Music Production

Apologies in advance for the novel!

I'm a little late to the party here, but here is my story. Nothing too glamorous, and admittedly I'm still very much an amateur.

In high school, I wanted to be in band. Always loved music, loved listening to it and wanted to make it. Unfortunately I came from a pretty poor household and we couldn't afford an instrument.

Five years ago (wow, it's already been five years?!) I decided "hey I'm making decent money now, maybe it's time to learn to play something." So I went to my local music store knowing NOTHING about how to actually play an instrument. But I decided to walk around and see if something called out to me.

I walk by the keyboards section, which is having a pretty slow day, and one of the guys there is just rocking out on this Korg Minilogue. It sounded phenomenal, and I just knew the synthesizer was for me. Admittedly up until that point, if you happened to ask me what a synthesizer was, I would have just said something like "it's a fancy electric piano." Yeah...real informed decision there. But I left with a lighter wallet and a brand new synthesizer.

Well, having a synthesizer is nice, but it's not conducive to making a full song, especially if you know little about making music, but at this point I am just devouring all of the synth YouTube content I can find, and stumble onto the wonderful world of grooveboxes.

"Wow, I can make full songs on a little box that I can just take with me? Sign me up!" Now, in case you don't know, my background is in tech. As such this scratched two itches for me, which are my love of music and my equally strong love of gadgets and gizmos. I may or may not occasionally be referred to as the little mermaid by my friends.

So I went down that rabbit hole. Mind you, at this point I still BARELY know anything about actually making music, and do I really have to learn about chords and scales? Where's the fun in that. So I took the "more dollars than sense" approach and tried to supplement my lack of skill with more gear. Spoiler alert: it didn't work.

Eventually I decided "I've got way too much gear and nothing to really show for it, and that needs to change." I went through all my gear and decided "this fills a practical use case, and this does not," and sold anything in the latter category. It was a huge relief.

Around that time I also ended up signing up for a couple online courses on music production, like Andrew Huang's on that site that used to be called Monthly. It wasn't bad...helped me get a better idea of how to think about music production overall, and I finally forced myself to put out my first track. It wasn't particularly good, and I've only officially released one song since then, but I'm still slightly proud of it.

Since then I've only ever officially released one other track and have worked on others off and on. I have no visions of making a career out of it, but I enjoy having fun and just noodling something out. Maybe I'll release more, maybe not, but at the end of the day I'm at a point where I enjoy what I'm doing with it all.

In regard to what made it all click for me - I naturally fell into the technical aspects of it (like how MIDI works, how to use a mixer, etc), due to the fact that I troubleshoot tech for a living and that felt like an extension. As for the more musical parts, I think what really did it for me was learning that musical inspiration is exactly that - inspiration. It doesn't have to follow a specific formula. You can start from complete randomness, and if you like it, great. If you don't, you can always build up from there or start again.