick everything was, it was taped and it wasn’t thin, you know.
Cameron Peron: I hear a little bit of Prince – a bit of 80s Prince in the drums.
Seth Haley: Yes, Prince was a huge inspiration but it’s funny bc I wasn’t into the music in the 80s for a long time, I swore it off for a long time. Again, back to advertising, I had a buddy who would constantly send me stuff, check this out, and when I finally caved, I was like, why did I wait so long to get into this genre, this funk music was a thing that I was very unacquainted with. I remember hearing certain things growing up, from my parents’ record collection, Michael Jackson, all kind of weird stuff but I don’t know, it just took me a very long time to accept that I liked this kind of music.
Cameron Peron: How did you get into making the music yourself?
Seth Haley: Well to go way back, I remember seeing the Chemical Brothers video on MTV. The video was for Block Rocking Beats.
Cameron Peron: 1997 or 5 or something?
Seth Haley: 95 I think. I remember hearing the music and thinking what is this – that was my first introduction to electronic music, that song. And then I made my parents take me to the mall to get that cd the very next day, had to have it, obsessed over it. And I had a little casio keyboard, my sister had some keyboards, I stole all the keyboards all over the house, you know I grew up with a piano. I would just play their music on one boom box and then on another boom box I’d be recording my keyboard stuff over it and just kind of riffing. I’d make these mixtape. They were called Biohazardous Beats. That was my foray into synthesizers. Growing up I was never into music, I played sports, football and track and field and wrestling when I was younger. I had always been into computers but, I guess producing music stems from when I found out about drum & bass and got my first set of turntables and started DJing and I DJed for awhile. And then I thought why don’t I make my own stuff to DJ? I started to do that, software and started producing and DJing my stuff and other people’s stuff and learning how songs flow and things like that.
Cameron Peron: Was there anyone specifically in Drum & Bass that you really admired?
Seth Haley: Yeah, like Diesel Boy and AK1200 and DJ Dara and Black Sun Empire, I could go on forever. That was the early stuff that I heard and I used to run an online radio station, it was called Elite Radio and it was a website. I’d just do it out of my bedroom, mix for an hour and a half and then it’d be over. That’s how I met some of the guys that had gotten me into advertising, doing that. That’s basically how I got into production, when I took it seriously, not just recording riffs over someone else’s songs.
Cameron Peron: What is success like for you? How would you point to success in what you’re doing?
Seth Haley: I think success for me is being comfortable with the final output. I just – you know, being happy with it. For me wanting to listen to my own music is kind of that’s what success is. When I think about success, it’s not material things, as much as I love wasting my money on synthesizers and electronics and the like, I really think making myself happy is the best, that’s how I gauge success.
Cameron Peron: Do you have any routines that allow you to get into flow when you’re producing music?
Seth Haley: I’m a morning person, I don’t work at night at all anymore, unless there’s a studio session or something. Most musicians I find work in the evenings, but I’ll get up at 5, make coffee and start working. I’ll work till 1 maybe 2, and kind of run out of steam and then do stuff around the house, dishes, etc. It comes from, I used to do it when I was in advertising, I’d wake up early and write music before I went to work because I was so excited about it and I was at work doing visual things all day long so I was starved for doing sonic kind of work. I used to work at night, that was my only choice, but even when I worked in advertising, I always felt much more creative in the morning and still towards the end of the day running out of steam.
Cameron Peron: Right. So 5am you’re up in the morning, making coffee, are you eating breakfast? Is there any kind of a routine, a physical or mental one that allows you to get into it?
Seth Haley: It’s kind of a weird routine. I take my probiotics, I make this kind of shake of probiotics and collagen, it’s a pretty atrocious drink, but it’s good for me. And I’ll take my aeropress and make my coffee.
Cameron Peron: Tell us more about this drink.
Seth Haley: Oh, it’s just probiotics, a plant based probiotic, however many cultures it is and a marine collagen, I’ll mix those together with water, sometimes coconut water, and drink it as fast as possible. Then I’ll do the coffee, usually go sit in the backyard for about 20 minutes, drinking my first cup of coffee. I have a lot of hummingbirds at my house and I like to feed them, they come right to the feeder when I sit there and I like to watch them. I’ve saved them a few times at the house, some babies have fallen out of the nest and I’ve gotten them back into the nest so I think they’re strangely comfortable with us, my roommate and I. So yeah, I’ll sit outside for awhile until the first cup is cold and I need a new cup and I’ll go in and make a new cup and go into the studio and fire everything up and work pretty quietly. Still probably about six am by then.
Cameron Peron: So when you’re in the backyard are you just by yourself, on social media, reading the paper, etc?
Seth Haley: Nope, by myself, my phone’s inside, just watching the birds and sitting there sipping my coffee.
Cameron Peron: Nice, good for you.
Seth Haley: That’s a huge thing that I miss, being on the road, can’t wait to get back.
Cameron Peron: Right. Ok so at 6am you’re in the studio, working on music. In that time are you totally focused on that? Do you turn off the phone? What do you do to like…?
Seth Haley: Well, I have my routines where I’ll work for a little while and then there’s certain websites I’ll check and certain things I want to watch. I’m a huge fan of Casey Niestat and his videos, I always watch his videos when he posts a new one and I have some blogs I’ll check periodically. I write very quietly and my roommate, he’s a little younger than me and likes to sleep in and I try to be extra quiet respectful of that. I’ll wait till about 11 until I turn it up a little bit and that’s when I start to get weird with it and fire up the synthesizers and stuff. In the morning I’ll mostly work on things that I’ve already started, that I’m going in and doing fine detail, headphone work and stuff like that. About 10:30-11 I start writing new music and stuff and experiment.
Cameron Peron: What are the things that have gotten in your way in producing really good music, to the level that you set aside? What are the challenges you’ve found that get in your way, I don’t want to taint that, but what are the things that prevent you or you have to fight to get into that flow to produce really good stuff?
Seth Haley: Well, a lot of it was geographic for me actually. When I worked in advertising I lived in New Jersey and when my music happened I moved home back to upstate New York, Syracuse. And then went on tour for awhile and when I finally had some time I moved down to Brooklyn and lived there for about three years and then moved out to California, been living in LA for about three years now. I just feel like all the moving around really kind of disjointed things for me, it was hard to focus, there were so many projects that I had started that I really liked but going back into them after so long was extremely challenging. I’m very much the kind of person that will sit in the studio until the song is pretty much done. There are certain things that I do to every song that it doesn’t matter where I am, just little things that I sprinkle on top, but the body of the song I really like to get wrapped up in one sitting, it’s hard for me to go back into stuff and then I start putting too much into the song and it starts to lose its simplicity, and gets cluttered that way. You know, moving to California it was really difficult for me to adjust to basically the room that I was working in. I just didn’t have the proper desk, it wasn’t exactly the room was set up, the feng shui was off, nothing was working and I forced myself to finish things, lots of remixes and stuff like that but in the last year I bought a really nice professional studio desk, and I started buying outboard gear – compressors and things like that and just having it set up that way where there’s some space in there now – it was very condensed when I first moved in there, the workflow was horrible. Adjusting the room was the major challenge. I try to write on the road and stuff like that but I really need the space to be perfect and comfortable.
Cameron Peron: How much of your success would you rate is contributed by luck or talent?
Seth Haley: I mean, to be candid, my music is very simple. I never set out to make complex music. It blows my mind the amount of people that are listening to my music. I don’t know, it’s funny. I’d like to say I’m fairly, to think I know what I’m doing, but definitely there’s luck. I mean, I get a lot of younger guys writing to me asking how did you, what did you do to get where you are now, and I’m like, it came up when the blogs were exploding and that’s gone now, it’s very small compared to what it used to be and I consider that the lucky part. I just hit it right before it all fell apart. All the major blogs are still there.
Cameron Peron: Tell me what happened there.
Seth Haley: I don’t know, I feel like people moved on, they kind of just disappeared.
Cameron Peron: Is that because of Spotify and the other services?
Seth Haley: Yeah, i wonder if it’s the streaming services, which, I use them, it’s just kind of the standard practice now. It’s easy. But it’s funny how I kind of rode the tail end of the blogs, and some of the blogs I used to visit have grown bigger but a lot of them have just disappeared and that’s really sad but you have to adjust to the way it all goes.
Cameron Peron: What are the channels today that you believe are helping to grow your listener base?
Seth Haley: Oh that’s another tricky question. There’s only so much I can do as far as promotion for the music itself and shows and other projects and things like that. It’s funny how we’ve been having this conversation on this tour because unfortunately it took me a little longer to finish my record and it really should’ve been out before we did this tour so we’ve been dealing with that kind of thing. But then I keep thinking that even if my record was out, people aren’t seeing the promotions and things like that anymore. You really do have to put a lot of money into that part of it now when you didn’t two years ago.
Cameron Peron: The promotion or the creative aspect?
Seth Haley: The promotion. Creative aspect, I’m still going to create, do all the artwork and visual but I feel like it’s difficult to promote.
Cameron Peron: Does instagram provide you with an opportunity for that?
Seth Haley: Yeah, definitely.
Cameron Peron: You have really nice stuff on instagram, I love it.
Seth Haley: Yeah that’s a huge – twitter has never been my strong point and Facebook, I really don’t like beating people over the head with ads and stuff. I try to – you can see it – I can post a picture of me and my dad in the woods and I can say hey come to my show next week and it’ll get 4000 likes or so and you post a picture of a show flyer and it just might have 800 likes. People don’t want to be advertised to, they just want it to happen behind the scenes so I’m just trying to use more beautiful imagery instead of just text. It’s weird, drum and bass the show flyers were a huge thing, concert posters, things like that. It’s weird to see how it goes now, it’s been an interesting challenge. I constantly write my booking agent, like hey man is there anything I should be doing like, I don’t feel as engaged anymore. And I have taken a long time off, I don’t post on social media as much, especially when I’m not on the road. When I’m at home my life is not that interesting when I’m not on the road. It’s weird how if you take maybe a month off you kind of fall off the radar of people. I’m not one to do things just to stay current though. I think we’re so overstimulated with content it’s hard for people to pick out what they really like anymore. People miss things. It’ll happen on the road all the time. I’ll play a cd and I’ll promote what I think is a good amount on my own, aside from the promoters in a specific city and I’ll get a message two days later, “hey man, when are you coming through wherever” and I’ll be like, dude I just played there. It’s hard to cover all your bases now there’s so many sites and apps I wish it was just one thing everybody had to go here. I’m not for monopolies but, if it would be easier for getting it all in one place it would be pretty awesome.
Cameron Peron: What’s next for you?
Seth Haley: This year is fairly busy touring. I’ve had some remix requests come in. I re-signed with ghost leaf for one more LP and one EP. I wonder how long I’ll take a break for, but I don’t really know. I definitely want to keep writing music. Maybe I’ll go back to another pseudonym for awhile just so the Com Truise project doesn’t get monotonous. I don’t want to write the same songs a million times. I honestly feel this new record is very different which is good but it might be jarring for some people but I think if I maybe take a break and work on something different it’ll re-inspire me in the Com Truise project.
Cameron Peron: So it’s more about reinventing yourself by writing through another pseudonym with a different kind of music that interests you?
Seth Haley: Yeah, I think so. I’m still hoping for some film scoring work. There are some things that have popped up recently that are opportunities. That’s what I’d really like to do is do that and produce for people and I honestly thought about doing more design. I really do miss it, it definitely made me more creative musically working on visual stuff, and only having a certain amount of time for music. I think the ideas just kind of came out better. I was able to create more – I just think I have too much free time these days, I’m not busy enough in a weird way.
Cameron Peron: What do you do with all that free time?
Seth Haley: Like I said, work until about 1 or 2 in the afternoon and then I just kind of sit outside or read. I cook a lot, I love to cook, it’s like my second passion these days. I go to bed really early, watching movies, just relax.
Cameron Peron: The new album is coming out June 16, and what is it called?
Seth Haley: Yes, June 16. Iteration.