How'd it all start for you?

[mickomoo]

Just out of curiosity and in the spirit of conversation I wanted to ask everyone how (and when and why if you want) did you start composing and producing music? How was the process initially, and at what point did you "improve" or notice some level of change in your skill level? What do you think got you there?

[ectogemia]

I started playing piano at age 9 and took lessons til I was around 14. I didn't really touch music between ages 14 and 16, but from 17-19 I played so friggin much guitar and got pretty good at it. Around age 20 I tried composing for the first time on FL Studio, but I suuuuuucked. So I took inventory:

.I had no idea how to use a DAW.

.I had only ever played other people's music off a sheet.

.My failure on FL Studio (evinced by Rozovian's blasting of my first ever remix, "Another World of Beasts" from FFVI) had me pretty discouraged with it all, and I vanished from the site til a few months ago.

So I quit trying to compose... in a sense... right around a year ago. BUT, I decided to try to learn to improvise on piano, although I hadn't played piano in years.

Best decision I ever made for my musical development.

I probably improvised at least an hour a day 5 days a week for the next year. It came surprisingly naturally, and I could hear my playing ability, improvisational ability, and ear improving every day -- WAY faster than it had when I had practiced piano or guitar more just playing off of a sheet.

About a week after I graduated from undergrad, I opened up zircon's demo file on FL9 and analyzed the mix again and again until I understood how FL9 worked and how subtractive synths worked. For some reason, this go-around with FL was a lot more fruitful in learning how things worked than my first attempt.

So with all my improvisation improving my ear and phrasing and such and analyzing zircon's (and several others') project files to learn techniques, I attempted an original. I pumped out like 4 or 5 in the next week, they sounded pretty damn good, got very positive feedback once posted on OCR, even had people download my music (WHOA!!) and it's been an addiction ever since. Rozovian even gave me positive feedback, so I feel redeemed from when he ripped apart that old remix from last year .

[Nase]

man, that was one piece of shit software.

it was still fun as hell.

[DarkeSword]

I was bitten by a radioactive spider.

[ectogemia]

I was bitten by a radioactive spider.

superman, it really IS you!!

[zircon]

My parents signed me up for piano lessons when I was about 7. I wasn't super-serious about music; I had no aspirations of being a professional, and I was much more interested in video games and just using the computer in general (basic programming, typing up stories, etc.) However, I did enjoy music as a hobby and practiced about 30 minutes a day. My first memory of being really excited about VGM was when I rented Mystic Quest for the first time along with an SNES. The boss music was unlike anything I had ever heard and it really pumped me up.

When I was about 15, my neighbor and good friend Colin downloaded Cool Edit or something similar. We used it to make mashups of Linkin Park and Korn songs. Sounds silly, but this was basically my first introduction to computer music and digital audio editing. For example, we would take one song from "Hybrid Theory" and line it up with the remixed version on "Reanimation" and make some basic edits. He asked for a full version of this program for Christmas, but received a copy of "Magix Music Maker 7 deLuxe" instead. Now, despite also having taken some piano lessons, Colin wasn't even into music as much as I was, so it's something of a miracle that he was entertained enough by digital audio to ask for software as a gift.

Anyway, he brought it over to my house, we installed it and immediately began working on same game remixes. It's worth mentioning that the year before that I discovered OC ReMix on a friend's recommendation ("I have DSL now, what should I do with it?" "Download everything at ocremix.org") so I was considerably more interested in VGM. We began by making a remix of Phantasy Star 4's Battle Theme. When he went home hours later, I stayed working on it. I got such enjoyment out of the process that I just didn't stop after that. We worked on many more (crappy) game remixes together, and even though I was really inexperienced, I started getting better at it.

That was all in late 2002 to early 2003, if I recall. In 2003 into 2004, I began picking up FL Studio. It was very challenging at first and around this time, I hit the point where I could tell my music wasn't as good as other stuff I was hearing (like McVaffe) but I couldn't figure out why. I did manage to power through and though it was hard, I switched over to FL entirely and stopped using Music Maker. I started making original music, and in 2004 released an album ("Phasma Elementum") which I sold to friends and family. After that, my skills were still improving gradually and I managed to produce a decent remix (Calamitous Judgment) after at least 12 really bad ones.

The biggest leap in my ability came in late 2004 and early 2005, when I started collaborating with tefnek. By looking at how another FL user was doing things I picked up a huge amount of knowledge on drum sequencing, layering, and mixing. I was also starting to accumulate some half-decent software and samples. You can hear the enormous difference between Phasma Elementum and my next album, Impulse Prime, released in mid-2005. I would also attribute some of this improvement to better listening gear (headphones instead of computer speakers) and ravenously devouring all the information I could about ANYTHING related to computer music, online or otherwise.

After that, the rest is history. I went to college for music business and continued to practice & learn. Now I do it full time.

[Liontamer]

It's worth mentioning that the year before that I discovered OC ReMix on a friend's recommendation ("I have DSL now, what should I do with it?" "Download everything at ocremix.org") so I was considerably more interested in VGM. We began by making a remix of Phantasy Star 4's Battle Theme. When he went home hours later, I stayed working on it. I got such enjoyment out of the process that I just didn't stop after that. We worked on many more (crappy) game remixes together, and even though I was really inexperienced, I started getting better at it.

That was all in late 2002 to early 2003, if I recall. In 2003 into 2004, I began picking up FL Studio. It was very challenging at first and around this time, I hit the point where I could tell my music wasn't as good as other stuff I was hearing (like McVaffe) but I couldn't figure out why. I did manage to power through and though it was hard, I switched over to FL entirely and stopped using Music Maker. I started making original music, and in 2004 released an album ("Phasma Elementum") which I sold to friends and family. After that, my skills were still improving gradually and I managed to produce a decent remix (Calamitous Judgment) after at least 12 really bad ones.

The biggest leap in my ability came in late 2004 and early 2005, when I started collaborating with tefnek. By looking at how another FL user was doing things I picked up a huge amount of knowledge on drum sequencing, layering, and mixing. I was also starting to accumulate some half-decent software and samples. You can hear the enormous difference between Phasma Elementum and my next album, Impulse Prime, released in mid-2005. I would also attribute some of this improvement to better listening gear (headphones instead of computer speakers) and ravenously devouring all the information I could about ANYTHING related to computer music, online or otherwise.

So even though we were both in the community by 2003, we actually didn't run into each other until I started doing VGF, so I need a refresher on this. Back in the day, before you had any OC ReMixes passed, you had a bad rep as someone who would complain about other mixes and the judging process despite being unproven. That said, I completely missed all of it. 100% of it. You've definitely mentioned years ago that you had too negative an attitude when you started posting (I think Shariq and other judges who knew you back then agreed you were too negative when y'all were reminiscing in the judges chat years later), so I'm kind of wondering what your mindset was as far as your own skills at the time and how you were perceiving other people's skills? Is there any advice or perspective you can give as to why your attitude was different in I guess 2002-early 2003 compared to when things really started clicking musically for you? I figured I'd ask here since it's along the lines of your POV of things here when you started, and it might be interesting to more people than just me.

[Modus]

Forced into piano lessons for years and though I was a lazy brat and learned next to nothing when it came to theory, I still developed a love for music.

I was never interested in producing music until I found OCR and found out about FL Studio. I was riding high on the feeling that I had mastered video production software and thought producing music for my videos would be amazing.

Well FL Studio turned out to be a lot harder for me. Visual storytelling came easy to me, but producing a good sound was a lot harder than producing a good image. It still is. I hate that I can look at any video tutorial and know exactly what's going on but any time I watch a music tutorial I feel completely lost.

So I continue to feed off the challenge of it all.

[zircon]

Well, hopefully I wasn't just perceived as nothing but an ass since I do remember having some good conversations and making e-friends with people like OverCoat. At the time I was just really hating high school (as many people do) and that gave me a bad attitude about some things. I didn't have any outlet for music whatsoever outside of OCR and my piano lessons, which weren't really the same thing. My parents at the time didn't really support my music, neither did my guidance counselor, teachers or anyone else outside of my close friends and people in the community. Obviously now my family supports me though, no question!

My first memory of being distinctly upset with the quality of my own stuff was when I was listening to McVaffe mixes, specifically Fillmore Freestyle. The way he used drums and synths was really interesting to me and it was at that point I realized that my stuff wasn't sounding anything like that, and I couldn't figure out why. Simultaneously, I may have publicly had an attitude in ~2003 and early 2004 that my stuff should be accepted, but I think I knew that I had a ways to go and I was having a hard time with that. In short, I don't recall ever thinking to myself that I was just as good as people like McVaffe and Disco Dan. I knew there was a gap but I suppose I just really wanted acceptance anyway since I wasn't getting much of it IRL at the time.

Once things started to click, around when I started Impulse Prime and began collabing with McVaffe, I think I was listening more critically overall. I was buying electronic music CDs and catching up on years of history that I missed. I got in the habit of doing 1:1 comparisons between my own music and stuff by Prodigy, Crystal Method, Chemical Brothers, and others like them. I've never lost that sense of being able to compare my music to somebody else's and immediately recognize the weaknesses in my own.

[AngelCityOutlaw]

My mother was pretty much the 80s Glam Metal Queen and had hundreds and hundreds of cassette tapes and vinyl records.

While everyone else was listening to Korn, Marylin Manson and Britney Spears I had Ratt, Poison, Motley Crue, Elvis, Guns N Roses, etc. If you can name me one band from sunset strip LA from around 84-91 that I haven't at least heard of.....I'd die of surprise.

When I was a little kid I would write mean songs about other kids I didn't like. Of course I didn't know anything about actually composing music, I just sang the lyrics and wrote them down. So that's how I started writing music I guess.

Now I just make shitty, badly recorded songs instead.

[avaris]

Simultaneously, I may have publicly had an attitude in ~2003 and early 2004 that my stuff should be accepted, but I think I knew that I had a ways to go and I was having a hard time with that. In short, I don't recall ever thinking to myself that I was just as good as people like McVaffe and Disco Dan. I knew there was a gap but I suppose I just really wanted acceptance anyway since I wasn't getting much of it IRL at the time.

I was exactly the same way from 2006 to 2007. Being an uber competitive person myself who can be ultra critical of himself does not help either. I believe my inability to ever compose in a "genre" or focus in on "genre" really hurts musically at times.

I played in school band from 5th grade to the beginning of 8th grade. In that time I played 7 different instruments. I got bored of each instrument very quickly and moved onto another one. Also did not like the music I was playing. I wanted to focus on sports in high school instead so band didn't seem like the best use of time.

During middle school and the beginning of high school I use to cut out instrumental sections of rap songs from CD's and songs from the radio on my stereo. Piece them back together and rap over them. Did that for quite some time.

My sophomore year of high school a friend of mine introduced me to Fruity Loops. I basically composed original music in FL for about 3-4 years. I had zero knowledge of anything. I just kept hammering away and tried to compose the melodies in my head. After that I completely dropped music for a year due to personal stuff.

My Junior year of college I decided to pick-up music again after listening to OCR for a year. This was the summer of 2006. I just dived in head first into everything. It was really hard to re-learn alot of stuff. It was both a rewarding and painful experience. Good news, I discovered at this time my love for music technology in general was just as much as composing music, maybe even more. I got really into sound design and mixing and mastering. By early 2007 I was doing sound design professionally working on commercial Refills for Reason. I still do professional sound design as a side-job to this day. After undergrad I went to graduate school for Music Technology which was friggin awesome.

I am such a music tech nerd, I have used all of the following on OC ReMIxes:

(Cubase, FL, Ableton Live, Sonar, Reason/Record, Logic) (used Pro-Tools in school)

I think my next goals are to find an electronic genre to call home and hopefully start working towards getting an original track signed. Also want to make another OC ReMix to hit 10 mixes posted. Can't stress to everyone enough to remember to always have fun and don't be too critical. I probably really set myself back being overly critical for too many years.

[liquid wind]

like all kids that have no idea wtf they're doing with music, I downloaded FL studio one day in 2005 and started tinkering around. when I first started I just made it my goal to learn new things and use composition to practice them, like I'd try to write each new song in a new scale or meter that I hadn't used before or thought I could use work with. all of my songs were impromptu, kind of one hour compoish as I was using the FL demo that doesn't allow you to save. shortly after this I also took to analyzing other peoples work more, I downloaded a lot of MIDI's and tried to pick them apart. I also downloaded modplug and started doing the same with modules but it would be another few months before I attempted to track anything.

eventually I got to the point where I wanted to learn modplug, being sick of FL's demo restrictions and not having any money, so I just sat down and wrote 4 really shitty pseudo chiptunes one night. some time after switching to modplug I found out about psycle which was a similar tracker but with a machine interface similar to that of buzz, and started using that as my main tool. although I did wind up buying FL once I got out of high school and got a job I think it was helpful that I got a few different perspectives, and being able to watch other peoples mods was great. the tracker scene was already dying by this time and I always wished I had gotten into it earlier in life, I loved how with modules you had the whole guts of the song rather than just the end audio

seeking more consistent practice I started a weekly OHC in 2007 that at it's beginning was basically a kwakfest ripoff(all MIDI). my bro kaxon wound up doing the file hosting and organizing for this because I am lazy and useless. interest in this died out about a year later, and eventually I just made an account here after avoiding it forever(wanted to change my artist handle first but I never thought of anything so I just stuck with this goofy name)

pretty much I've found compoing and viewing other peoples project files to be really useful, and reading a lot and integrating what I've read immediately after

[AngelCityOutlaw]

like all kids that have no idea wtf they're doing with music, I downloaded FL studio one day in 2005 and started tinkering around.

All kids lol. I started (truly) writing music with a guitar....I had no idea what FL studio or a DAW even was

I also had no idea wtf I was doing with music.

[AngelCityOutlaw]

I was bitten by a radioactive spider.

Thought you were more of a DC fan?

[DarkeSword]

It's easier to write "I was bitten by a radioactive spider" than "One night on the way home from seeing The Mark of Zorro with my socialite parents we took a shortcut through the notorious Crime Alley and were mugged by a man who wanted to steal my mother's pearl necklance that I asked her to wear and because my father tried to reason with the mugger my parents were shot and killed which led me to ..."

[Rozovian]

I played a shareware game, liked the music, asked the dude who made the game how to extract it from the game (no music folder, all in the app), he pointed me to modarchive, where I found mod files, which made me think I could make music with the computer, which made me get a tracker, which let me make sucky music, which pushed me to pick up a better tracker, which let me make better music, which prepared me for working with GarageBand on my dad's laptop until I got my own laptop for which I later got Logic and some Jam Packs and then an upgraded verison of Logic and then some additional instruments and a better computer and a midi keyboard and made loads and loads of music so that almost 10 years and 1700+ project files later I've learned a thing or two which I to a grat extent attribute to the ocr feedback boards and the opportunity to critique ppl's remixes which taught me to listen critically to my own which has helped me improve tremendously and above the standards bar for ocr which felt pretty good at the time tho now I'd like to go back and redo some of the tracks because some of my reasoning at the time, not to mention sound design and mixing, really weren't that great but in the grand scheme of things it was a stepping stone, a step in the right direction in which I hope I'm still heading so I can actually start making some dough out of my music making such as my upcoming album which I really need to start finishing the writing for so it'll ever get finished and I can point to that and say "I did that, do you need anything like that?" to ppl who might need my kind of music and therefor might hire me to do the music, which is something I've kind'a wanted to do for quite a while now, and despite getting my feet wet here or there I haven't really done anything that I'm happy enough with to put on a resume or demo tape or anything, but I'm guessing that'll come eventually, tho a few years later I'll think it's terrible which is something I'll attribute to improved self-critique which is somethiung I think everyone should work on here as ocr is a great palce to do just that in that there's both a couple of subforums for ppl's works and an extensive collection of high-quality works to compare those mixes to so you know what passes for good around here.

*breath*

And I picked up guitar after a short try-out on a synth, played in a little band with my friends which taught me a lot about how instruments interact in a band setting and later also picked up bass and am currently doing a lot on the aforementioned keyboard in order to become more effective at using that in making music which should save time when writing as well as add a far more emotive human touch than my sequencing can despite numerous attempts to humanize manually which is something that just doesn't beat the real thing tho you can get pretty close if you know what you're doing...

A little hyper, tonight, maybe?

[Guifrog]

I always wanted to be a musician of some type. Turns out that I played the drums - then quit. Started with acoustic guitar - quit. Then I went to keyboards - quit, then flute - quit. I mean... Wha?

Yet, I wanted to make music! Looks like I'm not the guy who gets along well with actual instruments, and it took some time until I realized that there were many ways of doing fully orchestrated songs with machines.

I downloaded FL Studio in 2009, and this is when I first wrote music - a crappy Oil Ocean ReMix that got immediately rejected from OCR . But I'm such a curious and stubborn monkey, I'd learn how to use FL at any cost, and once I managed to understand the basics, Shiva Nataraja came. How this mix turned out to be accepted at my current level, I dunno, but it was SO exciting *-*

Then I really felt the weight of still being a newbie. What was EQ? Compression? Dry? Wet? How to humanize? Where to get better samples? Why do the demo projects use so many weird plugins attached to the instruments, and what do they do? The results: since my indian-influenced mix, I can count like... 8 NO's! Precious crits included, along with the help from the WIP forums.

Again, I'm a stubborn dude. Still don't feel like taking music classes, and still willing to have more mixes accepted here. This is quite a college for me already!

[EC2151]

Definitely some interesting stories abound in this topic.

I've been playing the piano since age 6, and around that time I started to make up my own melodies.

Ol' Ludwig von Beethoven was my idol back then, and I wanted to become the next him. (look how that turned out D: )

Started taking lessons at age 8 from a teacher who taught me until I was a senior in high-school.

It kind of always amazed me back then that my peers playing piano or other instruments had no ambitions to compose music. Really, in my mind, it was that if you played an instrument, you naturally lent yourself towards composing your own pieces. I still kind of think that, but I guess I can see why someone is content with just performance.

However, ever since I was a little kid, one of my dreams was to be a big-time composer (now I'm a history major, ha ha), and later in life that morphed into becoming a video-game composer.

Man, before DAWs I just wrote music down on sheet paper (hell sometimes I DREW the sheet paper!). I got a program (or rather, my computer savvy brother got a program) that let me compose with a little bit of limitations (couldn't for the life of me get percussion in there) and I thought i was in heaven. Of course that program bugged out on my old PC from 1999. Also, when I discovered OCR one of my bucket-list ambitions was to become a posted mixer on this site. Still waiting to hear on that one.

For a long time I put off composition (though I regularly still came up with new pieces for the piano), until more and more I became convinced that I needed to get the old music out of my head so as to allow new songs to come to form (because I had cataloged and remembered about every single song I've ever written from about age 6 in my head, and it was getting pretty crowded in there, not to mention the constant playing to remember them all).

On another forum I went to roughly 1.5-2 years ago, someone gave me the link to a pirated copy of FL Studio 7, which I made many many bad songs with. They are painful to listen to. Last year though I decided that I should go "legit" and bought the producer edition of FL9, and bought actual sound libraries.

Of course, my lappy just died a while back, meaning I'm trying to figure out how to get FL9 working on my computer (it's not working anymore... I think I might have to uninstall it and get FL10... but I don't want FL10!)- but all the same, it more or less marks the time where I started to get all super-serious about my hobby. Of course, I was always super-serious about it.

Speaking of trackers, as of late, i've been heavily into making tracker music, with (in order): TFM Music Maker, VGM Music Maker, FamiTracker, Beepola, and Synder (haven't figured out Vortex Tracker 2 yet). Because I love a good chiptune (despite not being good at making them).

[Yoozer]

My grandmother used to have this:

which I somehow discovered and played the hell out of. I received it as a present for my 6th birthday. It sounded like a giant melodica with a vacuum cleaner inside (and that's how it works, too).

An uncle used to have this:

which I received for my first Communion - my parents saw how fond I was of the orange thingy but it made an awful lot of noise, and this thing had headphones.

After just attempting to play for a few years I took lessons for one year at age 9 or so. Then the Commodore 64 happened and my uncle (another one) gave me tapes with Mike Oldfield and Jarre. I was blown away and it started to grate more and more that I wasn't able to make the sounds I heard with the organ. I also heard lots of sounds in the C64 that were immensely intriguing. Also, the lessons were boring to me - I started cheating by simply memorizing the music instead of reading the sheet music and acting as a human sequencer. Nothing exciting happened in terms of chords.

So I quit taking the lessons and "progressed" on my own. However, the sound issue still wasn't solved, so my uncle took me on a road trip to various music stores. I was drooling at this:

which was about 1200 guilders at the time. I would never be able to afford that. (I got my revenge: last year I scored one for 25 euros and good lord, it sucked. Glad I never did this.)

So instead, my uncle directed me to something affordable, which happened to be this.

The salesguy gave me a pair of headphones, selected a preset, enabled the arpeggiator and my uncle started haggling about the price to reduce it from the princely sum of 550 guilders down to 500. In the meantime, I hit the keys.

A meter-wide grin split my face. This was it. This was exactly the thing I've been looking for, for all that time; this made the sounds I wanted.

So we loaded it in his car and returned home. My dad rigged up an old turntable with built-in amp and two speakers - the predecessor of this thing:

and I could play. Most of the time I'd be wearing headphones, though. That same uncle built me a primitive 3-channel mono mixing desk so I could listen to several instruments at the same time, because then this arrived:

and this:

Then I sold them and tried to trade up every year or so; scraping money from birthdays and Sinterklaas together and stocking shelves and working on a farm planting leek and so on. I went through a Yamaha PSR-7, a Yamaha PSR-500 (bigger keyboard, taught me about building my own accompaniment rhythms), a Roland JW50 (my first real workstation with disks!), a Yamaha SY35 (FM+sample-based synth with no sequencer but with effects - which I sampled into FastTracker) to a Yamaha W5 workstation around 1997. This was a serious workstation with lots of synthesis options and effects and 76 keys and it taught me all about sequencing. I already knew about synthesis. Then there wasn't anything to trade up to anymore except for well, more workstations.

In that same year I did a performance with the workstation; kind of like a Faithless-like track. In 1998 I met a guy who saw me back then - he later told me that when he saw me he wanted to quit because I did a kick-ass track with a single machine, and he had several synths and a sampler and if I was interested in making some tracks? Sure!

So I was introduced to Cubasis (now Cubase Elements) which was a pure MIDI sequencer. I dragged my stuff over there, and because I saved up and made more money now I could buy a Roland XP-30 which was added to the collection. We made a demo in '98 and a serious one to send to record companies in '99. We sent 20 of 'm to various companies and got 3 replies.

By that time the other guy was done with highschool but I was still studying for my BSc in Computer Science, and my schedule didn't allow for much in the way of making music. So, he continued and made a career out of it, and I put my part of the advance in buying a serious mixing desk instead of the crappy DJ mixing desk I had (no EQ, nothing). His dad had died the previous year and left him a sizable enough inheritance to shop around for equipment; and that's what he did. I recommended the Virus B to him, he asked if I wanted one too and pay him back at zero interest rate - and I declined - my parents would never forgive me for that (and I was still living with them).

Since he had the advance; his own apartment, all the necessary gear to start production - I vowed to myself that it wouldn't be the equipment that would hold me back, so I stocked more shelves and did helpdesk work and had my internships and so on. I amassed quite a bit of stuff and studied it inside and out - but never made music, merely learned and learned.

Fast forward to now: I'm selling off the extraneous crap, around 2007 or so I've also added plugins and switched DAWs (from Cubase to Ableton Live, which at least made me feel a lot better about making music), and still don't have time to make music! However, I can tell you quite a bit about synthesis.

All the things I so foolishly sold in 1992 I bought back again for pretty reasonable prices back when they still were reasonable; I paid less for the Juno if you factor in inflation. Since I blew up the DR110 I got a beaten-up unit and put the mint case of the blown one around it. I got the Solina back for a stupidly low price from the man I originally sold it to.

Meanwhile I'm downsizing (again) and still not making music.

What does this have to do with OCR? Well, this. I still have to redo that one, as it was sloppy as hell.

[OverCoat]

Well, hopefully I wasn't just perceived as nothing but an ass since I do remember having some good conversations and making e-friends with people like OverCoat.

Soundtempest brethren 4 lyfe

How'd it all start... well, when I was a kid, I was pretty much raised on 70s/80s rock, my dad is a huge prog rock/singer-songwriter/classic rock fan, and was in a local prog band of his own in that era, so I grew up listening to his ELP, Yes, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, etc. collection. My mom listened to [and still listens to] brand new stuff, so at the time it was all about grunge and alt rock, especially growing up in the early 90s in Seattle. As far as myself, well.. I was the kind of kid who stuck a cartridge into my genesis just to listen to the sound test and later when I got a computer I would listen to redbook audio CD-ROM games on my cd player.

I never really knew what I wanted to do with myself, but then in high school I discovered the magic of Napster. I had also been emulating a shitton of Genesis/SNES games at the time, so I was downloading videogame music mp3s off there. One day I saw a Shadow's Theme remix by "OC Remix." Turns out it was actually by K. Praslowicz Anyway, I followed the link here and became active in the community. After discovering the IRC channel and basically spending every waking hour on it, I decided to try this making music thing out [p.s. if you actually decide to listen to this song, make sure your speakers are turned way down]. I got FruityLoops 2.7 off Morpheus and played around with it, but 3.0 came out soon after and that's when I finally made that awful song I just linked . I was so happy to have created something, and it was so simple to me, that I kept at it. At the time I was hugely influenced by CotMM, Starla, Daknit, and Beatdrop, since they were the ones I was talking to the most at the time, and if it wasn't for their help I wouldn't have gotten to this point.

I guess I'm kind of a late bloomer with starting to make a career out of my music, and there's still a lot for me to work on [promotions!], but I'm extremely proud of this last decade that I have spent pursuing music, writing over 1,000 songs, sharing it with people who enjoy it.

[Jamphibious]

I think my very first taste of music writing was when I downloaded a version of Guitar Pro 4 (I think it was 4), in Grade 9/10. I had started playing guitar in Grade 8, and I took piano lessons when I was way younger, but I didn't get into it much (I wish I did). I mainly used Guitar Pro to learn songs from downloaded tabs at first, but then I realized I could make my own MIDI songs with it. I had also downloaded some version of RPG Maker around the same time, and I found the idea of exporting MIDIs from Guitar Pro to use in RPG Maker to be really awesome. I was making music for my own terrible RPGs, which felt pretty amazing at the time. A lot of the MIDIs I made were pretty basic, but I thought I had some cool ideas and there might be stuff worth salvaging if I ever bother to go back and siphon through it all.

Anyways, I fiddled about with it for a while, and then I came across FL Studio. My first year of fiddling about with it in Grade 11 was interesting, and resulted in some pretty terrible electronica that clipped left, right, and center. But again, there might still be ideas worth salvaging. I'll admit a lot of it was just bad though.

I found out there was a Music & Computers course offered at my school in Grade 12, which had us making music in Encore. I ended up getting a 99% in that course, and my teacher was really impressed by my work. I had a friend say that a lot of my music sounded like something she would hear in Sonic, and that made sense since the Genesis Sonic games were such a big thing for me growing up and probably got me interested in VGM in the first place. Taking that course definitely pushed me in the right direction. Getting that kind of support from my music teacher and from my peers was an amazing feeling.

However, it was a long while after this before I actually started to make decent sounding stuff in FL Studio. My musical ideas were improving, but of course the mixing was just bad because I didn't know what I was doing. I think during my first year of university is where I finally looked online for any tips, tricks, and guides that I could and learned a lot about mixing, and my work really showed a spike in quality. I'm still learning a lot now, but that was when it really picked up. Also, when I finally got a MIDI keyboard hooked up to my computer earlier this year, it really helped with efficiency and has also made it a lot easier to create melodies, chords, etc.

Since video games have been a prominent part of my life since I can remember, when I started fiddling with writing music I just knew I wanted to write for video games. I always enjoyed all kinds of music growing up, and it was probably my biggest passion alongside video games. So why not put the two together, I thought. Overall I'm pretty happy with where I am now, and I'm continuously learning things as I go. I hope to continue to improve as I move forward.

[Frederic Petitpas]

[........]

[SJM]

I've been growing up in a quite musical family and so I was fascinated by music very soon - I had my first piano lessons at the age of 4 (so about 13 years ago) and until today I love the piano my parents bought for me back then . Apparently I liked to "compose" back then, too, because I have lot of sheets of paper with hardly recognisable notes on them

Well, after maybe 10 years I stopped having regular lessons, although I did have them for a few months a few times

One day I found a book in a library entitled "Cubasis für Kids" - it had Cubasis 2.0 Go! on it and I used it to make 30 seconds MIDI files with orchestral ideas I had - all just played back via the standard way... probably something like a simple MIDI wavetable - I don't know Either way, here I learned about MIDI/audio and the arranging concept with clips and tracks.

I don't know what happened earlier, but two events ware important for the final musical phase (=the one I'm currently in): First, I listened to the german ambient electronica artist "Schiller" and I really liked the music, but there was one sound in a piece (

at 2:20 ) that made my say: "OMG! I need to know about these synthesizers. I wanna make a sound that sounds that amazing, too!". So I started searching the web, found SynthEdit and quickly learned about oscillators, LFOs and envelopes, although I didn't really understand that filter/frequency/compression/etc stuff until I got an reaaaally old book from a library, which was basically teaching you how to use an really old modular synthesizer - but the knowledge about all waves being composited of sine waves and so on still applied, so I learned a lot about all that I built a "piano" sound and a "string" sound ("the more detuned, the better, right? why not have 32 oscillators?") and since MULAB was the only "free" DAW I found I built two 20 second pieces in it using my great ( ) synths.

The second event was seeing somebody I knew start something with propellersomething on his laptop and that laptop was suddenly making cool music that guy created! So I soon started experimenting with Reason and... that was awesome! So this is more or less the "real" start of making music for me After some time I switched to REAPER, because although Reasons rack was wonderfully flexible, I mostly inserted hundreds of effect plugins instead of really few plugins properly (= sound is too filtered?....Layer yet another Thor over it!) and soon lost control

So now with REAPER I'm really making music and it's fun and it's rewarding and I can't imagine this "phase" to end yet

tl;dr: classical background - different phases on the way to producing music

Sorry if I wrote too much useless information

[ShrackAttack]

I started playing music in the middle school band as a percussionist in the 6th grade. I ended up doing a lot of the whole marching band thing back in high school and had thought about pursing DCI for a while.

After I got out of high school I had no idea what I wanted to do... I pretty much picked a college at random and went thinking I wanted to be a computer programmer. That first semester I chose to do marching band and take percussion ensemble, from there I just sort of kept signing up for music classes and ended up choosing "Music Technology" as my major 2 and a half years into my degree study, while still having no real clue what I wanted to do or major in. Music Tech was just a 'temporary' thing at the time when I chose it. 6 months after that (around 2009) I took my first computer music class and started on my first DAW "Digital performer". I was freaking AMAZED at the possibilities even though the first thing I ever did was utterly horrible, which was a very bad Chrono Cross track remake (I think of People Imprisoned?). Years prior to that I had been listening to people like kLutz, Ailsean, Zircon, and that same Shadow's theme remix that overcoat mentioned.

I started actually trying to write my own, original music a little over a year and a half ago. Since then, I feel like I've improved drastically since that first crappy Chrono Cross track remake in digital performer. I've pretty much been reading everything I possibly can on music, sound, production, audio implementation, etc since then and try to work on something every day. I graduated college 9 months ago and due to that hard work and absolute persistence in a short amount of time I am/have:

-Working on SFX/music for 2 games of high quality (unfortunately unpaid, but work nonetheless)

-Won a Music Teachers Association composition contest for my state at the highest level

-Teaching percussion to high school kids/performing for pay

-Interning at a record label

I am hoping that within a couple years I will be able to support myself monetarily off of JUST audio and not have to have a part time job to supplement it, but for now I can be content with what I've accomplished in a short time I think.

I will say that trying to do music for a living is a very discouraging business. Comparing your track you just made to someone who is much further along can be very humbling and extremely frustrating when you can't understand how to make yours sound similar. Becoming even decent at music composition and production takes many years and I know a lot of beginners expect it to just suddenly happen (Myself included until recently) but its much more of a slow evolution. It takes constant persistence and a lot of hard work every day for years. It is very encouraging to know how a lot of the people you look up too now started out that very same way and that most people were not just born writing great music, but achieved it through practice and discipline.

and TLDR

[Nonamer]

I took voice lessons for about five years and learned the basics of sight-singing. I didn't make it into an arts high school choral program (god damn tenors...), so my musical interests took a screeching halt...until I joined OCR, which revived them. I'm learning how to mess around with Logic right now. Compared to GarageBand, this is golden.