Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
There’s a lot of options for floaty music out there. Some are free with a creative commons license, some are built into tanks by manufacturers, some float centers will use meditation tracks to pull people out of it, or self compose music on occasion.
How does Float On pick their post-float music? Ashkahn and Graham explain their thoughts on post-float music, why they maintain a minimalist approach, and explain the formation of Theta State Records.
Show Resources
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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: Alright.
Ashkahn: Hey everybody welcome.
Graham: Hello another day another podcast.
Ashkahn: Yep that’s right. Everyday. My name is Ashkahn.
Graham: And I’m Graham.
Ashkahn: Alright.
Graham: And today’s question is-
Ashkahn: Off to a good start here.
Graham: “What kind of wake up music do you use or do you let each person choose?” It actually says “decide” but “choose” sounded better.
Ashkahn: It sounded more like a musical. It sounded more like the lyrics to a nice wake up song. Yeah we basically just play these podcasts intros for you.
Graham: That’s absolutely not what we do. But we have created music that we play inside our float tanks which is kind of cool. So we’ve had some different artist programs that we’ve run throughout the years and one of those programs was for musicians and they actually floated and during their time floating came up with kind of different compositions that they then recorded and we have a whole music publishing company as well. A label. That’s what they call it in the biz.
Ashkahn: Mus-labe
Graham: Yep. Thetastaterecords.com. If you go there you can stream all of our many tracks-
Ashkahn: And the program was-
Graham: A success.
Ashkahn: Yes, but it was also focused on this idea of making float music. We went into it with the musicians telling them that what we were hoping to inspire people to do is write music they thought would be nice to listen to at the end of a float.
Graham: Then commercially successful.
Ashkahn: And make us a bunch of money. So some of those songs I definitely would not play for people to bring them out of the tank.
Graham: But still, yeah.
Ashkahn: Some it would be a little intense.
Graham: Kind of like playing intros.
Ashkahn: But a good handful of them are really nice and that is since we started that program years ago what we’ve been using as the music to let people know that their floats are done.
Graham: And I kind of like it so we don’t play music leading into their floats.
Ashkahn: No.
Graham: At least by default or during their floats.
Ashkahn: No.
Graham: And really if someone wants that it takes a lot of arguing with us in order for them to get it like we can technically do it.
Ashkahn: We’re pretty hard headed about it. We’re just like you shouldn’t.
Graham: You shouldn’t want this. You should question.
Ashkahn: “You’re wrong for even thinking that. Get out of our shop!” Like it escalates pretty fast.
Graham: So, with music at the end of the, I guess the reason for that is and we don’t play music in the lobby or anything like that either. And it kind of feels like we’re throwing people into this really sensitive environment where they’re with themselves and they get to have a dialog with their own mind and body and kind of influencing that by queuing them with different music that’s played in the lobby or going into a tank, it just kind of feels wrong for leading into this solitary personal experience to us. And even for music coming out of the tank I’m still like, at the beginning before we had recorded kind of our own track with local musicians we had the same thought of “What are we supposed to play that’s bringing people out of this almost sacred float space that’s not going to influence it in someone? How do we play music that’s perfect for everyone?” You know?
Ashkahn: And we don’t know but.
Graham: But then.
Ashkahn: Here, one I know. I’m gonna make one argument that I think is a nice argument for playing music at the beginning of peoples’ floats, which is that a lot of people, when it’s their first time floating, I think get nervous that they won’t hear the music at the end. You know, that they’re sitting there in their float a little bit in the back of their head being like “Oh boy I shouldn’t miss this music” and it’s one thing to anchor you or kind of be something that’s on your mind or a little worrisome. And so I think there is something nice about hearing the music beforehand and hearing the volume and seeing that you’ll definitely, it’s very easy to hear, and stuff like that, that I think that gives people some amount of comfort if it’s their first time. Not quite stress out about perhaps missing it.
Graham: Yeah.
Ashkahn: Which still isn’t enough to make us do it. We still don’t play music beforehand but I do think that’s a legit argument.
Graham: If this didn’t come across you’re strictly in Float On opinion land when you’re going through all this stuff. We do things weird. We market differently than you do. We decide to play music differently than you do. Do a lot of very strange things. Put all of that through the float filter.
Ashkahn: Not the actual float filter.
Graham: I guess to get back to the actual question now about what kind of music we play at the end of our floats, playing anything to me kind of feels like a compromise to be honest. I’d really kind of rather have people be, if you could channel mental music that people had tie into their brain waves and they’re creating their own music to wake themselves up. In my mind that’s the ideal.
Ashkahn: Yeah. We don’t have the technology yet, but it’s going there.
Graham: Nor are we working on it actively so. But having people from the city that you’re in float in the same tanks that you’re floating in, and themselves compose music to be woken up from, from those tanks, feels almost like as close as we could get to kind of tailoring things to this float experience and hopefully ending up with something that I guess was both inoffensive to wake up to and also hopefully actually pleasant in complimenting the experience to a better degree than even just kind of downloading some of your own favorite music tracks or getting rights to play those to wake people up.
Ashkahn: Yeah and the other part of the question. Do we let people choose/decide is hard from an operational standpoint too. Some float tanks are different.
Graham: Yeah, depending on the tanks. We have a bunch of different styles.
Ashkahn: We have a bunch of different styles.
Graham: Some aggressive.
Ashkahn: Some music is loaded onto an SD card that’s in the controller box of the float tank.
Graham: Buried deep underground, in a control bunker.
Ashkahn: With lava all around it.
Graham: That one’s harder to get to.
Ashkahn: And then other ones make it a lot easier but it’s not always the easiest thing in the world to just casually let someone choose the music and especially to not have that same music be played for multiple but like everyone who you’re turning the music on for at the same time. You have to have kind of the right setup to even be able to really have that as an option. I don’t know. I guess it just seemed like a lot of effort and complexity for exactly what it was worth.
Graham: Yeah so different points we’ve had kind of different amounts that we can either play music in peoples’ tanks for them that’s their own music and that we can wake them up with it.
Ashkahn: We technically can now for like I think 4 of our 6 tanks?
Graham: Yeah, I think.
Ashkahn: We can do it.
Graham: I think 4 of the tanks.
Ashkahn: But it’s still even with the wires and everything it’s just infrequent enough that it kind of breaks our flow and so we don’t really do it or tell people about it that often.
Graham: Yeah, but we can and we have on request.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: In which we probably will in the future.
Ashkahn: Much more often is people requesting to listen to something during their float, like an experienced floater wanting to come in and hear whatever whale noises or something.
Graham: Yeah or an employee wanting to pull a tank prank on another employee playing death metal or something.
Ashkahn: I will say that I feel like we’re not the best at changing our music.
Graham: Yeah for sure. We could probably do a better job of switching up the track. I do wonder how much people actually care about that though. I know our employees sometimes complain about hearing the same music every time they go in but I almost feel like you have to be at that level of regularity to literally have it-
Ashkahn: Yeah you really gotta float quite often to I think even really notice or have a great sense of it.
Graham: I personally actually like being woken up by the same track every time. It just sort of concludes my own personal journey that I have a certain familiarity in feeling this.
Ashkahn: I kind of like hearing different, when I float at other peoples’ centers it’s always kind of exciting to hear some different song at the end.
Graham: Yeah it shakes me up man. Rattles me to my core.
Ashkahn: I had this idea way when we first started to have a progression of music that people would go through over the course of their first like 10 floats. Like everyone’s first float here is this ending song, and then their second float they hear this one, their third float they hear this one. I mean it was just unbelievably complicated to actually do something like that in reality but that was my vision going into opening Float On.
Graham: Just progressively more subliminal messaging about memberships mixed in you know. By like the fifth or sixth float you don’t really care, like you’re used to it and it’s also part of your ritual.
Ashkahn: Gift cards are a great thing around the holidays.
Graham: Yeah, so that’s our general approach. And honestly if you do want to hear some of the tracks that we use to wake people up go over to Theta State Records. Stream some of the stuff for free.
Ashkahn: Right. Dot com?
Graham: Yeah dot com. Yeah. Or just Google it. Google Theta State Records. Don’t go looking for like a local store in your area. We don’t have a brick and mortar in any town. Yeah there’s a lot of good tracks on there and it will give you an idea and if you want to use them to wake up your clients you’re very welcome to contact us and we’ll ship along a track to you or something.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: And I guess.
Ashkhan: That’s good. Yes. You guys have other questions you can go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast.
Graham: And they’ll go into the giant master list of questions that we get from all around the world.
Ashkahn: That’s very exciting.
Graham: Every single minute of every single day.
Ashkahn: An exciting list.
Graham: Talk to you tomorrow.
Ashkahn: Goodbye. See you later.
Recent Podcast Episodes
Funding your center through Kickstarter – DSP 119
Crowdfunding has made so many projects possible that would otherwise not exist. It seems perfect for niche ideas, concepts that would otherwise never see the light of day, and passion projects that just need to happen. This sounds perfect for float centers, but there are some caveats.
Crowdfunding is time intensive and there’s not guarantee of success. Aside from that, there are some issues with it that complicate things for float centers that other crowdfunded projects likely won’t face. Graham and Ashkahn talk about the successes of float center crowdfunding and the not-so-successes as well.
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For anyone considering a DIY float tank, give this episode a listen first. This isn’t a discussion on the merits of doing things one way versus another or expressing an opinion on one side and playing devil’s advocate for the other. Graham and Ashkahn know painfully well from personal experience the pitfalls of falling into the hubris trap of thinking you can build your own float tanks. They built two large open tanks in Float On and even years later they still cause headaches.
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The perception that it can be a cost-cutting measure or a more reliable way to get an operating float tank in your center by going DIY is generally pretty flawed. There’s so much to it that you just can’t consider before the fact.
Should Your Float Center have a Blog? – DSP 117
This seems like a good idea on paper. It helps with SEO stuff for Google. It gives you an outlet to write about floating and share information about the industry. And it seems to fall in line with something that other businesses do, right?
So what are the downsides? How much time and effort does a blog really take? What sort of impact does it have for a float center? Graham and Ashkahn lay out the pros and cons as well as things you may not initially consider about the responsibility of having a blog.
Thoughts on Buying Yelp Ads – DSP 116
There are lots of businesses that experience the dogged persistence of Yelp sales people calling them. Float On has done both buying Yelp ad space and living without it and Graham and Ashkahn break down exactly what that experience was like.
They also go into exactly what Yelp ads mean and how it impacts your float center (or doesn’t, as the case may be) as well as how well Yelp stacks up in comparison to other ad sources.
When is it Time to Open a Second Float Center? – DSP 115
Okay, so… Float On only has one location (not counting Float On Hong Kong) and there’s certainly a reason for that. Graham and Ashkahn have toyed with the idea of opening up another center multiple times throughout the years but something else always came up. As they’ve met more people in the industry, they’ve seen some of the pitfalls and successes from people opening additional locations, franchises and whatever else. They share their thoughts on when they think it’d be best to open and why they say to wait a little bit.
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