How'd it all start for you?

[LuketheXjesse]

Started learning guitar 4-5 years ago, got into actual music recording here on OCR around 2-3 years ago, and now http://tindeck.com/listen/zdvn

[theshaggyfreak]

I've been involved with music since I was fairly young. At the age of 8, my parents got me started with band at school and I learned to play clarinet. I kept up with music in various forms from middle school to high school. I eventually picked up trumpet for the typical band stuff and bass guitar the high school jazz band.

When I started college (1992), I concentrated most of my musical efforts on playing bass and I started to play in various bands. My uncle had given me this old 4-track reel to reel deck and I spent quite a bit of time using that to record demos with the bands I played in. Listening to those old tapes is kind of painful now but I still have that deck. All I had was that deck and a few crappy Radio Shack mics that I'd borrow from friends.

Around 1999/2000, I got interested in digital recording when a friend of mine showed me the studio that he worked at. They had Pro Tools as well as some ADAT gear and I got pretty interested in all of that. Unfortunately, it was still fairly expensive to get into setting up a home studio at that point. So, I didn't start buying any sort of recording gear until a couple years later.

I started out with a really crappy Lexicon interface and various DAWs that were out at the time. FL and Cool Edit are the two I remembered using most. I didn't have a huge interest in VGM at that point and I was just starting to grasp what synths could do. Prior to all of that, I was just your typical rock n roll guy. I wasn't until I started using Reason that a lot of things clicked for me.

So, I've been working on recording various types of music in my project studio since then. Most of the stuff I've done has just been my own originals but I've recorded some other bands as well. I certainly have collected my share of gear over the past 10 years but it's fun to have all those toys to play with. One of these days I really need to sit down and attempt doing something for OCR.

[ad.mixx]

I started with orchestral epics in mario paint.

[SapSpecial]

hahah Yeah i fooled around once or twice with mario paint, too. i started playing the kayboard around six years old and just progressed to sequencers at 14. Experimented with FL and stuff. Then I picked up other instruments along the way.

Heres where i kinda am today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg5O1wc0nVc

[Meteo Xavier]

All I really remember for how it started with me was that I'd get into music as a way of getting into acting, that I'd be a superstar by 19 by sheer will alone and could get into movies.

Now I look back and wonder what the fuck I was thinking. 8 years later though, I seem to accrued some skill and some success that I could turn this endeavor into something serious.

[Cyril the Wolf]

Sax --> AOL's "Antagonist message boards" where I downloaded Final Fantasy 9's battle music (I have a remix of that with Fishy on the FF9 Project) --> Getting Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 Demo so I could watch the notes fly by ---> Got interested in the bass part s and showed my father who showed me Rush's Cygnus X-1... that is where it changed.

In 2003 I started hanging around VGMusic trying to make MIDIs mostly original as in: http://www.acelie.com/cyril/midi.html

In 2005ish I started trying to record stuff becuase I primarily wanted to make guitar music: http://www.acelie.com/cyril/audio.html started.

Uh, basically I've been improving since, I have a rather large body of work now but I won't bore you with the details. My remixing has improved mys skills much, but my lack of vocal skill has put off me subbing a lot of shit.

[PROTO·DOME]

Classically trained musician, someone said "you should use Fruity Loops", I used Fruity Loops.

The coolest of stories.

[ectogemia]

Classically trained musician, someone said "you should use Fruity Loops", I used Fruity Loops.

The coolest of stories.

My story is pretty much the same, except I don't have much training, no one told me to use Fruity Loopz, and my story isn't all that cool.

edit: But really, when did you start with all that music nonsense? And you're pretty jazzy for being classically trained

[Rukunetsu]

I've always loved music - and especially the piano. While I had no serious formal training, I just took to playing around and discovering chords (particularly jazzy ones), and being inspired by various genres of music. As the years progressed, I discovered digital music creation (aside from recording it on my Yamaha PSR-340).

I then got Ableton Live 6 - and the rest is history.

[Modus]

I was cornered by one of those musical monkeys that hold the cymbals. I remember that day like it was the day it happened on. It just kept bashing those things together for hours and hours, inches from my face. Eventually the monkey's owner, some fat guy with a music box, came up to me real close and said "FL studio and the monkey will go"

Of course I had no idea what he meant at the time but I got my ass out of there. I did look up FL studio when I got home and for fear of the monkey started learning it.

Man I've never shared that with anyone before

[ectogemia]

I was cornered by one of those musical monkeys that hold the cymbals. I remember that day like it was the day it happened on. It just kept bashing those things together for hours and hours, inches from my face. Eventually the monkey's owner, some fat guy with a music box, came up to me real close and said "FL studio and the monkey will go"

Of course I had no idea what he meant at the time but I got my ass out of there. I did look up FL studio when I got home and for fear of the monkey started learning it.

Man I've never shared that with anyone before

Your mushrooms: hand them over.

[Modus]

Your mushrooms: hand them over.

For someone who misuses colons?

NEVERrrr

*sip*

[Rukunetsu]

FL Studio. FL Studio Everywhere lol.

[Nabeel Ansari]

I learned FL Studio.

Then I learned music.

Yeah.

[PROTO·DOME]

edit: But really, when did you start with all that music nonsense? And you're pretty jazzy for being classically trained

I started a while back but didn't start taking it seriously until about three or four years ago. When you're a kid/angsty teen you just don't give a damn and practicing anything is a chore.

Classically trained just refers to learning music through all the theory and sheet music junk; jazz was a fairly large(ish) part of it, especially when it came to practicing harmony. Mind you, jazz is 'classical' enough now for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music to stick it in their grade syllabus alongside Hayden and Wagner.

[Anorax]

I started a while back. When you're a kid/angsty teen you just don't give a damn and practicing anything is a chore.

This^

I guess I'm somewhere in one of the dozen or so processes Zircon said he went through. My music still sucks, I have no idea what my attitude about it is (I'm sure the judges would laugh in my face if it wasn't for the fact that they are nice), because I've never posted.

it's been about a year and a half since I downloaded Mixcraft 5. It took me about 3 weeks to learn what the quantize did.

From the start, I've basically ignored effects. Now I know they are really important to the overall quality of your work. I'm still working on improving, but not all paths are straight and smooth.

[WillRock]

Well, I was basically brought up on music - classical music that is, beethoven, mozart, all that stuff. I started doing piano lessons when I was about 7, and learnt music theory.

In my core, I was a musician, but I also had a major interest in video games, something my parants tried to limit me from doing by only buying me a gameboy and limiting my time on it.

Back to music, it was around high school that I first heard Bon Jovi - Living on a Prayer. Life changing moment for me, that signaled my change of interest from classical music and the 90's boy band mainstream faff I was subjected to. I started to look into all the classic rock bands similar to Bon Jovi - Guns N' Roses, Motley Crue, Def Leppard, Van Halen etc. All this inspired me to pick up a guitar.

Around this time I started to realise that I had compositional skill (I kept imagining in my head differences to the songs I was hearing, and hearing them as I wanted them to be) and got interested in composing. I got a computer and brought cubase SE, which was to help with my music classes at school and started composing rock tracks. It was basically midi quality but I didn't care.

Move forward a few years to college, and I found Reason, through which I was subjected to much higher quality sounds to make my music with. I also learnt the basics of production at this point, putting effects on my instruments etc. I still made rock tracks with bad guitar samples tho I formed a college band called No Idea in which I played guitar, and recorded an album of music at college.

Then, when I left, I went back to gaming more while waiting for Uni to start. One day, I was playing links awakening found myself wondering what tal tal heights music would sound like if it wasn't limited by the hardware. Thats when it hit me to do remixes. I'd been doing seqeunced rock tracks up to this point but thought that if people heard my music, they'd think it was naff, so I switched to synths for the time being. I made a remix of tal tal heights, and made a youtube account to upload it, which is here: http://www.youtube.com/user/WillRock07?feature=mhee.

I found myself being subjected to requests and ended up fulfilling a few, all links awakening tracks, and my ever growing fanbase kept suggesting I submit to OCR. Not knowing what OCR was, I looked it up, and found myself listening to remixes from bLiNd, Zircon and Mcvaffe and immediately found myself feeling outclassed. Still, I submitted a track, it got rejected, and I tried to up my game by posting tracks on the WIP forums for feedback, and experimenting with aspects of reason I hadn't before. All this experimenting helped me to make Snowboardin Sonic. It got rejected, but I felt it was a huge step in the right direction, and redid tal tal heights, which ended up as my first OCRemix. I resubbed Snowboardin Sonic, and then things started to click for me. I later brought Pro Tools, and could finally add guitars into my music, and thus... all these experiences helped me become the musician I am today.

[Garpocalypse]

All this experimenting helped me to make Snowboardin Sonic. It got rejected, but I felt it was a huge step in the right direction... and I resubbed Snowboardin Sonic, and then things started to click for me. Snowboardin Sonic, Snowboardin Sonic, Snowboardin Sonic. I later brought Pro To-Snowboardin Sonic, and could finally add Snowboardin Sonic into my Snowboardin Sonic, and thus... Snowboardin Sonic ll these experiences helped me become the musician I am today. Snowboardin Sonic!

*as heard by Gar23*

I agree with your points and overall views on life WR. Snowboardin Sonic was the best Sonic remix ever.

Could you post a link to the rejected version? I'm curious as hell as to what it sounded like.

-gar

[WillRock]

This was the rejected mix

[mickomoo]

This^

I guess I'm somewhere in one of the dozen or so processes Zircon said he went through. My music still sucks, I have no idea what my attitude about it is (I'm sure the judges would laugh in my face if it wasn't for the fact that they are nice), because I've never posted.

it's been about a year and a half since I downloaded Mixcraft 5. It took me about 3 weeks to learn what the quantize did.

From the start, I've basically ignored effects. Now I know they are really important to the overall quality of your work. I'm still working on improving, but not all paths are straight and smooth.

I'm in the same boat... I wanna punch my computer because not only am I not improving but Mixcraft's lack of memory keeps crashing any of my projects with 10 or more tracks.

[Anorax]

I'm in the same boat... I wanna punch my computer because not only am I not improving but Mixcraft's lack of memory keeps crashing any of my projects with 10 or more tracks.

Mixcraft Memory issues? Never had that one (ok, I guess I have, CPU load issues - use the Freeze Track command Ctrl+F)... Hmm.

About "not improving", just work at it. Believe it or not, an absolute great way to organize Mixcraft is to change the track names to whatever they are used for. Say, if I have several instances of the same VSTi open, it does well for me to rename the track to something completely different. Try naming the tracks to something that describes the sound of that track.

Also, work with the Automation lane. It's a great thing to use.

[AngelCityOutlaw]

I'm in the same boat... I wanna punch my computer because not only am I not improving but Mixcraft's lack of memory keeps crashing any of my projects with 10 or more tracks.

I haven't improved in the last 10 years, so don't feel bad.

or maybe that's not encouraging? I dunno.

[mickomoo]

Mixcraft Memory issues? Never had that one (ok, I guess I have, CPU load issues - use the Freeze Track command Ctrl+F)... Hmm.

About "not improving", just work at it. Believe it or not, an absolute great way to organize Mixcraft is to change the track names to whatever they are used for. Say, if I have several instances of the same VSTi open, it does well for me to rename the track to something completely different. Try naming the tracks to something that describes the sound of that track.

Also, work with the Automation lane. It's a great thing to use.

Freeze track function helps, but the problem is I guess I'm doing to many things at once. I don't like freezing tracks cus I don't record my tracks individually

[Anorax]

Freeze track function helps, but the problem is I guess I'm doing to many things at once. I don't like freezing tracks cus I don't record my tracks individually

I guess I don't have a problem with it because... hmm maybe this is becoming off topic... Click the bottom link in my signature. we'll talk there.

[noTuX]

I really don't have any type of musical education. I pretty much make stuff that I think sounds good. That's pretty much how I've always made music.

About 13 years ago, my dad introduced me to Midisoft Studio 4. He taught me the basics on how to use it, and I pretty much played around with the example songs that came with it for a while until I stumbled on the Super Mario Bros theme in MIDI format. When I found that, I started to wonder if there was more VG MIDI files that I could find out there. I eventually came across VGMusic.com, and they had all the midi files I could handle! Later as my skills improved, I started combining different songs and melodies and making MIDI remixes.I was visiting that site for years before I even noticed the OC ReMix link on the left-hand side.

Funny side story- One day, I accidentally clicked on the OCR link and was brought to the old Overclocked Remix site (back when the site color was orange and shit), and I thought "What the fuck kind of shitty site is this?!?!" The colors of the home page made my head hurt and the people that posted back then were dicks, so I never clicked on that link again...

Some time after "Dark Cloud" came out, I was looking for the MIDI file for the "Moon Sea" and "A Sinking Ship" themes, when I came across Dev's 'La Saia's Resting Place' remix. At that time, I believe the site just switched to the blue color scheme, and I didn't realize it was the same site that I said I would never come back to again.

I started visiting this site a couple of times a week, and grabbing music. Eventually, I came across McVaffe's 'Bukkis Tango' remix, and I though it sounded pretty similar to the one remix I made using Midisoft (BTW, I recently re-remixed that song), and at that moment, I figured, "I might have what it takes to get a song posted up on here too", but I knew I didn't have the appropriate software to make OCR quality music, but I did have the creativity. So, I asked around and found out the two major programs people were using were FL Studio 7 and Reason.

In 2004, after figuring out the basics in FL Studio, I made my first Sonic remix, gave it a retarded name (I honestly don't remember why I spelled it that way, but I had a good reason), and submitted it. So, much for that! After getting the boot, I got pissed and started flooding the WIP forum with mixes. Sort of my way of proving I had the skillz, dammit! But, they weren't up to par neither. I was going to give up until I started listening to SirRus' remixes and his advice. That is why I kinda consider him a friend. We pushed each other.

I started to finally understand the "quality over quantity" concept, and focused on spending more time making better quality music. I finally got my KH mix passed in 05.

Ever since then, I've been working to learn different styles of music and better mixing and mastering techniques (which is my weakness). I'm not really doing remixes as often as I used to, but with new project that I do work on, I try to improve at least one skill. I would like to eventually start making a little money with my music, but I know I have to get ALOT better.